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[Spoilers/Theory] When the Dead Go Marching In


The Dew

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(I don't know if this thread should be here so I'd like to ask the Admins to remove it or delete it, as they see fit)

It is the time of the season that one does not want to be a gravedigger in Westeros. Imagine the NK resurrecting everything on his path, like large predators or other animals that could be useful to him, and also, the ones who are already dead in the cemetaries/crypts of the North and the entire Westeros.

Imagine the dead rising from the Crypts of Winterfell, and any crypt that is built in any of the major castles/holdfasts. There is one thing that the NK can do, and his entourage, without any debate, and that is to Raise the Dead (unless I am watching a different show). The NK is south of the Wall, no blocking against his magic. The NK did that in Hardhome, so why wouldn't he do it South of the Wall? Can he only raise the ones who were killed by him or his entourage? In the wall, well before its "magical structural failure" the NW started burning their dead, I believe for this reason.

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We don't know what the rules are.

For example, maybe he can only raise the recently dead. (Sure, some of the wights look pretty skeletal, but they seem to continue to decompose after death, as with the hand they tried to send to KL earlier, which rotted away over the weeks in the novels, and apparently didn't even arrive intact in the show because nobody ever mentioned it again.) In that case, he wouldn't get much out of the crypts.

On the other hand, maybe it would work fine.

Anyway, I think he'll get more than enough new soldiers even without graveyards and crypts. He's only got 100K right now, and even in the show the North has 1M living people for him to kill and raise, and not that many of them could be safe behind the walls of Winterfell.

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It's a good question.  The show hasn't gone into it with much detail but in the books Ygritte tells Jon, "We never found the Horn of Winter. We opened half a hundred graves and let all those shades loose in the world, and never found the Horn of Joramun to bring this cold thing down."

The question here is what does she mean by "shades"?  If she means Wight's then it would appear the Others can raise really old corpses.  Now combine that with Eddard pointing out to Robert all those barrows then it seems to me that it's entirely possible that you could be correct about what is to come.....

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Creatures don't need to be killed by the NK or his army in order to be resurrected.

We also know that they can be pretty badly decayed before being resurrected, suggesting that death doesn't need to be recent.

The only rule that I think might apply is that the dead have to be on or near to the surface in order to be exposed to whatever magic awakens them. Being buried underneath a layer of snow beyond the wall may not be enough, resulting in the tradition of burning corpses. South of the wall however, a thick layer of solid earth may stop the dead from rising.

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