Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | TV | February 23, 2026
As A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms closed out its first season, Ser Duncan the Tall and Egg are seen riding off to Dorne. It was a quiet finale, marked by wasted opportunities (what I wouldn’t give for Lyonel Baratheon to invite me home to play!) and one fantastic last laugh: an end credit scene reveals that Maekar did not, in fact, permit Egg to leave with Dunk. Our last image is of the boy’s father, realizing Egg is not riding with the Targaryen caravan and shouting, “Where the f**k is he?!” The boy lied once again, because of course he did, and now the lowly hedge knight and his princely squire are heading off to new adventures. So, the question is: what’s next?
In some ways, that’s an easy question to answer. HBO greenlit two seasons of the Game of Thrones prequel series, which adapts George R.R. Martin’s “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas. Season one was based on the novella “The Hedge Knight,” and season two, adapting the second tale titled “The Sworn Sword,” is already in production. Should HBO wish to continue the series, there’s a third novella, “The Mystery Knight,” which was published in 2010, and… that’s it. Martin has long claimed to have more Dunk and Egg adventures in the pipeline, but he won’t write them until he completes “The Winds of Winter,” the long-awaited next installment in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series (on which Game of Thrones is based).
If the concept of HBO launching a show based on unfinished George R. R. Martin works sends a familiar shudder down your spine, welcome to the club. We’ve been here before, haven’t we? And just like with Game of Thrones, it sounds like Martin has shared his notes and unpublished stories with the A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms team, so the creators are privy to the author’s plans for Dunk and Egg. It’s enough material that showrunner Ira Parker apparently has an ending in mind, as he revealed to Entertainment Weekly:
“I have pitched George my ending, if we get all the way to the end of all of his stories that he’s done,” Parker teases. “And he hasn’t told me no yet out of hand. So who knows?”
The difference, of course, is that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is structured around self-contained chapters rather than a sprawling narrative where all the plot lines must converge like GoT. Each season will tell a complete story in the lives of these two characters, and Parker acknowledges that the story could end pretty much after any season, even if he has a goal post in mind - and it isn’t hard to guess what that goal post might be.
Remember the prophecy that the mysterious fortune teller delivered to Egg in episode three? “You shall be King, and die in a hot fire, and worms shall feed upon your ashes. And all who know you shall rejoice in your dying.” That would make a pretty definitive final chapter in a show about Egg’s life, don’t you think? It’s easy to imagine the show charting Egg’s path from squire to becoming King Aegon V, and culminating in his death - an event known as the Tragedy at Summerhall. Apparently, later in life, Egg became obsessed with the idea of restoring dragons to Westeros, and when he gathered his family at Summerhall to celebrate the birth of his first great-grandchild, a fire broke out that may or may not have linked to an attempt to hatch dragon eggs.
It’s believed that both Dunk and Egg died in that fire, although that may not be entirely accurate - according to a recent slip of the tongue from actor Dexter Sol Ansell, who plays Egg. When asked how much they know about their characters’ futures and specifically “Summerhall” during an interview with Decider, Ansell explained that they “know from George” that Dunk survives the fire, but not whether Egg survives (all while Dunk actor Peter Claffey is denying it all in a panic right next to him). Given everything we know about George R. R. Martin spilling all his own plot tea with the creative teams adapting his (unfinished!) works, there’s little reason to doubt he’s got something up his sleeve regarding the Tragedy at Summerhall. I’ve already seen speculation that, if Dunk were to survive, he may have slunk off to Tarth and eventually fathered a certain ridiculously large girl called Brienne.
But even without those surprise reveals, Summerhall just makes sense as an endpoint for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Whether Dunk and Egg die or not, the person we know does survive is Egg’s great-grandchild, born during the fire: Prince Rhaegar. Yes, that Prince Rhaegar, elder brother of Daenerys Targaryen and (according to Game of Thrones) father of Jon Snow. Rhaegar’s life, more than anyone’s, inspired the events we all know, even though he was long dead by the time Game of Thrones starts.
The problem is that this all makes sense in the “everything’s connected” way that fueled Game of Thrones but doesn’t feel true to the smaller scope of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I keep coming back to the fact that Parker said he pitched Martin an ending, which presumably means his vision for the show either extends beyond or departs in some way from Martin’s unwritten text. And that just might be a very good thing. For all its faults, the last season of Game of Thrones delivered the broad plot points Martin intended all along (King effing BRAN?!). Maybe it’s time for a show to look at the man’s ideas and come up with a better ending instead.
