The War of the Five Kings still rages, its devastating effects felt across almost all of the Seven Kingdoms. On the Iron Throne sits the ruthless boy-king Joffrey, while his grandfather, Lord Tywin Lannister, the Hand of the King, strives to secure his rule and, consequently, the Lannister dynasty. He plots to eliminate King Stannis Baratheon, defeated at the Battle of the Blackwater, and the direwolf Robb Stark, who leads a campaign in the West despite having lost his homeland in the North.

Meanwhile, the exiled queen Daenerys Targaryen forges her path across a blood-soaked continent, seeking to liberate hundreds of thousands of slaves and acquire an army to reclaim her kingdom, accompanied by the world's only three living dragons.

In the north, a massive army of wildlings is moving in preparation for an attack on the Wall and the invasion of the Seven Kingdoms, an army joined by the Night's Watchman Jon Snow as a spy, although something worse is advancing from the far north, the real enemy that almost everyone is preoccupied with fighting, and which all the armies of the earth may not be able to deter.