A raven arrives from the mummers' guild across the narrow sea: their telling of the Dance of the Dragons has entered its third season, begun on the one-and-twentieth day of the sixth moon and unfurling one chapter each week through the height of summer, eight in all. We do not recount their scenes here — that is the mummers' craft to perform and yours to witness. What the Chronicle offers instead is the older, quieter thing: a lamp to read the histories by while their fires burn.
The season draws upon Fire & Blood, Archmaester Gyldayn's account of the Targaryen kings, and it carries the Dance toward its cruelest passages — the storming of King's Landing, the treachery at Tumbleton, the turning of cloaks, and the long unraveling that leaves neither claimant whole. These are matters long set down in ink, and you may read of them in our own words, unspoiled by any mummer's embellishment, in the archive at your leisure.
Here the reader holds an advantage the viewer does not. Gyldayn himself wrote from quarreling sources — the testimony of a court fool, the confessions of a septon, the boasts of the victors — and where his accounts disagree, he says so plainly. The mummers must choose a single version to stage; the book preserves the doubt. That is the heart of every book-versus-screen quarrel worth having: not which is right, but which uncertainties the telling chose to resolve.
To read alongside the season, we commend to you our chronicle of the Dance of the Dragons, which walks the war from Viserys's death to the bitter after. Follow, too, the timeline's own markers — the Battle of the Gullet, the fall of King's Landing, the fires of Tumbleton — each with its histories laid bare. Read the record first, and the mummers' choices will show themselves the more clearly for it.
A word of honest keeping: the Chronicle reports about these tellings; it never reproduces them. What is HBO's and Warner Bros. Discovery's remains theirs. What is written in the books remains ours to summarize, to weigh, and to set beside the screen — which is precisely what a maester is for.