The sixth volume of the great song remains unfinished. This the Chronicle records not with rancor but with the plain honesty a maester owes his ledger. By the maker's own reckoning near the turn of the year, some eleven hundred pages stood written — a mountain of manuscript by any measure — with several hundred more yet to climb, and no date set for the book's arrival.
The summer brought a grim milestone to mark in the margins. In the sixth moon of this year the count passed five thousand five hundred and forty-three days since A Dance with Dragons was set before readers, in the summer of the year 2011 by the reckoning of that world. The wait for the sixth book has now outrun the whole span that delivered the first five — a fact that wants no embellishment to feel its weight.
The Chronicle keeps a strict wall between what is confirmed and what is merely whispered. This season the whispers ran loud: rumors that the manuscript was finished, that an announcement stood ready. They were false, and the maker's own publisher rose to say so plainly. We pass along neither false comfort nor false despair — only the tally, honestly kept.
For all that, the maker's resolve holds. To abandon the book, he has said, would feel like a total failure, and finishing it he means to do. The Chronicle takes him at his word, sets down the count, and waits as it has always waited — patiently, and without pretending to know the hour. When the winds finally rise, this desk will be the first to send the raven.