Even though there’s still a certain air of enduring mystery surrounding the White Walkers in the Game of Thrones universe, there are certain truths that fans undoubtedly agree on.
Things like their weakness to Dragonglass and their unnatural strength are pretty self-evident, right? How about the identity of their leader, the Night King? How many Night Kings are there in Game of Thrones?
While we only see a single version of the Night King, a popular fan theory seems to suggest that there might have been more than one army leader of the dead plotting behind the scenes. Before we can go further into this fascinating hypothesis, let’s take a quick glance at the hierarchy of the Army of the Dead in Game of Thrones.
Above all sits the Night King, the only one capable of raising the dead and creating the White Walkers. These White Walkers serve as the second-in-command in the army of the undead, operating with a certain autonomy.
Lastly, there are the wights, which are the mindless zombies we frequently see people erroneously call “White Walkers.”
As fans know, when Arya killed the Night King, the rest of the undead army fell with him. However, what if there was another? Would he crumble too, or would he have been above the Night King’s influence? More importantly, what evidence do we have about the existence of more leaders? The answer lies in the show itself.
We know that the White Walkers – and the Night King – were created thousands of years ago by the Children of the Forest: the show explicitly tells us so. However, there’s a certain scene that involves Jon and Dany going to a Dragonglass cave.
In this locale, Jon finds an ancient picture depicting the White Walkers and the Night King – who looks completely different from the one we’ve seen in the show.
This Night King has a long beard, something that’s clearly missing from the one Jon faced at Hardhome. Did he shave? No, that’s just not how things in the world of Game of Thrones operate.
The theory further suggests that the Children of the Forest created more than one Night King and that the one we see in the show is the last one left. The best part about this theory is that it makes perfect sense within the Game of Thrones’ larger mythos.
In the Age of Heroes, after the White Walkers were originally defeated by the Children of the Forest and the first men, a fraction of the army of the undead remained, waiting beyond the cold lands in the North of Westeros.
Of course, these remaining White Walkers couldn’t have returned without a leader, which is where the Night King comes into play.
The theory suggests that the Night King of the show is the last of its kind, and he’s also the one responsible for amassing an army that would attack Westeros thousands of years later.
While the mythos surrounding the White Walkers and the Night King is still one of the major letdowns surrounding Game of Thrones, we can hope that the upcoming Jon Snow series shines some light into the backstory of these terrifying creatures, and what would happen if the prophecies of the Azor Ahai and the new Long Night were to become true.
