‘Game of Thrones’: New Promo Teases Epic Battle Scene With Daenerys, Jon Snow

HBO has released another teaser to bump up the tension for the final season of Game of Thrones. And if you didn’t think that things were dire before, this one sets the stage for what the heroes of Westeros are up against.

“We fight together now, or die,” Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) warns as armies march and dragons soar through the frosty north and Winterfell. The enemy is coming and they aren’t messing around.

If it wasn’t clear that HBO and the team behind Game of Thrones were ready to go all out with this final season, the implications in this trailer add some clarity to what we’re facing. It is dark. It is gritty. And best of all, it is coming next Sunday.

That’s the part that drives home that this is all really happening.

It has been a long road to this final season of HBO’s fantasy epic. It will be the first conclusion to George R.R. Martin’s popular series — he is still working on the final two books and the official ending from his mind. That said, he did give series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss the broad strokes of where his story was going.

The split between book readers and those who love the series has always been clear, but this final season is uncharted territory across the board. Nobody knows what is going to happen and speculation is high.

Away from the events on the show, the end of the series is a major chapter closing for those involved in the series. Kit Harington went from being a general unknown to the face of a series known around the world, something that weighed heavy on him and pushed him to therapy.

“My darkest period was when the show seemed to become so much about Jon, when he died and came back,” Harington told Variety in March. “I really didn’t like the focus on the whole show coming onto Jon…When you become the cliffhanger of a TV show, and a TV show probably at the height of its power, the focus on you is f—ing terrifying.”

Emilia Clarke also shared her own dark moments during the show, opening up about a medical scare where doctors discovered a pair of brain aneurysms following the first season, almost cutting her career short.

“Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain — shooting, stabbing, constricting pain — was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged,” she opened up about in the New Yorker. She would go on to have two surgeries and a lengthy recovery, but had a positive turn in the end.

She also looked back on how the show changed her views on being an actress, including her views on nude scenes. It’s also something she shares with others on the show, like Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams. They’ve all essentially grown up on camera and this is the climax of an event that has shaped them for years to come.

Game of Thrones final season premieres April 14 on HBO.