The War of the Five Kings continues to rage, afflicting almost all corners of the Seven Kingdoms. On the Iron Throne sits the tyrannical boy-king Joffrey, while his grandfather, Lord Tywin Lannister, Hand of the King, seeks to secure his rule and thus the Lannister family's power, planning to eliminate King Stannis Baratheon, who was defeated at the Battle of the Blackwater, and the Young Wolf Robb Stark, who leads a campaign in the west despite having lost his homeland in the North.

Meanwhile, the exiled queen Daenerys Targaryen makes her way across another blood-soaked continent, aiming to free hundreds of thousands of slaves and acquire an army to reclaim her kingdom, along with the world's only three living dragons.

In the North, a massive army of wildlings prepares to attack the Wall and invade the Seven Kingdoms, an army that Jon Snow of the Night's Watch has joined as a spy. Yet something far worse advances from the far North, the true enemy that almost everyone is too busy fighting each other to notice, and whose advance might not be stopped by all the armies of the world.