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In Season 5 of Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister and Jorah Mormont are attacked by stone
men in the ruins of Valyria. Stone men are people with a disease called greyscale,
which makes the skin “grey and cracked and hard” and “stiff and dead” like stone,
eventually causing madness then death. The disease develops slowly, usually starting
on a finger or toe then spreading across the skin. There are said to be “three good
cures for greyscale: axe and sword and cleaver. Hacking off afflicted parts … sometimes
stop[s] the spread of the disease … but not always”. Greyscale is highly contagious
– just touching a stone man can spread the sickness, and this is what happens to Jorah
in the show, and Jon Connington in the books. George R. R. Martin describes this as a “death
sentence”, but a slow one – you can survive years with greyscale, but death is inevitable.
There are other forms of greyscale, though, one of which is often seen in children, who
may actually survive the disease but be left disfigured, which is what happens to Shireen
Baratheon. Surviving childhood greyscale is said to protect you from getting it again,
though in the books the wildling Val says that “The grey death sleeps, only to wake
again”, which kinda implies that the disease can come back.
In any case, greyscale is pretty rare in Westeros, but it’s apparently more common in Volantis
and the cities of the Rhoyne, who send people with greyscale to “the ruins of Valyria”
in the show, and to the Sorrows in the books, where the stone men wander “through the
fog until they die”. Some believe that the stone men of the Sorrows are ruled by
someone called the Shrouded Lord who gives “grey kiss[es]” and resides over a “stony
court”. One story says this Lord was once a statue, until “a grey woman came out of
the fog and kissed him with lips as cold as ice”. Which sounds kinda like the white
walkers and wights. Might there be a connection between the zombies of ice and the zombies
of stone? For now we don’t know. What we do know is that the stone men are
people with greyscale, which Shireen had, and Jorah slash Jon Conn now has – making
him a dying man with nothing to lose. Thanks for watching. There’ll be more theories
and analyses ahead, but let me know if you’d like to see more of these little explanations
too.