Dorne To Be Wild: 'Game Of Thrones' Actor Confirms They Won't Be Back In Season 7

As HBO's Game of Thrones flies its dragons toward the halfway point of its seventh season, all is not well in the Seven Kingdoms. We may have only had three episodes, but so far there has been nautical nonsense, incestuous intimacy, and a meeting of the messiahs that was some 21 years in the making. However, among all the battles and bastards, we have already started waving goodbye to some of our series regulars to make room for the show's endgame.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones Season 7.

It appears that Seal is wrong if the episode "The Queen's Justice" is anything to go by, and a kiss from a Queen is far more deadly than a "Kiss from a Rose." We saw Indira Varma's Ellaria Sand chained in the Red Keep and facing a grim future. As vengeance for the death of Myrcella, Cersei promised Ellaria that she will spend her days watching her daughter rot before her eyes. However, while we assumed Thrones would show Varma's tragic plight at least one more time, it seems that the showrunners are finally shutting the book on that awful Dorne storyline.

'Sand' Of Hope and Glory

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Varma confirmed that "The Queen's Justice" was the last stand for Sand and we will never see Ellaria again:

"[Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] called me, but I kind of knew already. Obviously there’s lots of trimming going on. It’s all coming to a head and you have to get rid of less important characters that the audience hasn’t had the chance to invest in as much. So I was expecting it. I wasn’t heartbroken. And I was like, “As long as I die on screen…” and they were like “Yeah!” But of course I don’t die on screen. I stay alive, I’m just not going to reappear. I think it’s really clever."

In a show that is so good at tying off loose ends and giving our characters a grisly send off, Ellaria's fate is altogether more chilling. Just left there in chains, with no hope of rescue, Ellaria will spend her remaining days longing for that sweet kiss of death from Cersei. Just like Doreah being left to suffocate in Xaro Xhoan Daxos's vault back in Season 2, there is something darker about a character being left to perish off-screen — a fact that hasn't escaped Varma either:

"It’s really dark. What I love about this scene is you’re reading it and from one sentence to the next you don’t know what’s going to happen — how Cersei is going to treat her victim. I just thought the delivery of that information was so clever. Especially since the kiss comes before the information."

While Tyene Sand will get a slow and painful death, Ellaria arguably gets the worse end of the stick and will spend the next few decades locked up with a corpse — I hope she packed some Febreeze. However, the toying method with which Cersei dispatched the Sands harkens back to the Mad King's treatment of Brandon and Rickard Stark. While poison wasn't his MO, Aerys Targaryen taunted the Starks without offering them a merciful death. So, with Cersei already blowing up half of the population, and now playing with her food, the Mad Queen transition is well under way. But, what does this mean for the Lannister Lioness? Queenslayer, anyone?

(Source: EW)