Game of Thrones season 7: watch the new trailer

On the longest day of the year, HBO’s Game of Thrones granted its fans — who have been enduring the longest wait of the year — a new trailer for the show’s seventh season.

The trailer offers several tantalizing glimpses of Westeros’s many warring factions — and of dragons! — but is ultimately wrapped around the main theme of uniting against a common enemy.

"For centuries, our families fought together against their common enemy, despite their differences — together," intones a voice that seems to belong to Jon Snow, who was last seen being declared king in the North at the end of season six. "We need to do the same if we're going to survive, because the enemy is real. It's always been real."

We can’t be certain exactly which common enemy that voiceover is referring to, since it’s played over several different images of battle — but it’s pretty easy to guess. One of the first teasers we got about the seventh season played up the presence of the Night King, and this talk about uniting seems to point to a big battle with the White Walkers. And we do get a couple of images that suggest that very thing (including Beric Dondarrion, wielding a giant flaming sword).

But there are also glimpses of some brutal human-on-human fighting, involving the Greyjoys, Daenerys’s army (we saw the Yara and Dany form an alliance at the end of last season), and of course, Dany’s dragons — who are briefly seen flying toward the castle Dragonstone, the ancestral home of the Targaryens, confirming Dany’s return to Westeros this season.

But the trailer returns to the theme of unity by its end, with a concluding voiceover from Sansa that calls back to her father’s death, and underlines the idea that the many squabbling houses of Westeros will have to come together against a greater enemy: "When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies — but the pack survives."

Game of Thrones will premiere on HBO on July 16.

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