Spoilers ahead! Tread lightly!

“Game of Thrones” season 8 roars back to HBO on January 4, 2019. It’s been a long, long wait to see how this song of fire and ice will come to a close and we just got a major spoiler, courtesy of an unusual source.

Here’s your last chance. Click away to something more benign if you don’t want to be spoiled. Here’s a video to give you a little buffer before you get a message from the three-eyed raven.

Still with us? Here we go. The spoilers involve the fate of the one-handed wonder, Jaime Lannister. Last we saw Jaime, he was arguing with Queen Cersei to send their armies to fight the White Walkers approaching from the north. He told her that if the White Walkers win the fight, they’ll swoop down to King’s Landing and slaughter Team Lannister. And if the Targaryen-Snow-Stark team wins the war, they’ll also slaughter the Lannisters for failing to join the anti-zombie effort.

Cersei was like, “Nah. We’ve got the Iron Bank willing to fund a mercenary army and Team Greyjoy is still with us and I’m pretty sure we can kill those dragons or burn the zombies. Let ’em fight without us.”

Jaime was beside himself. And Cersei, pregnant with another of her brother’s babies, let Jaime walk away.

So what will season 8 hold for the man with the golden hand?

The answer lies in a lawsuit. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime, is fighting a legal battle against his former manager. As the court battle unfolded, documents revealed that Coster-Waldau will appear in all six episodes in the final “Game of Thrones” season.

It had been rumored that Jaime might die mid-season, but if he appears in all six episodes, that pretty much kills that rumor. That said, there is a possibility Jaime could die and still appear. Let’s say the Night King gets his hands on Jaime and turn him into an undead frost monster. It worked on Dany’s dragon, Viserion!

So while some people think it’s an open-and-shut case of Jaime riding off into the sunset, there is a chance he could die and fight for the White Walkers. Or maybe he dies in the final episode. Or maybe he dies and appears in later episodes as a ghost or flashback.

The most likely scenario has him fighting to the death with Tormund for the honor of Brienne’s hand.

And Brienne will walk away from the victor because Brienne has no use for those fools. Is it 2019 yet?