Given the highly secretive nature of their show, Game of Thrones show-runners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff are disinclined to give too many interviews taking fans behind the scenes of the popular HBO series. But the annual insider look from Entertainment Weekly has arrived, and it contains some bad news for all you Brienne-and-Tormund lovers out there.

“We need to kill one of them now,” Benioff says in reference to the popular pairing of the red-headed Wildling and the lady warrior. “There can’t be a happy ending or any romantic connection on the show. But we’re not going to tell you which one.” This obvious joke (seriously, he’s probably joking), however, is not the bad news. Before they threaten to murder one or both of these audience favorites, Weiss and Benioff reveal a little more detail about how the Brienne-and-Tormund “relationship” developed from page to screen. It started, Benioff says, with a tiny bit of stage direction for Tormund in the Season 6 script that read: “He stares at Brienne because he’s never seen a woman like that before.” That was it. “And then,” Benioff adds, “we let the actors do what they do.”

The only other real interaction between Brienne and Tormund (fan-generated “ships” have been built on far less) came as the two were preparing to ride off in different directions. This time, Weiss says, the interaction was entirely unscripted. “She looks at him and he smiles at her. It’s not something you could ever write. It’s just this moment where this guy is creeping out on her and he smiles in a way that makes her very uncomfortable and she just looks away. I saw it 150 times and every time it made me laugh; it’s purely the two of them.”