Speaking with Game of Thrones sound designer Paula Fairfield, I told her I was tempted to call her the real mother of dragons. “It’s happened before!” she replied. But after hearing the Emmy winner talk about the big, scaly showstoppers, that unoriginal comparison feels even more unavoidable. From the design studio she built in her desert home near Palm Springs, Fairfield puts together every roar, flap, and hiss we’ve come to know and love in Daenerys’s three dragon children: Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion.

Fairfield joined Thrones in Season 3 and talks about “inheriting” the trio of dragons when they were “more kind of like toddlers.” She then lovingly crafted stories and personalities for each dragon to help get to the heart of their sound. She sees Drogon as a kind of lover to Daenerys, and endows his noises with more sensual tones—whereas the “bros,” as she calls Rhaegal and Viserion, are like “Beavis and Butthead.” One task she faces every year is to use sound to convey how much larger in size Dany’s children are growing. At this point, she says, Drogon is “one big motherfucker.”

But this season, Fairfield faced a particularly difficult challenge—one, she says, that gave her stress-induced nightmares. After helping him grow for several years, Fairfield had to transform the dragon Viserion into the terrifying, blue-flame-breathing, undead ride of the Night King. (Or, as Fairfield likes to call it, “the icy dragon.”) To pull it all off, Fairfield called on some die-hard Game of Thrones fans, along with jackhammers and blowtorches, to help voice zombie Viserion’s first flight. Here, she takes us behind the scenes of the dragons, wights, polar bears, and crumbling Wall she gave voice to in Season 7.

DRAGON VS. DRAGON

Though Fairfield is careful to explain that she knows nothing about what will happen among all the dragons in Season 8, she, like the rest of us, expects that at some point we will see Viserion square off against his brother, Drogon. That means she had to make sure that while undead Viserion still sounded like a dragon, he was distinct enough from his siblings that, blue flame and tattered wings aside, we would have no trouble differentiating them. “Drogon and Viserion,” she explained, “those two pieces of fire, the way they move, the screams they make, everything has to be completely and immediately identifiable.”

THE SCREAMS OF THE UNDEAD

Fairfield decided that Viserion’s new blue fire cry should be filled with “the tortured screams of the dead army.” (Fairfield reports that when she ran that idea past showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, they responded: “Well, okay then.”) Like any sound designer worth their salt, Fairfield already had a massive catalogue of screams from her work in the horror genre—but she wanted even more. After gathering some shrieks from the guys on the Game of Thrones sound crew, Fairfield turned to a group of the show’s fans who have become rather well-known for screaming their heads off.

A group of Chicago residents gather every Thrones Sunday in the Burlington Bar in Logan Square to record themselves gasping, sighing, and hollering at every twist and turn of the HBO series. Sean Loftus, a filmmaker, Burlington bartender, and all-knowing book reader, started filming the crowd’s reactions way back when the Mountain popped the head off Oberyn Martell. That video went viral, and while HBO started sending cease and desist letters to other bars holding viewing parties, the Burlington crowd got a special care package from Weiss and Benioff—who are fans. Their filmed reaction to the explosive Season 6 finale has racked up 3.7 million views.

Having met a few of the Burlington regulars at the Con of Thrones fan convention earlier this year, Fairfield asked Samantha (Sam) Adolfo (jack of all trades artist and obsessive Game of Thrones nerd), Morgan Drase (lead singer of Chicago band Radio Shaq), Dustin Drase (musician, husband, Ice Dragon), Amelia Chambers (writer and purveyor of vintage clothing), and Loftus to, according to Adolfo, “get a little drunk, and then scream as if you're being tortured. It’ll be therapeutic!” She didn’t tell them why she needed the screams, or even that her request was for Game of Thrones.

As musicians, the Drases were set up with plenty of recording equipment. As Dustin describes it: