Season 6 of HBO’s Game of Thrones was arguably the most hype in the show’s history — with the series blasting through plot at a previously unheard-of pace — but it looks like the show’s legions of fans will have to practice patience while production waits for winter.

The show’s main family, the Starks, has a tagline of sorts: “Winter is coming.” In the season-six finale, that proverb changed to reality, with the maesters’ (wisemen/weathermen in the show’s lore) proclaiming that “winter is here.”

What that means IRL is that the series actually has to wait for winter before they can resume shooting.

Executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss told the UFC Unfiltered podcast that season 7 will be delayed for this reason and that no premiere date has yet been set.

“No … we don’t have an airdate yet, but this year it’ll probably be a bit later, ’cause we’re starting a bit later because at the end of this season, ‘winter is here,’ and that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes anymore,” they told the podcast, according to Variety. “So we kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim, grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot.”

The season 6 premiere of Game of Thrones — fervor for which was at an all-time high after season 5 ended on the cliffhanger of whether hero Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) was in fact dead — was announced just four months before the show returned, with HBO telling the world in January 2016 that Game of Thrones would be back in April. (And also including the below mysterious piece of key art that set off GoT conspiracy theorists around the world.)

The silver lining in the delay may best serve book fans: Maybe George R. R. Martin, author of the best-selling series of books on which the show is based, will be able to get the latest tome in the saga, Winds of Winter, published before the show’s next season debuts.

READ MORE: Variety

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