SPOILERS ahead for those not caught up on Game of Thrones

The sixth season of HBO's Game of Thrones moved all of the show's final pieces into place in some major ways, not only ending the season with Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) on the Iron Throne and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) being renamed the King in the North, but also finally setting Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her army on their journey to Westeros. So following that kind of an emotional and action-packed season finale, the year long wait until the follow-up seventh season was already going to be difficult enough for fans. That was, before HBO then went on to announce that the season would be premiering later than normal, this time in the summer of 2017, rather than in spring, due to production delays.

Set to contain only seven episodes this time around as well, not much official news has been released or made known about the upcoming season as of yet (other than some notable castings), much to the fans' chagrin. With set photos and spoiler reports from the season's production running rampant online for the past few months in addition, it seems safe to say that the break in-between seasons has been harder this year for fans of the show than it ever has been before.

Luckily, Game of Thrones fans everywhere can rejoice today, as HBO has officially released the first brief images from the highly-anticipated season. Airing before last night's episode of Westworld, the images themselves are rather Stark-centric, and while they don't reveal much, they should be more than enough for fans to theorize and speculate about from now until the next official teaser or announcement. Take a look at the screenshots of the images below (H/T Watchers on the Wall):

Game of Thrones Arya Season 7 Image

Game of Thrones Jon Season 7 Image

Game of Thrones Sansa Season 7 Image

While obviously not much, the shots do give us our first look at Jon, Sansa (Sophie Turner), and Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) in the new season. With the former returning to Westeros at the end of last season, it was heavily rumored amongst fans too that they would next see Arya reuniting not only with Sansa and Jon, but also young Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), who when we left him seemed to be on his way to Winterfell.

The images aren't confirmation, of course, but the black winter coat and possibly snowy location surrounding Arya do seem to feed into the rumors, which just makes the possibility of an all-out Stark reunion this season seem that much more likely. The sixth season finale, however, left both Jon and Sansa in uncertain places. While Jon was named King in the North, there seemed to be some turmoil and resentment towards her half-sibling growing within Sansa, thanks in no small part to Littlefinger's (Aidan Gillen) whispering in her ear in the finale.

The image of Sansa sees her walking away from the Godswood tree that we last saw her speaking with Littlefinger at last season, so whether or not this moment connects back to that will have to wait to be seen - but we'd be surprised if the trouble between Jon and Sansa is resolved cleanly or easily. No matter what happens though, these images seem to confirm once again how large, and possibly triumphant of a season this is shaping up to be for the Stark family.

Game of Thrones season 7 airs on HBO in Summer 2017.

Source: Watchers on the Wall