Rayder drew a slow breath, frost pluming from his lips and fading into the white wind. The screams on the plain had thinned to ragged threads; steel clattered less often; the thud of bodies into snow had become the rhythm of the night. He lifted his palm and, with the ease of habit that should have frightened any sane man, reached once more for the frigid wellspring he had pried open days before.
Cold power answered.
It seeped along his veins like black ice, sifting through marrow and nerve, then spilled outward in a tide that no mortal priest could have called holy. Rays of pale light crawled over the corpses strewn through the drifts—Savages with rough-hewn spears, black-cloaked rangers of the Night's Watch, nameless dead who had sprinted and shouted and believed they could outpace the winter only an hour ago. One by one, the bodies twitched. Joints popped. Frost steamed off torn armor. Eyes opened, and the pupils drowned beneath a steady, unnatural blue.
The living saw it too. Men who, moments earlier, had stood shoulder to shoulder despite years of hatred now broke ranks. They had closed their formation when they thought courage might suffice; they scattered when they understood that courage was not a cure. Lines collapsed into knots, then into lone figures running across open snow, slipping, falling, clawing at the crust with bare hands as if one more heartbeat of life might somehow purchase a thaw.
It did not.
By the time Rayder let his hand fall, the battle's end was no longer a matter for debate. Nearly three thousand had marched or ridden into that valley at dawn; by dusk, fewer than a few dozen fugitives limped away into the pines—haunted silhouettes against a rim of stormlight. Behind them trailed a new cadre of the dead, stiff-gaited, obedient, tireless.
Rayder did not grin. He did not cheer. He simply noted, with the clinical relief of a craftsman seeing sound joinery, that the technique worked.
The wight legion was, in truth, a bug in the world's design—a flaw exploited, a rule bent until it became something like a knife. Where men bled and monsters tired, the dead did neither. A commander could spend them like coin and never run out of purse so long as the snow kept its promise and the night stayed long.
And the night, here, had endless patience.
He sent a thought through the mental cord that joined him to Ghidorah. The dragon shifted above the clouds—three heads tasting the high, thin air, lightning purring behind gilded fangs. Far away, the storm answered with a low roll. The battlefield, for a heartbeat, felt like a chessboard on which he could move any piece he pleased.
Then the backlash came, faint but familiar: a shiver in the power he had borrowed, a tightening in the invisible thread that led north—beyond the Frostfangs, beyond the ghost-light plains, to the seven-cornered altar that crouched on the world like a frozen spider.
At that altar's heart, the Night King stirred.
He stood with eyes closed, hands spread, the cold around him so absolute it rang. Ice mist drifted from his armor in slow curls, and runes the color of star-glass pulsed beneath his skin. When Rayder siphoned, something in the Night King always felt it—not a scream, not a shout, but a tug in the net, a knot working loose. The old thing lifted his face slightly, as if listening for a footstep in a buried hall, and offered what passed for a prayer to the power that had made him.
More, he asked of the Cold God. More will, more strength, more bodies.
Behind him, the altar gave answer in silence. Beneath it, the dead rolled in their sleep.
Rayder sensed the attention and shut his eyes half-way, weighing risk against reward with the quick arithmetic that had kept him living where wiser men had died. Each time he invoked the Night King's current, he discovered another quirk—another loophole. Tonight's discovery had almost made him laugh, though he had not given the battlefield that satisfaction. Casting, he had realized, could pay a dividend.
If he drew one measure of the Cold God's power to raise a corpse, he could skim a sliver for himself—one-tenth, sometimes two—without spoiling the spell. The wight still rose; the blue still lit. It only moved a shade slower, its blows carrying a fraction less weight. The difference was hardly noticeable amid the chaos of a melee. Yet the fraction he kept gathered in the hollow behind his ribs like a secret fire.
Kickbacks, he thought, and almost shook his head. Even magic had its bribes.
No matter the world, there would always be a way to line a purse—or a power—if one were bold enough to look.
On the ground below, the last of the allied line broke. The Savages—Se'en Ren in rough furs, faces tattooed with the past—threw aside axes and vanished into the timber. The rangers, disciplined to the end, tried to cover a retreat, but dragonglass shattered, bowstrings iced, men slipped, and that was that. The truce between old enemies had burned hot and brief as straw. It had been brave; it had not been enough.
It had, however, been informative.
Far to the south, a commander wrapped in black wool and command made his own calculations. The Lord Commander of the Night's Watch had never intended to wage a campaign in the Ghost Shadow Forest. He had sent men to the Savages in the name of knowledge, not salvation: to test how the wights moved, how they fought, how they died if they could be made to die at all. Intelligence had a price; he had paid it; now his mission returned to what it had always been.
"Fall back," he ordered in a voice that did not tremble. "To the Wall. Make ready. Send the ravens."
The Great Wall did not judge. Its blue-white face had watched winters before men had learned to give them names. It did not care who trembled at its shadow; it only stood. Behind those stones, the Lord Commander believed, numbers and high ground and ancient craft would make the difference that courage could not. The Watch would hold. That was the oath. That was the work.
The ravens lifted into slate skies with messages laced to their legs. They flew with all the speed that fear could lend a wing.
They arrived in a palace where spring braziers burned but did not seem to warm the room. King Jaehaerys, all learning and lineage, lay against cushions that smelled faintly of cedar, his breath shallow, the gold thread in his coverlet catching firelight and throwing it back in tired sparks. The maesters had done what maesters do when the body has turned traitor: leeches, draughts, whispered consultations behind tapestries. The king's pulse grew quieter each day. Time had become a soft-footed visitor in the corners of the chamber.
The raven landed. The letter was cut loose. The seal broke.
When the words were read—when the reports of wights marching and men vanishing and winter moving with intent reached ears that had heard too many councils for too many years—the old king closed his eyes. For a breath that felt like a minute, and a minute that felt like a year, the room did not know whether a soul had left it.
Then the maesters leaned in with their learned panic. Tinctures. Cloths. A hush like the inside of a tomb. At last the king's chest lifted again, barely, stubbornly. Life returned, thin as a hair.
He lifted a hand that had once signed treaties and commanded fleets and patted the air.
"Leave us," he said, and the sound was paper against stone. "All. Leave—us."
They obeyed. The chamber emptied until it held only a bed, a fire, a winter light—and Viserys.
The grandson came as a man trying to be quieter than his heartbeat. He knelt, and the old king's gaze found him, and for a moment, the throne and the crown and the chains of office were not in the room. There was only family.
"You must listen," Jaehaerys whispered. "And you must remember."
From beneath the coverlet he drew a dagger wrapped in cloth. He unwrapped it with the care of a priest opening a reliquary. Metal glinted: pale, alive, a thing that might prefer the dark. The blade was known by many names in many tongues, but in this room, it was simply what it had always been—the Ice and Fire Blade, the dagger that ran like a seam through the Targaryen line.
"This is yours," said the king. "Not as ornament. As oath."
Viserys took it. It was lighter than he expected and heavier than he wanted.
"Two dreams," Jaehaerys said, and the words gathered weight as he spoke them. "Two that the kings before you kept, and that I kept, and that you will keep after I am gone."
He told the first, which needed little telling because the world had already finished the tale: Daenys's vision of the Doom, the fall of Valyria into ash and scream, the end of forty dragon-lord families in a single breath of the earth. The prophecy that had rescued one house by teaching it to run. The confirmation of what dragon dreams could do when they were not laughed at.
He told the second, which had not yet finished, because the winter had not yet finished: Yigen's dream of a world that would end not in flame but in a cold that walked, a darkness that thought. The North would move. The dead would march. The night would learn to speak. When it did, a Targaryen must be ready to bind men who hated each other into an army that hated the dark more.
Viserys listened and felt the floor tilt beneath his feet though his knees remained on stone. The dagger in his hands felt colder. He thought of crowns he had wanted and councils he had dreamed of leading and saw, instead, a road of ice and breath and duty stretching into a horizon without dawn.
"I—" he began, and stopped, because what mattered was not what he wanted to say but what needed to be done.
"You will be king," Jaehaerys said, and a hint of the old iron cut through the frailty. "Not because it pleases you. Because it must be someone. Because the blade does not carry itself."
When the old king closed his eyes this time, it was not in surrender. It was in completion. He had said what had to be said. He had laid down what had to be carried. Whether that weight would break the man he loved was no longer his to decide.
The city breathed differently that night. Word moved from corridor to corridor without sound, as if passed hand to hand like a candle in a wind. Before dawn, Viserys took the crown—first with his hands, then with his shoulders, then with the part of a man that yields when it must. The oaths had been spoken; the blood had its designs; the realm would have its ceremony soon enough. For now, king was not a pageant but a verb.
He summoned the council to meet him in the painted chamber. There were chairs and tapestries and the soft cluck of servants setting wine on tables. There were men who had pledged to serve a crown and learned to serve themselves. There were faces that measured, and faces that flattered, and one or two that simply watched.
Viserys set the dagger on the table beside the map as if to say: we will be polite, and we will speak plainly, and if the world refuses either, then we will teach it to listen.
He spoke first of the ravens. He spoke of the Watch's reports, and of the Ghost Shadow Forest, and of wights whose eyes burned like winter. He spoke of The Great Wall not as a legend but as a line on a map that needed bodies behind it, and grain, and fire, and command.
The council stirred like a nest poked with a stick. Some argued the old arguments—that the Savages were to blame for their own suffering, that the Watch should handle the Watch's business, that winter tales were for frightening children and funding border garrisons. Others remembered older books and older scars. A few were brave enough to name what they feared.
Viserys listened, because a king who does not listen makes enemies of his own allies. When they finished, he told them, briefly, what his grandfather had told him. He did not say "prophecy," for the word worked a strange magic in men's heads. He said only: prepare.
"Send grain north," he ordered. "Send steel. Send masons and oil. If the Watch asks for pitch, give them pitch. If they ask for horses, give them horses. If they ask for men, we will count them and we will send them. We will not debate winter while it is at our gate."
It was not a rousing speech. It was not poetry. It was a list, and lists win wars when men decide to obey them.
While the south took its first steps toward seriousness, the far north took longer strides.
At the seven-cornered altar, the Night King opened his eyes at last. Frost reflected frost, and the light that moved in his pupils was the dead starlight of ancient winters. He had allowed his hatred to simmer for long days and longer nights, and now it rose in him like a tide that forgot the shore. If he had been asked to name the source of that hatred, he would have spoken a single name—spoken it without heat, because heat did not live in him, but with a precision that would have reminded a listener of knives.
Rayder.
Not merely because the mortal had taken his power and wielded it without permission. Not merely because he had skimmed a tithe for himself and chuckled in his quiet way at the trick. But because he had done all of this and remained unafraid, and the Night King—who had spent centuries teaching fear to living things—understood that a fearless enemy must be taught a deeper lesson.
He called to the Cold God again, not with supplication but with kinship. Strength answered, slow and massive as tectonic plates. Somewhere beneath the altar, something very old turned in its sleep and smiled without lips.
On the valley where Rayder's work had been done, the wind shifted. The dead continued their appointed task: to rise when told, to fall when forced, to rise again if given leave. The snow soaked up the last warmth of the day and gave none back. Rayder watched from his vantage, his dragons circling on wide wings, and weighed the harvest of energy in his mind.
He had learned too much to stop now. The fractions he stole added to something tangible—new channels inside him, new resilience, new ways to shape cold or flame when he had to. Power did not ask for pardon when it arrived; it simply made space for itself.
Yet even as he planned his next movement, another calculation unfolded—more civic than sorcerous. The assault had done one more thing he needed: it had forced enemies to clasp hands and then forced them to let go. The Night's Watch and the Savages had bled together for an afternoon, and now the Watch would return to the only wall that mattered while the tribes argued, mourned, and waited for a new disaster to tell them what to do.
That chaos would buy him days. Perhaps weeks.
He sent a final command to the wight cohort in the valley—scatter, harry, do not chase too far—and let the field fall quiet. Snow began to drift over the ruined camp, soft as ash. In a day, there would be nothing left of the battle but a thin difference in the surface of the world; in two, even that would be gone. Winter was generous with erasures.
Rayder turned away. Ghidorah dipped to receive him, wings cupping the wind with the effortless grace that belonged only to things born for the sky. Above them, Im marked a lazy circle; farther off, Yigen cut a darker line against the cloud, larger and surer every time Rayder measured him with his eye.
He settled into the saddle and let his palm rest a moment on warm scale. The night pressed its cold snout to his cheek. He thought of the fractions of stolen power coiling behind his heart like banked embers; he thought of the altar and the old will that waited there; he thought, briefly, of a king in a far room placing a dagger on a table and telling men to send grain.
Two games, he realized, moving on two boards that did not know each other's rules.
Perhaps they would meet. Perhaps they would collide.
For now, he would keep skimming from the current and paying in bodies, because that was the price the night demanded and the bargain he had the audacity to accept.
"Come," he told the dragon, and the great beast climbed until the battlefield became a smudge on the snow and the stars looked like ice seeds scattered by a patient god.
Behind him, the wights walked. Before him, a crown weighed itself against a winter. Between those two, Rayder counted and counted, and did not yet find a number that frightened him enough to stop.
Ãdvåñçé çhàptêr àvàilàble óñ pàtreøn (Gk31)