Westeros – Beyond the Wall
The Tyrant's eyes flared with cold blue fire as Pierce took full control. Facing the wights exploding out of the snow, he didn't retreat—he charged straight into them!
"Rrrraaah—!"
A inhuman growl ripped from the Tyrant's throat. Its left arm whipped sideways like a wrecking ball. The razor-sharp Valyrian steel spikes embedded in the gauntlet smashed into the first two wights.
CRACK! SQUELCH!
Bones shattered and rotten flesh tore. The two corpses flew like rag dolls, chests caved in, blue eyes flickering out.
Those Valyrian steel spikes might have been second-rate, but they were still brutally hard—and just like Pierce had hoped, they did extra damage to the undead.
At the same time, the dragon-glass dagger in his right hand turned into black lightning.
SHUNK!
The blade stabbed clean through another wight's eye socket. The burning blue flame snuffed out instantly. The creature froze mid-lunge and toppled over.
Dragon-glass worked exactly as advertised.
The secondary-forged Valyrian steel from Qohor wasn't quite the real thing, but for Pierce it was more than enough.
Combat instinct seemed baked into every inch of the Tyrant's "muscles." Pierce spun the heavy body through the pack of wights—stiff, but terrifyingly strong and fast.
Every swing of the spiked arm or stab of the dagger came with the wet crunch of tearing flesh or the soft hiss of a soul-flame being extinguished.
Pierce quickly realized the dragon-glass dagger was instant death on single targets, but when numbers piled up, the Valyrian steel spikes on his fists and feet worked just as well.
The spikes ripped through decayed skin and shredded joints with ease.
He deliberately held back power—he wanted samples. He grabbed one wight's sword arm, twisted, and yanked.
CRUNCH! The limb tore free with a sickening sound and got tossed into the snow.
The one-armed wight kept lunging. Pierce stomped its knee, snapping the joint. It collapsed, still twitching uselessly.
Another wight got its Achilles tendons sliced by the dragon-glass dagger—perfectly crippled, still "alive" for study.
The skirmish ended in seconds. Most wights were now real corpses. Only two broken ones still writhed on the ground.
No time to linger. Pierce ripped strips of the sturdiest clothing off the bodies, twisted them into rough ropes, and lashed the two crippled wights around the neck. Then he started dragging them like dead dogs through the knee-deep snow, following the faint pull of the glass candle.
The heavy footsteps left deep tracks and drag marks behind him.
When the link to Qyburn finally sharpened a little, the maester's urgent thoughts came through in broken bursts via the candle's resonance:
"My lord… is that you? …Hardhome… northwest… we're… harassed by wildlings… guide…"
A weak but steady directional pull immediately came from the northwest!
Pierce's mind steadied. Qyburn was still alive—and he'd figured out how to use the glass candle for basic navigation.
He sent a short, raspy command back through the Tyrant:
"Send… team… escort… dragon-glass… ropes…"
At Hardhome, Qyburn received the fuzzy order and instantly understood.
He didn't waste a second. He picked ten of his toughest, calmest mercenaries, outfitted them with special dragon-glass short spears, daggers, and coils of rope dusted with powdered dragon-glass.
"Listen up! The master is on his way back—possibly with… special cargo. Your job is escort. Get him and the cargo back safe! Anything with blue eyes that moves—hit it with dragon-glass. That's an order!"
The ten men didn't hesitate. They mounted their hardy little ponies and rode straight into the blizzard, following Qyburn's rough heading.
Back at Hardhome, Qyburn doubled down on the defenses. Captured wildling slaves, whipped and supervised by Pierce's mercenaries, hauled stones and reinforced the crude wooden walls.
Farther out, fifty Tyrant wights stood like frozen statues in the storm, each wearing a dragon-glass-studded collar—insurance against other undead.
Even farther, thick wooden stakes impaled the bodies of wildlings who'd tried to run. Dragon-glass shards were driven through their hearts. The corpses had frozen rock-hard, blue ice crystals coating them—a silent warning to anyone thinking of causing trouble.
A savage golden crab banner snapped and cracked on the central pole, announcing who now owned this place.
With a clear direction, Pierce picked up speed. Dragging two dead weights slowed him, but the Tyrant's strength was endless. The only real cost was the growing strain on his own mind.
Then that cold, malevolent presence returned.
This time it didn't try to invade. It circled like a venomous snake hidden in the shadows—watching, judging, radiating pure killing intent.
Pierce's powerful soul sense locked onto it instantly. He whipped the Tyrant's head around. Glowing eyes fixed on a figure at the edge of the dead forest.
It sat on a horse with the same burning blue eyes. Tall and slender, skin white as milk, carved from ice itself.
Ancient armor that glittered like black ice. A face like cold marble—expressionless, lifeless. Eyes held two flames brighter and deeper than any wight's.
An Other!!
It seemed confused by the Tyrant—something that moved and fought but was clearly dead. It studied Pierce carefully.
Then it raised its hand and lifted a translucent ice spear that radiated killing cold.
WHOOSH—!
The ice spear tore through the blizzard faster than any arrow, screaming straight for the Tyrant's head.
Too fast! Pierce barely managed to raise his right arm—the one covered in dense Valyrian steel spikes—and block in front of his face.
CLANG—!!!
The impact rang like a hammer on an anvil. The spear tip slammed into the spikes with terrifying force. The whole Tyrant staggered backward several steps, heavy feet plowing deep furrows in the snow.
Valyrian steel stopped the strike, but the raw power and freezing aura coated the entire right arm in thick white frost. Movement turned sluggish. Pierce felt the connection to that arm weaken.
The Other's blue eyes flickered with surprise when its spear failed to kill.
It let out a silent screech. Snow erupted around them. More wights burst from the ground, howling as they charged.
The Other itself rode forward at a leisurely pace, clearly heading for its dropped spear. Apparently it didn't create new ones on the spot.
"Come on then!" Pierce's blood rose. He drove the Tyrant straight into the fresh wave of wights.
No more holding back—he pushed the undead body to its absolute limit. The spiked arms became twin meat grinders. Every swing ripped off limbs. The dragon-glass dagger flickered in and out, snuffing blue soul-flames one after another.
He focused on the heads. That seemed to be their core. Spike-smash or dagger-stab—either way they dropped fast.
The towering Tyrant tore through the wights like a tiger through sheep.
Occasional blades hacked or stabbed into the Tyrant's body, but the heavy armor and necromantic flesh shrugged off everything short of severed limbs. Minor damage.
By then the Other had reached its spear and leaned down to retrieve it.
Pierce wasn't about to let that happen.
He kicked a blocking wight aside and swung the Tyrant's massive fist in a whistling arc straight at the undead horse's head. The Valyrian steel spikes on the knuckles flashed death.
The Other reacted instantly. It abandoned the spear and reared the horse to block with its hooves.
THUNK—!
The punch—backed by monstrous strength and razor spikes—punched straight through the wight-horse's skull. The blue light in its eyes died. The huge body collapsed.
The momentum hurled the Other from the saddle. It twisted gracefully in the air and landed on its feet in the snow.
Pierce pressed the attack. He strode forward, snatched the fallen ice spear with his left hand, and hurled it with every ounce of the Tyrant's power while the Other was still off-balance.
The Other clearly hadn't expected its own weapon to be turned against it. It dodged at the last second—but the spear still grazed its thigh.
CRACK!
Not flesh—ice shattering. The spear tip sliced through the Other's icy armor, and a jet of freezing blue energy sprayed from the wound!
"SSSSSS—!"
The Other let out its first audible shriek—pure pain and rage.
Pierce's right arm, from having touched and thrown the freezing spear, was now completely encased in thick, glowing blue ice from palm to elbow. He'd lost all feeling in it.
Luckily the Valyrian steel had slowed the spread; the freeze hadn't reached his torso.
Wounded, unarmed, and slowed, the Other stared at Pierce with a mix of wariness and towering hatred.
It screeched again, ordering the remaining wights into a frenzied charge, while it dragged itself backward across the snow.
Pierce knew he couldn't stay. He quickly used the last strips of cloth to bind the injured, immobile Other. But the freezing aura pouring off it snapped the ropes instantly.
Seeing the constant cold radiating from the creature, Pierce had an idea. He sandwiched the Other between the two crippled wights—one on each side—then lashed them all together with the ropes. The wights acted as insulation, protecting the cloth from the worst of the cold.
Just as he finished, his soul sense picked up the sound of hooves—coming from the Hardhome direction.
Moments later the ten-man mercenary squad burst through the blizzard into view.
They stared at the Tyrant and its bizarre "trophies": a monstrous undead with one arm frozen solid, dragging two twitching crippled wights, plus a pale figure trapped between them, leaking freezing mist.
The squad leader swallowed his fear and called out the pre-arranged code phrase.
Pierce answered through the Tyrant in his broken, raspy voice: "It's… me… materials… collected… bodies…"
The mercenaries were terrified, but gold was gold. After everything they'd already seen, they were basically numb to the supernatural. They dismounted at once, checked the downed wights, picked out the ones still twitching with faint blue eyes, bound them with the special dragon-glass ropes, and loaded them onto the ponies.
All of it was watched by a pair of hidden eyes in the distant forest.
Osha—a lean, tough young wildling woman with wind-burned cheeks—and her seven ragged spearwives stared in horror.
Their tribe had been wiped out by a stronger raiding band. They'd barely escaped and had been starving in the blizzard for days, eyes hollow with hunger.
"Old gods above…" one spearwife whispered, voice shaking. "Those riders aren't free folk! What the hell is that giant… monster? It killed all those 'monsters' and even caught… a White Walker?!"
"It was talking to the riders…" another muttered.
Osha licked her cracked lips. Hunger and desperation burned in her eyes. "I don't know what they are, but they've got food and shelter. That monster's terrifying, but the riders still look alive… We're starving to death. Either we take the risk or we freeze out here. I say we try!"
Survival won. Osha and her spearwives slipped silently after the group, following the distant column toward the rising smoke and the huge golden crab banner.
Pierce, still inside the Tyrant and guarded by the mercenaries, dragged his precious "research materials" step by heavy step toward the first foothold he had carved beyond the Wall.