A/N: I suggest listening to Workbench's "Air Cargo" while reading this... Oh I don't know, I was listening to it while writing. Please review if you liked it! Looking forward to uploading more REAL stories later!
He could not breathe.
It was as if, he thought, there was only a glimpse of the world that was called Westeros. Only a snippet, a sliver of the land, that he knew of. He thought he had seen it all, from Dorne to Winterfell, but no. His eyes had only been partially open to the world, but now, he was looking at it all.
The whiteness of it blinded him. So pure and glistening, harsh and barren and the most beautiful thing he had ever see. The cold bit into his skin severely, but it was just an afterthought to him.
The snow, the mountains, the rise and fall of this new world, went on forever. It would never stop, he thought. You could walk as far as you liked, walk until you died, until all of civilization perished, but the endless white snow would never end.
The beauty was indescribable. Yet beyond the wall was not supposed to be a thing a man of the Night's Watch marveled at. How? he thought. How, when the first men came upon this great expanse, how could they not stop and just stare at the great beauty of this land? How had they continued, focused on their noble tasks ahead, when there was this white glory to behold?
He understood then, without even thinking about it, why men who came to live in the Night's Watch called themselves brothers. For the men he was with were bonded to him through service, but the true feeling of something bigger, deeper than those words came from the ground, the harsh ground. He was not a brother of the flesh and blood men, he was rooted into the wide white world beyond the wall.
He had come to the wall to purge his sins, unaware of how the visit would change him. Unaware of how men could be pulled into shape by instructors and other men of the same sinful blood.
But he knew now it was not the men or the training that turned these horrid outcasts into noble watchers on the wall. It was the land. It was the sheer, unyielding horror and beauty of Beyond The Wall that changed people from soft summer boys to survivors, to warriors, to men.