THE WALL
Dawn.
Light came slowly over the Wall, creeping and cautious like the hand of a worried lover. Nothing moved. The world turned from black to violet to silver to gold, and there was no sound but the shrieking wind and the flapping of the new standard of the Night's Watch, mounted obstinately in the courtyard of Castle Black. Lord Commander Samwell had ordered a new sigil be made for his new Watch: a pair of gleaming undead eyes slashed across the familiar black field. The Lord Commander had fought viciously to include a pair of enlarged testicles below the eyes to indicate virility, manliness, strength, and coolness, but he'd been voted down two nights ago, when the design was being finalized.
"The bitch must know," Samwell had cried. "He must know that he is in the North. He must feel the wind cutting his flesh and ripping at his soul! The balls will put the fear of God into him!"
"Trust me, man, the bitch will know," said Dareon, whose drawing talent had earned him the duty of designing the new sigil. "Don't worry about that. All I'm saying is the eyes look cooler without the fuckin' balls down below them. You don't have balls on your face. If we're doing balls, we might as well get rid of the eyes entirely and put a dick. At least that'll make sense with the balls."
"What about only the balls?" Maester Aemon had inquired.
"Oh, come on," Tammy complained. "That guy's blind! He can't even see the sigil. He shouldn't get a vote. And besides, we need the eyes. They look really cool. The eyes will scare Lord Randyll worse than the balls."
That, however, remained to be seen. Lord Randyll Tarly's host marched fearlessly north along the Kingsroad, a seemingly unending column of mailed knights and their squires, archers dwarfed by their dragonbone bows, maesters and medics, sellswords hungry for gold and glory, and at the head of it all Lord Randyll himself, a resplendent figure in his crimson plate. The striding huntsman hung like a deadly premonition from the host's banners, and massive war drums at various intervals throughout the column beat thunder into the air. They'd been marching for almost a week straight, stopping mostly just to slaughter flagging horses for meat. They slept in overlapping shifts so that the march would never have to cease. Lord Randyll had wanted to answer his son's call with steel, and as quickly as possible.
A ragged cheer went up among the men in the front of the column as the top of the Wall slowly emerged from the horizon: a white line that grew and grew and grew until it seemed to fill the world. Seven hundred feet high it was, and three hundred miles long. The Wall was the most impressive structure ever raised by mortal man, but if it intimidated Lord Randyll, this did not show.
Do DOO, do DOOOOOOO, went the column's warhorn. "Falter not, heroes!" Randyll Tarly bellowed, lifting Heartsbane into the air and waving its three foot length as if it were no heavier than a stick. "My fat son thinks to defend Castle Black from the south! With none but his rapers, his thieves, his slackjaws and his fools! The shit that sank to the realm's very bottom! Ha! On this day we teach him the craft of war! On this day the Watch bleeds!"
The column exploded in cheers, and the cheering continued until the host arrived at Castle Black and found it completely deserted except for the flapping battle standard. The stables were empty of horses and the kennels empty of dogs. There was nothing to fight.
"M'lord," said Fuckup, who was Randyll Tarly's household fool. He trotted his mule up to stand at Lord Randyll's side. "Where dafuq they at?" Fuckup had been brought along for comic relief and for the morale boost his inevitable death in battle would bring to the column of actual warriors. His huge, 3D-looking neck tattoo of a slice of pizza danced as he twisted his onion-shaped head from left to right and then left again, searching for the brothers of the Watch. "Where fatass at?" he muttered.
Lord Randyll wordlessly clouted Fuckup with the back of one mailed fist, knocking him from his mule. "Find them," he shouted. "Drag them from their holes and slaughter them! No quarter!" The knights of House Tarly reared their mounts and charged off to the east and the west like swarming ants spreading along the base of the Wall, past the ice cells and eventually into the far castles that served as checkpoints along the Wall's absurd length. But there was no one to drag from any hole, no one to slaughter. The Wall appeared to be utterly abandoned.
"He was prankin' you!" Fuckup shrieked, wiping blood from his nose on the sleeve of his tunic. By this time he had remounted his mule. "Fatass dunked on you, boy! He ain't even here!"
Lord Randyll scowled and again smashed Fuckup to the ground. He trotted forward into the courtyard of Castle Black with an ear turned to the ominous silence. There was the clopping of far-off hooves, captains shouting muffled orders to men far distant... and no movement at all that he could see. With mounting unease, Lord Randyll approached the battle standard to study its device.
"Undead eyes," he murmured to himself. It didn't seem to make sense. The Night's Watch was the realm's sworn defender against the undead. And yet…
"M'lord! M'lord!" A knight came trotting into the courtyard looking and sounding frantic. "M'lord, above you! Look out!"
Lord Randyll craned his neck, dragging his eyes further and further up the Wall. At once he understood. Of course the Wall couldn't be defended from the south. It couldn't even really be defended from the north. It was too large to be defensible from the ground.
The defenders were atop the Wall.
"Welcome to my Wall, BITCH!" came the thunderous baritone of Samwell Tarly's voice, diminished hardly at all by the incredible seven-hundred-foot distance.
The first man streaked from the sky like a falling star, screamless even as he landed in the yard as might a garbage bag full of watermelons. He didn't so much land as explode, spattering Lord Randyll and Fuckup with gore. Fuckup screamed.
A second and a third man fell as the first had, one crashing through the rafters of Castle Black and another landing on top of the armory with a sickening crunch. Lord Randyll's mount squealed in terror and tried to rear, but he yanked its head around with the reigns and kicked it forward, out of the courtyard to the safety of the road... but the dead men were rising again, blocking his path to the gates. The first guy who'd fallen was barely able to rise, so splattered had he been, but the other two sprung up from their impact zones with luminous sapphire eyes and vile grins on their ruined faces. A fourth sacrifice crashed directly in front of Lord Randyll, causing him to fall from his horse. He caught a scream before it could escape his throat and scrambled backward and away from the wight as it rose before him.
"So good of you to come," it said in a voice that was like ripping cloth. It had been Ser Alliser Thorne, once. Now it was a bloody horror with shattered legs and eyes of blue fire, and it knew nothing of pain or fear or exhaustion. Ser Alliser's ruined bones crackled and broke further as he stood up to tower over Lord Randyll.
In the end the bloodbath lasted perhaps only fifteen or twenty minutes, but time may as well have frozen solid for the men of Randyll Tarly's host. While many of the brothers of the Watch cannonballed down from atop the Wall to rise as the undead and rip through the enemy ranks with tooth and claw, the rest rained down an unending torrent of flaming arrows, rocks, barrels of frozen gravel, and unused odds and ends of plate armor. A few fools actually attempted to scale the Wall, but naturally it repelled them. They had not brought tools for climbing, and besides, it was seven hundred feet of pure hell to the top. The Watch lost not a single man (unless you counted the ones who had jumped off and become wights).
Lord Randyll never did leave the courtyard. The wight formerly known as Ser Alliser had smashed through his plate and snatched open his belly with a clawed hand, yanked out a few yards of his entrails, and then left him to die. Lord Commander Samwell found his father in this state around sunset, when the brothers finally descended the Wall to euthanize the remnants of the host and claim Lord Randyll's dead as wights. Naked Samwell crouched by his father's head and removed his sunglasses. Lord Randyll's breath rushed shallowly in and out.
"You should have let me dance and sing and read," Samwell said. "You could have saved yourself, my lord. If only you had known with whom the fuck you were dealing."
"You are not my son," Lord Randyll breathed.
"No," Samwell agreed. He unlimbered his elephant trunk and began to urinate into Lord Randyll's open guts. Tammy came to his side and clung to one of his huge, flabby arms. She looked down at the ruined man with tears in her glowing eyes.
Samwell flipped his dong around to shake off the drops. "No," he repeated, "no son of yours. No son of Tarly. House Tarly is finished. On this day I begin a new House. Witness me, bitch; witness the birth of House Slayer."
Night fell. Lord Randyll closed his eyes, and his spirit descended into whatever hells there are.
