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Jorah

"The Kingslayer has fallen! The Kingslayer has fallen!" The repeated shouts from gold-armored Lannisters, retreating from the banks of White Knife from the east, might have been greeted with cheers by the Northern armies who made up the center flank, if the words had been spoken only a few months before. The news was now met with stricken glances and dead silence, as the men knew that Jaime Lannister was all that was holding the river. The dead would be coming from two sides now, south through the charred ruins of the Wolfswood and east across the river.

Jorah Mormont, commanding general of the ground forces, received the news with a grim and taciturn expression that had varied little all day. Night was approaching. The horizon bled stark violet on the edge of storm clouds that pushed forward faster than the army of the dead. Spits of snow and ash mixed together in the air all around them.

The air grew colder and there was something sinister in its chill. The heat of battle failed to shake off the frost and their steel began to stick, slick with blood and water icing up the blades. Beric Dondarrion's sword might have stayed clean, as it was doused in flame, but Jorah had seen that fiery sword charge a swarm of the undead hours ago and he hadn't seen it since.

They were within thirty miles of Winterfell now, pushed back first from Last Hearth, then down to the Wolfswood in the west and the Dreadfort in the east, and still further, losing ground every hour towards their last stand. There were just too many. And they didn't stop, they didn't rest. For every one of the living soldiers that fell, the Night King gained another to his side.

Still, they stood their ground.

Here we stand. Jorah thought grimly as he watched yet another surge break across the hillside, skeletal soldiers rushing at them with a fevered pace that stunk of madness and mayhem.

"Come meet my axe, you fucking cunts!" Sandor Clegane growled in anticipation, from Jorah's left. The Hound was covered head-to-toe in blood and grime. His axe had felled a thousand soldiers this day. And yet, there was little to show for it, except piles of undead corpses on the long road of retreat.

One wave followed another. Jorah's men sliced through them all, but it was exhausting work, like slogging through the tangled underbrush of some foreign jungle.

At least the jungle would be warm, Jorah grumbled in his head as he plunged the iron sword in his left hand into the clattering rib cage of the nearest spear-waving undead, while fending off two others with the sword in his right.

Jorah had never faced an enemy like this. When he was still a young man, he fought for glory, following Thoros of Myr into Pike with such reckless abandon, cutting down the rebellious Greyjoys with vigor. In exile, he fought for gold, suppressing all thoughts of honor for the grasping, grueling work of buying his way home again. But his enemies had always been flesh and blood, with desires and motivations of their own.

Even fighting for Daenerys all those years—in the Red Waste, in Qarth, in Slaver's Bay, in the fighting pits of Meereen…all her many enemies were men attempting to preserve a way of life and a power and influence they had come to believe they held by right. They held fast to their old world order and paid for it. In fire and blood.

Perhaps they even deserved it. Jorah was tempted to believe they did, but he knew himself well enough to know that Daenerys could demand anything of him and he would give it to her—despite knowing the veritable truth of words he spoke to her years ago in the pyramid at Meereen: It's tempting to see your enemies as evil, but there's good and evil on every side of every war ever fought.

Until this one, he amended in his head. The Night King's army was something else entirely.

The enemy was fast but their bones were brittle. Their aim was sharp but their hearts were empty. Their eyes were chillingly haunted, their mission to destroy every living being in their path was insatiable. Like a plague, they were created and fashioned for only one purpose, to conquer and destroy. To bring death and more death.

"Gods be damned!" Jorah cried aloud, as one of the smaller ones, a child once upon a time, emerged from the pack and leapt up, crawling, clawing, grasping at his wrist and making his sword play clumsy for too many seconds in a row. He shook the blue-eyed demon off, but not before another landed a fierce blow on his upper torso, where his armor was failing and he felt cold metal bite into flesh. With a roar of anger, he brought the sword around and took the bastard's head off.

"Watch those little fuckers, Mormont!" Sandor Clegane cautioned, the warning coming too late to do any good. Jorah continued hacking and slashing at the hoard, with the rest of them, ignoring the newest wound as he had the rest, until the dead lay as corpses once again at their feet.

They lost another eighth mile in the surge but maintained their numbers, sad as they may be. Success was now measured in merely holding the line, which still they failed to do. And now with the Kingslayer's men in full retreat, Jorah could only hope Lyanna's Bear Island fighters and the Knights of the Vale were holding the western line with more success.

But it was just a matter of time. The stubbornness of bears, lions, wolves and wildlings would not stop the flood of dead men or the imminent blizzard that rolled in on those violet storm clouds.

In the brief reprieve, Jorah grimaced as he reached under his split armor. He came away with scarlet blood bathing his fingers.

"You'll need to sew that up," the Hound mentioned darkly, as he climbed the knoll that Jorah stood on.

"It's a scratch," Jorah muttered back, adding, "And there's no time."

Far across the moors, a Whitewalker on a monstrous black horse was raising the dead they had only recently felled. And the spits of ice and snow were falling faster and harder, flakes and pellets swirling in a few new blasts of northern breeze. And one blast from above, as large, leathery wings flapped by overhead.

"The dragons!" one of Jon's wildlings in the small valley below raised a hand, pointing at the battle raging in the sky. Jorah looked up with the rest.

Jorah's heart went cold, colder than the frosty air that swirled around the corpse-strewn moors. Viserion and Rhaegal were dancing in the sky above, tussling and tangling, as they headed to Winterfell. But Drogon was not with them.

Drogon and his rider were not with them.