"I never wanted to be a priest."
Raising an eyebrow, I looked up from my drink – something sour, forget the name – and glanced back at Thoros; unshaven stubble, bags under his eyes, a thick woolen cloak draped across his shoulders, he sat stooped on a low marble bench, hands clasped and elbows on his knees.
"Too many restrictions, you see. Too few allowances. I would pass them in the streets, the preachers in their sackcloths, and pity their want of the finer things. No, this mantle" – he grabbed and shook the collar of his ratty red robes – "was not my choice."
That morning, we'd risen neither bright nor early. Dawn, after all, is the domain of the proles – a proper nob never stirs before nine (ideally noon, but needs must) – and this far north, the sun stayed crouched just beyond the horizon, holding the slate-grey sky in perpetual twilight.
Still, the others, the fleshy ones, with their (relatively) mortal constitutions, needed a little time to scarf down their breakfasts, throw on their clothes, and splash some water onto their faces before setting out for the day. And so, while they faffed and puttered and rummaged about, I stood there and waited, glass in hand, staring in boredom at the surrounding mountains through the flaps of the tent.
Suppose that's the cost of traveling in groups.
Thoros chuckled, half-wistful, half-bitter.
"The first inherits, the second joins the army, and the third goes to the church. That is the rule, yes?"
His accent was thick, pronounced, yet not offensively so – Sallah, of all things, would be the closest analogue, having that same rhythm and bass.
"Well, being the eighth of eight, nowhere as smart, or skilled, or driven as the rest, to the church I went." For a second, his lips seemed to curl. "Just given away, like loose change. Father had connections, though, money too, and I was soon elevated to the cloth."
A snort.
"I am hardly fit to supervise a latrine, much less shepherd men's souls. Nevertheless, the Lord's warmth embraced me." Eyes unfocused, the priest instinctively, unconsciously, rubbed a hand against his chest. "His flame took root in my heart."
Knowing the kind of god he worshiped, I reckoned that 'flame' was quite literal.
"An unwanted guest. For years, that was how I saw him. An unwanted guest." He swallowed, wringing his hands. "Now, I mourn his absence. This cold, this … blight, has reduced the blaze to smoldering embers. Left him a mere dormant sliver."
Almost to be expected, really.
Here, that ever-present rot, that cancer on the world's soul, swelled and surged, clotted and congealed, thick enough to cut with a knife, and certainly dense enough to block any signals from one as maimed and gutted as R'hllor. Whatever cataclysm had afflicted this world (I had my suspicions, but you know what they say about assuming), these mountains weren't the epicenter – there'd be scars if they were – though the fumes and fallout, carried by the wind, had evidently made them home, contaminated them down to the bedrock, then used them as a base to percolate and spread until their poison stained the entire continent.
I'd never seen anything like it – at least, not on this scale, nor quite so sustained. While the word 'apocalyptic' might come off too strong, I simply can't think of any other way to express its sheer severity.
"What does it mean, I wonder, that even the Lord finds this place repugnant?"
"It means we should turn back while we still have the chance."
Thoros blinked, and I swiveled around fully.
Brynden, voice flat, expression firm, stared me straight in the eyes. Perched atop a footstool, she was trying her level best to imbue her stance with some measure of authority.
The combined effect – the hands on her hips, the furry parka hanging down past her knees, the knowledge that, in truth, a dirty old man seethed behind that doll-like countenance – bludgeoned me over the head, and I found myself fighting back laughter.
"Oh?" Her face wrinkled when my giggles started leaking through. "Dare I ask why?"
"You know damn well why."
"Humor me."
Head tilted downward, as if it were physically pressed by the intended gravity of her words, she made an earnest effort at killing me with a glower.
"The Others are not the Ironborn," she growled. "No, they're not nearly so benign. They are a force of nature, the wrath of winter, heralds of Death itself." Her grimace turned a full-on sneer. "For a century, I've prepared for their return, and victory – survival – is still but a distant aspiration. What hope do you have, bumbling up to bash them with a hammer?"
"Ye of little faith!" I chortled. Part of me felt bad taunting the poor girl, but she made it far too easy. "I'll have you know, that hammer and I have been through a lot together – and if I may say, I've gotten pretty good with it."
Had her fists been clenched tighter, her fingers would've snapped. "Not good enough."
I offered a sympathetic smile – only mostly insincere – like she really was the child she appeared on the surface. "When I call myself a god, I'm not just being cocky."
Just.
"Even gods die," Bryden hissed, "and you – " Abruptly straightening, shutting her eyes, she rallied her emotions only a second before they irreversibly erupted, and forced a steadying breath. "In the face of annihilation, one would expect some humility."
At this, I couldn't help but scoff.
Humility?
An idiot could tell, within the first minute of meeting me, that I'd a chronic shortage of the stuff.
Hardly as if I needed any.
"Then one would be deluded."
The dam burst.
"Deluded? I'm deluded?" Hopping off the footstool, she thrust an accusatory finger. "You're the one traipsing into the lion's den! You're the one treating this like a game!" She stomped her feet. "The Prince isn't ready yet! The world isn't ready yet! You'd sacrifice civilization, life itself for what? Amusement? Impatience? Your own damned pride?!"
Raising his hands in an attempt at consolation, Thoros decided to interject. "My frie – "
Brynden, spit flying, spun around to face him. "Shut up!"
However, undeterred, he pressed on. "I've seen the Cold Ones, their march upon the living, and understand – if nothing else – that they must be driven back." Good to see his prognosticating hadn't been a complete waste. "If not by Her Grace, then who?"
"The Promised Prince! Azor Ahai! With resources, and a plan, and an army at his back!"
The evocation of his faith's messiah – and the prophecy that underpinned near all of its doctrine – gave Thoros pause. But whatever the dogma happened to be, regardless of the sermons and synods and scriptures, his Lord had come down from on high, reached through the flames, and personally bestowed him with purpose, a mission.
Had any other cleric been in his place, they'd have written it off as a trick of the light, or denounced me as some servant of the Enemy, or otherwise struggled to reconcile my existence (and R'hllor's apparent acceptance thereof) with their narrow cosmology.
But this drunken lout?
I hesitate to call him heterodox, for that would imply he'd a care for theology, or even a teaspoon of principle – any conviction, any reverence, had died with Rickard and Brandon Stark, long been choked by Aerys' wildfire, and thoroughly doused with liquor. A decade in the court of the savage sunset kings had left him a mooching, purposeless bum, who only stuck with the church for the stipend, and whose exploration of the human condition only took him as far as beneath a whore's knickers.
And it's the unfulfilled ones, the lost ones, the ones stuck searching for meaning, who – after a firm kick in the pants, mind you – always make for the truest believers.
So beholding the sheer enthusiasm with which his dying god had seized on the glowing statue lady with baps the size of watermelons, he put his rekindled faith not in me – not in my power in its own right – but in the esteem that his Lord held for me, and used it to steel his resolve.
"It is still our duty to fight for the living."
"Fat load of good we'd do them if we joined the dead!"
Panting, pacing, raking her fingers through her hair, Brynden then remembered that Ed was there, too, leaning against a column, chewing on some toast, quietly watching the drama unfold.
"Boy!"
He tilted his head; she took a step towards him.
"You've got sense, tell her you won't play along with this lunacy!"
Ed's leg, the missing one, hadn't grown back with the rest of him – he frowned and furrowed, fingers absently drumming against the thigh of his prosthesis, thumb tracing its pale golden filigree. He searched Brynden's eyes, then mine, before crossing his arms with a sigh.
"She'd just do it anyway," the kid grunted. "Her mind's already set."
Ignoring the initial dazed stupefaction, Brynden's knee-jerk instinct was violence – to hurl herself at someone, something, and pound and thrash and wail away until it lay broken on the floor. But as she trembled and clenched, and her breathing picked up speed, the reality of her situation once more barged to the forefront of her mind, and something within her snapped; her too-high voice caught in her throat, tears pooled at the corners of her eyes, and with her head hung low and shoulders hunched forward, she burst out crying.
Taking one last sip of that awful, bitter wine, I set the glass onto an end table.
"Finished?"
Eyes red (well, redder), she waved a hand and shook her head. "Just … " she sobbed, before devolving once more into tearful blubbering, arms folded in a self-embrace.
Burying my nascent pity before I actually felt something, I shot the other two a pointed frown and a firm flick of my chin: alright, hurry up.
After some dithering, a few concerned glances back and forth between Brynden and me, Thoros rose with a groan, tied his cloak, and buckled his sword belt over his beer belly – seeing as our resident Targaryen wasn't in much of a state to use it, he'd re-hilted Dark Sister with cannibalized parts, and crammed it into a makeshift sheath stitched from scraps of canvas and leather.
Ed, meanwhile, wiping the crumbs from his mouth, double-checked the straps of his armor. Though no small part of him resented the Erdtree on his breastplate, practicality (and the engraved heating runes) rather outshined his distaste.
Sparing Brynden another look, and noting that she hadn't let up, propriety insisted that I proffer an olive branch.
"You could always stay in the tent."
That is, the extradimensional space anchored to its interior – the horses found it comfortable enough.
My words took a moment to register; sniffling, shuddering, she affected a somber, forlorn poise, the kind only seen in the condemned.
"No," she all but whimpered, then sharply inhaled. "If I must, I'd rather die like a man."
I didn't take the shot – frankly, it's poor form to pluck such a low-hanging fruit.
The girl dried her tears, slipped on her boots, and, trundling towards the exit, flashed me about the evilest an eye a Hummel figurine could give.
By this point, the priest and the kid had finalized their preparations, bundled up and strapped in, and so, taking my natural place at the lead, raw dogging it in one of my usual dresses (the cold lets you know that you're alive), I stepped out into the snow; the others trudged along behind me, and Ed, without prompting – like a good little coolie – got to work packing the tent.
And then, we were off.
V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V
Sniffing out our quarry – actually finding the Others – had proved somewhat trickier than we might've hoped.
In hindsight, I should've expected this; hell, the circumstances nigh guaranteed it. We'd thousands of miles of wilderness to comb through, and while my more metaphysical senses could make out the hotspots, those places where the infection piled highest, I just couldn't glean anything specific, much less actionable, through the thickness of the rot (at least, not without far more effort than I was willing to spend on what ultimately amounted to pest control).
Thus, an alternative strategy – if Mohammed can't find the mountain, then give the mountain a bloody good reason to come and find Mohammed instead.
As a matter of prudence (I won't insult you with any claims of modesty, or pretensions of humanitarianism), I usually kept my aura, my presence, the outward emission of my power constrained, or at least spared the mayflies the brunt of it. Magic, after all, has a palpable weight to it – this is probably old hat by now, but I think it bears repeating – and gods such as myself (the descriptor still feels strange on the tongue, even after all these years), in keeping with our nature as living fonts, impose that weight onto our surroundings, enough to make some measure of self-restraint a practical, everyday necessity.
Of course, I loosened the leash on occasion, and chuckled when the lowlies fainted and foundered, but that's neither here nor there.
All it took, then, to make our trespass as blatant as possible was opening my trenchcoat and flashing my divinity, letting it hang out for all the world to see, so potent that the others had to squint and turn away. With each jerk and twitch, flex and flair, the air shimmered and atmosphere buckled, golden grace shining like a lighthouse on a moonless night.
Put simply, we weren't commandos, sneaking behind enemy lines, but a marching band, trumpets and horns screaming full-blast as we stomped our way northward, closer and closer to the edge of the earth, into the heart of winter itself.
They'd no other option, now, but to confront us – and confront us they did.
First came an unnatural stillness, an uncanny pressure, an aberrant thrumming right behind the ears; then, a cold, white mist, rising up from the ice, creeping through the air, enshrouding the anemic twilight; finally, somewhere ahead beneath the blanket of fog, sharp through the muffling silence, the squeaking and crunching of footsteps in the snow.
Arm outstretched, I snapped to a halt.
One of the hangers-on, I'm not sure who, stumbled at my abruptness, and arrested his fall with a hand against my shoulder blade.
"Wha – "
"Quiet."
Steadily, methodically, more footsteps, more crunching, emerging from the front and sides and rear – louder, harsher, closer.
The men shakily readied their weapons, and Brynden, cradling a kitchen knife, huddled between them.
"Lord of Light, defend us," Thoros mumbled in his native Myrish, "for the night is dark and full of terrors … "
We could see them through the mist, now, the cold undead, shambling, limping, their vacant eyes flickering Zyklon blue.
Tribesmen, Watchmen, even the rare Essosi, the Others hadn't discriminated – all life, in their eyes, was equally contemptible, better put to use in the service of death. Over the centuries, millennia, they'd poached scores of loners and drifters, outcasts and stragglers, snatched them up in the blackness of night, or cornered them in the shade between the trees, or recovered their unburnt bodies from beneath the frozen earth.
Flesh smooth and faces peaceful, I'd have almost mistaken the newest ones as living if not for their bloated, frostbitten hands, and skin as pale as paper; the oldest, meanwhile, were hardly more than skeletons, with strips of bleached cloth and dried flesh clinging to their windstripped bones.
In an instant, as if snapping to attention, they stopped and stilled, transformed into rigor-stiffed corpses.
Brynden sharply inhaled.
The slender forms of three White Walkers drifted like fog through the horde.
Diamond tresses, sapphire skin, spindly limbs and slender faces, they'd the radiance and brilliance of faceted gemstones, and the majesty of sculpted ice. Their delicate armor twinkled like chandeliers, colors shifting like oil on the water, and plates chiming with each ethereal motion. The longswords cradled in their willowy fingers were fashioned from brilliant crystal, thinner than a hair and sharper than a razor.
They were beautiful.
Only their eyes – burning like the stars – betrayed their hatred.
Their hatred of life, of warmth.
Of us.
The Others hated the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, the rustling of grass and the laughter of children, the sun shining bright in the summer skies above. Hate was their essence, what drove them onward, the core that powered their beings. The remainder of the spectrum, fear and joy and all the rest – whenever the Walkers deigned to feel them – just tinted that malign foundation.
They weren't merely twisted by the rot, or corrupted by its blight; they were born of it, given form by it, the rancorous products of a putrefied world.
Dazzling as they might've looked, their very existence was an abomination.
Hammer tapping idly against my shin, I watched as they glided out in front of their thralls, and scrutinized them as they closed the distance, studying me in kind, chattering and gesturing amongst themselves, until coming to rest a few paces away.
Curiosity, it seems, had trounced their common sense.
Well, far be it from me to squander such a generous opportunity.
The leading one, the closest one, hadn't envisioned that my hammer would pulverize everything above his shoulders; the other two startled, reflexively baulked, and I pounced at the next one – the Walker on the left – with a quick upward swing, gouging a canyon from his gut to its collar; then, before he could raise his sword, I closed the distance to the third and seized him by the neck.
There was panic in his eyes.
"I expected a better fight," I sneered. "Something more benefiting your kind's reputation." My grip tightened, and the Walker frantically clawed at my wrist. "I must say, I'm disappointed."
With the benefit of hindsight, it was stupid of me to gloat.
A flurry, a lunge, and the second's sword pricked my forearm, the tip just piercing the skin; it only got so far before, cracking, splintering, the blade gave a shrill, keening whine, like a stuck pig, then shattered to pieces.
I staggered, moreso from the surprise than the impact itself. As my arm jerked, my fingers twitched, accidentally snapping the third Other's neck, and I unthinkingly flung the flaccid body to the ground just as my head whipped towards my attacker.
Mangled by the jagged shards of his sword, the second Walker – the one whose torso I'd cleft in two – writhed and flailed and hissed on his back, hands pressed against his shredded eyes, cyan blood spilling out onto the rocks.
Evidently, I hadn't hit him hard enough.
Sloppy.
I looked at the spot, the hairline notch, where his sword had nicked my arm, chipping my stone skin, and exposing a glimpse of the luster underneath.
(You must understand, my corporeal form was essentially an airbrushed facade: beneath the alabaster shell, I was a luminous being of runes and starstuff, glued together by dark matter, then molded to a shape that the original had found sufficiently queenly.
She used to be a brunette, believe it or not, back before her ascension.
I can't explain why, exactly, I've stuck with that emphatically female sheath, instead of fashioning something more in line with who, what I'd once been. Perhaps her memory's influence on my own self-concept was just that strong, or maybe some unconscious, unconfronted part of me agreed with her residual id.
Not sure it matters, either way – after so many years as a lady, I struggle to see myself as anything else.
Matter over mind.
But I digress.)
I growled in frustration, mostly at myself, and when the third Walker, head lolling back, clumsily rose to his feet, I reduced his abdomen to paste. Catastrophic as the damage to him might've been, though, it would've only kept him down for another minute or so; already, the ice and snow were refilling the holes, and re-setting his broken spine.
Frankly, I could've reduced him to atoms, but he'd have still been in some way alive, tethered to the world, and therefore capable of eventual regeneration.
Magical problems have magical solutions – this was elementary, yet here I'd been relying on blunt force alone.
Just sloppy.
So I reached inside the shadow of my inner light, channeled the Rune of Death, and shot the Walker with a bolt of crimson flame.
(A history lesson:
Destined Death, as it is also known, stipulates that all things are fated to one day die – unavoidably, irreversibly, absolutely.
Following the defeat of the Gloam-Eyed Queen, her last true rival for supremacy, the newly ascendant God-Queen Marika feared the dissolution of her reign, and for this reason plucked Death from the Elden Ring, and sealed it within her brother-cum-dog-cum-minder, Maliketh.
Consequently, she and her children would live forever, absent a universal commandment to the contrary – hence her regnal epithet, the Eternal.
This was the beginning of the Golden Order.
From that day on, the souls of those whose physical bodies died, rather than venturing onward into the undiscovered country, were fed to the Erdtree, where they were scrubbed of their identity, and thereafter born anew, like fruit from its branches. For the majority, mortality had thus become a closed circuit, an endless loop of salvage, more and more vitality lost to oblivion with each subsequent reincarnation.
What's more, there existed a substantial minority of true immortals, 'gifted' life everlasting by dint of their ancestry, or their service to the empire. Sooner or later, as the years wore on, their bodies stooped and shriveled, and their eccentricities increasingly guided their actions, until senility took them entirely.
Put simply, she denied her subjects a true, final rest, and thereby doomed them to an agonizing entropy – and her civilization to an inevitable collapse.
Only when the Order had decayed into decadence, and Death managed to take her favored son, did Marika comprehend the depths of her folly, but she still couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger.
No, she fobbed that job off onto me.)
The bolt sliced cleanly through the Walker, flesh bubbling in its wake, spurts of flame sizzling around the entry wound.
Eyes wide, he gave a gurgling groan, before his fingers slackened and chest –
" – LP US!"
A blink.
I'd forgotten about the wights.
Seriously, did I get dropped on the head or something?
Bumbling up with a hammer, indeed.
The wights had surrounded, besieged, strangled my companions – practically threw themselves upon them with suicidal abandon. Thoros hacked away at the mob with that Valyrian sword, while Ed struggled to hold them back with an axe and shield.
Brynden, clinging to Ed's back like a chimpanzee, blindly lashed out with her knife, and screamed in terror over the din of battle.
"HELP US, YOU FUCKING CU – !"
Right.
A flick; seeded with the flames of Destined Death, the turbulent mountain gales erupted into a firestorm; wights, Walkers, the whirlwind seized them all, twisted them through the air, and burnt them to a crisp.
My hand clamped to a fist –an unnecessary affectation, sure, but a satisfying one.
The conflagration buffered, contracted, then exploded; the shockwave blasted forth, stripping rocks and snow, and tearing the peaks from the neighboring mountains.
Ashes rained down, the booming echoed through the hills, and the lingering heat simmered – and then, silence.
"Get in the tent."
Shaken, numb, the three of them gaped and furrowed and swallowed.
"Now."
They didn't argue, or at least lacked the will to – Ed got to work driving stakes and raising poles, while Thoros and Bryden quietly watched him.
"Stay inside"
The skin on my forearm reknit, unblemished and smooth.
"Don't leave. Don't follow."
I summoned my armor, taking solace in its comforting weight as I tested the joints and adjusted the helmet.
"I'll return when I'm done."
V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V/\V
Wreathed in Death's black-red flames, the head of my hammer slammed through the ranks of living dead, limbs flying as ten score wights toppled from the ridgeline.
I overswinged the follow-through, setting me off-balance; a reanimated giant – jaw ripped away, intestines scooped out, fingers worn down to the knuckles – scrambled to exploit the opening; my back leg whipped forth, smashed against the giant's sternum, and its body sprayed across the rocks.
Inertia tugging me a few steps forward, I glimpsed a frenzied blur in the corner of my vision, felt a cautionary tingling at the back of my skull – in a word, my instincts screamed; I evaporated, astralized, beamed myself some twenty feet away with a great booming flash, just in time to dodge the Other atop a skeletonized polar bear.
"Come on!" I cackled, vaporizing the rider and mount with a beam of crimson fire. "You can do better than that!"
It was the most fun I'd had in decades
Powering through my mistakes – that's about the easiest way to explain my, her, our fighting style (for as much as one can call it a 'style'). Having not the means, then time, then inclination for any formal training, the original had learned on the job, as it were, and relied on her tremendous strength to compensate for any technical shortcomings. Over time, she'd achieved a respectable proficiency, though as far as actual skill went, she'd never really risen above the level of a talented amateur.
This was, I would argue, rather in keeping with the rest of her character.
For a goddess of Order, an ordained and proclaimed champion of civilization, the original had always lacked a certain refinement. Not with respect to her manner, no (it might have taken a few centuries, but she'd mastered the outward trappings of royalty, or at least outgrown the worst of her gaudy nouveau riche), though her fundamental nature had always remained decidedly savage – beneath all the glamor and gilding, the speech and the dress, she was still a conquering warlord, tossing her sword onto the scales; a barbarian Khan, trampling her enemies as she reveled in their lamentations; a street rat, swiping purses and discarded crusts of bread.
Bare-chested Radagon, the simple soldier, was always the idealist of the pair, the one who'd hogged for himself all the conscientiousness and rectitude. I always appreciated the duality of it – the yin-yang of their singular whole – in a detached, intellectual sort of way.
And while I like to think that, over my stay, I'd smoothed her rougher edges, what's a drop of a lifetime in a sea of eternity?
Innumerable wights felled, immeasurable distance traversed, the swings and strikes and slashes began to blend together, and time lost its meaning.
Mountains melted away like wax, and the crevasses and seracs leveled to a solid sheet of ice, hard as stone, stretching out past the horizon into the blind infinity. Auroras blazing in the arctic midnight sky, here, beneath the ice, lay the empty husk of a forgotten city, the entombed remains of a primeval metropolis, built from that dreadful oily black stone. Only its tallest spires poked above the ice, their masonry varnished with glimmering rime, and roof tiles wreathed with icicles.
Spiders and mammoths, undead thralls, the Others charged me with everything they had, thrust and lunged, stabbed and rammed, scratched and bit – until they simply hadn't any more to send.
The last White Walker died impaled on a spear of flame, surrounded by its vanquished fellows; burning from within, frozen flesh melting to a watery slush, it rasped a dying curse – "May Father take you," it coughed, voice like crackling ice. "And may Night embrace us all."
When it breathed its last, there was no grand fanfare, no great renewal, no miraculous abatement of the rot.
The cold, lonely wind just howled and cried.