Torches, fire-oil bombs, and the flames burning atop the corpses shrank at a speed visible to the naked eye and finally went out.
No telescope was needed. Everyone on the Wall could clearly see what lay below.
To put it simply, everything in sight was dead bodies!
Wildlings wrapped in fur, giants with their innards spilling out, black-clad members of the Night's Watch, half-rotten corpses with tattered clothes, skeletal remains stripped of flesh, a polar bear missing half its skull, penguins wobbling with black blood dripping from their chests.
Every corpse that could have come from beyond the Wall and those that shouldn't have were all gathered here.
At the beginning of winter, even the wildlings numbered more than a hundred thousand, and like the people of Westeros, they buried their dead.
Now, counting the ones buried underground, the ones lying on the surface, and the humans and beasts roaming through the forests, a force of one million would not have been an exaggeration.
"Target the place where the blue lights flicker. Those are the Others' eyes. Attack the Others. Use fire-oil bombs! Dragon-glass arrows!" Cotter Pyke bellowed.
"Light the beacon tower and inform Greenwatch to the west!"
"Tell Maester Harmune to immediately send letters. Every raven from Winterfell, Last Hearth of House Umber, King's Landing, all of them must be released. And do not forget Dragonstone."
"Notify the Bay Fleet to leave port and patrol along the coast. If they spot the sea freezing over, bombard it with fire-oil immediately!"
As the commands of the garrison captain spread outward—from the Wall, to the fortress below, down through the wormways, and to the harbor—everyone moved into action.
"Whew, it finally begins."
Cotter Pyke let out a deep breath, tightened his grip on the dragonbone blade, and bared his teeth toward the wilderness. "I am standing right here today watching. Let's see how you dog bastards plan to cross this Wall!"
"There are so many of them, maybe they'll stack themselves and climb right up, hahahaha!" A knight in gleaming armor stamped with a black-and-white boar sigil roared with laughter.
He was Rolands of Snipe Hall in the Reach, a count who answered the Dragon Queen's call for a united front against the Others and had voluntarily donned black and ridden north.
Knights like Count Rolands—noble volunteers—had come by the hundreds in recent years, resolving the long-standing shortage of ranking officers within the Watch.
These knights who came willingly and without worldly burdens were the true backbone of the Night's Watch.
As a seasoned veteran, Count Rolands knew exactly what was needed now—something to loosen the boys' tension.
Old Ulmar also understood his intention and shouted, "Or maybe their strategy is to drain all our arrows and fire-oil, so they just line up down there and stand still like target dummies!"
"Hahahaha!"
Within moments, under the guidance of several veterans, laughter burst across the Wall. As they laughed, the soldiers gradually relaxed and resumed methodically throwing fire-oil bombs and launching dragon-glass arrows.
Until something changed below.
"Rustle, rustle, rustle." The corpses that had silently endured the barrage suddenly moved as one, shifting to either side and revealing a ten-meter-wide path.
A surge of icy white mist rolled out from the far end of that opening.
The wind grew colder.
The freezing fog thickened.
The Night's Watch saw two faint blue lanterns flickering in the mist, drifting closer to the Wall.
"A large one is coming," Ulmar whispered grimly. He drew his bow, lit the oilcloth-wrapped arrow in the brazier, and let it fly. It shot six hundred meters outward, aided by the wall's towering height.
"Ah!" Once they saw what was coming, everyone cried out together.
It was an army—rows of ice-crystal armor, seaweed-like silver hair, every one of them an Other.
More than a hundred strong!
These Others rode black-furred spiders the size of buffalo and followed behind a single figure carrying a handle shaped like a parasol.
Just like knights following a king into battle.
Count Rolands suddenly understood and shouted in horror, "The White Walker King! The one leading them is the White Walker King!"
"Attack! Everyone, hurry! Fire-oil bombs! Dragon-glass ballista bolts! Arrows! Cover that monster!" Cotter Pyke snapped back to himself and roared.
But the White Walker King was no fool. He halted five hundred meters from the Wall, and a spiraling storm of ice and snow rose around him, shredding every arrow and bolt before they could reach their mark.
And the storm blocked all lines of sight.
They had barely managed two volleys when a low, grating sound emerged from the storm—a grinding scrape like a shoe sole dragging across thick glass on a cement road—and reached them without resistance.
Hearing that sound, the Night's Watch felt their minds slip. It was as if icy hands clutched their souls, froze them solid, and crushed them into frost dust.
And then the most terrifying thing happened.
Those same hands gripped not only their souls but also the Wall beneath their feet.
Crack.
The first fissure appeared. The first groaning roar of breaking ice split the air. The men on top of the Wall had not yet noticed, but those preparing for battle in the courtyard below saw it clearly.
The crack was like a fresh wound carved across a baby's cheek—a deep scar stretching hundreds of meters across the pale ice, sharp, vivid, and soul-shaking.
Before anyone could scream—"Crack, crack—crack-crack-crack—crack-crack-crack-crack!"
A second crack, a third, a fourth erupted in seconds. The mountain-tall Wall splintered into a web of fractures.
And visible to all, a thick, heavy black cloud slowly spread over the Wall—like the Wall was a child lying upon the ground, and a mother was laying a massive quilt gently over him.
"Crack—Boom—"
Amid the oppressive black clouds over the city, dense, spiderweb-like crimson lightning flickered.
"Ahhh—" The lightning overhead, the glacier cracks at their feet resembling the mouths of giants, made every Night's Watchman on the Great Wall anticipate what was about to happen.
One by one, they opened their mouths, letting out meaningless yet terrifying screams—the last they would ever utter in their lives.
Of course, some of the quicker Night's Watchmen sprinted eastward, toward the bay.
"Rumble—"
The first roof-sized block of ice broke free from the wall and plummeted from a height of hundreds of meters, crashing into the Eastern Sea Watchtower. Dozens of Night's Watchmen, busy moving supplies near the hoist frame, didn't even have time to scream before the ice smashed their skulls like buckets of rocks, burying them completely.
And this was only the beginning.
"Boom—Crash—"
The first falling ice block triggered a domino effect. One after another, the ice walls collapsed, along with the wooden ladders Night's Watchmen had built upon them, sliding down in a cascade.
A thick layer of icy mist began to envelop the land.
The wind grew stronger and colder.
In just over ten seconds, the Night's Watch castles behind the Eastern Sea Watch Tower were completely covered by ice.
"BOOOOM—"
Finally, as ice fell away, the bricks and boulders inside the Great Wall were exposed, as if ten thousand fuses had been laid within the walls and detonated in sequence.
The black clouds above the Wall grew darker and heavier, and the finger-thick network of lightning became denser.
First, a muffled boom sounded from beneath Seal Bay, then from east to west, explosions—or rather, the deafening collapse of the Wall—rumbled endlessly.
In truth, there were no explosions. The sheer force and sound of the Wall's collapse were so overwhelming that it felt as if the heavens and earth had shattered and mountains had tumbled.
"The Wall has fallen? Am I dreaming?"
At Seal Bay, sailors on fifteen patrol longships stood frozen on deck, staring at the crumbling Wall. Their hearts seemed ripped from the warmth of their chests and thrown into the icy sea.
They were drained by the horror before them, collapsing onto the decks, wailing in despair.
To the north of the Wall, the ice storm surrounding the White Walker King had dissipated, revealing a "majestic" White Walker.
Like others of his kind, he had grayish-white wrinkled skin, but no flowing, seaweed-like silver hair.
From his bald head grew nine transparent, sword-shaped ice spikes, like small horns.
These spikes formed a circle atop his head, a natural crown of thorns.
The crown of nine ice spikes declared his identity boldly to all living beings: he was the White Walker King, destined to bring endless calamity to the world.
He now blew into a bronze-adorned black horn as long as an arm.
If Sam or Jon were here, they could instantly recognize its origin: guided by the direwolves, Jon had found it beneath a boulder at the First Men's Fist Peak. Unable to sound it, he gave it to Sam as a keepsake.
Sam had kept it ever since.
When the Night's Watch first encountered White Walkers and wights at the First Men's Fist Peak, the men had fled in panic, losing their armor and belongings. Sam had gotten separated but still carried the horn.
Later, traveling south to Oldtown, he brought it along.
In Braavos, he carried the horn; on Dragonstone, in the presence of the Dragon Queen, it remained in his pack. Finally, Fat Sam took it to Oldtown.
To be honest, if you asked him why he carried this worn, brass-inlaid black horn—worthless in value—he would look puzzled: "Yeah, why do I keep it?"
No matter what, in Oldtown, it should have been as far as possible from the White Walkers beyond the Wall.
But it was lost.
A dead pigeon with one glowing blue eye carried off a raven the size of a full-grown hen. The raven flew directly over Ser Aes' head, no more than a hundred meters away.
Then, the raven's eyes glowed blue as it flew into Sam's bedroom, located the horn as if on instinct, and carried it back north, beyond the Wall.
The moment it crossed the Wall, under the effect of a warding circle, the wight raven's body was torn apart into a pile of limbs and rotting flesh.
Yet it had flown over 1,000 meters high and carried significant initial northward velocity.
At this moment, the laws of magic receded, and Newton's rules came into play.
Flying at 1,000 meters, initial speed of 50 m/s (comparable to the fastest pigeon on Earth), under Earth-like gravity,
Could the raven's corpse and the horn it carried clear a 200-meter-high, 20-meter-wide Wall?
(End of chapter)
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