"This entire ranging was a mistake." Dirk, a scrawny man with beady eyes and a dirty brown mop of hair, muttered to the side. Jon cut him a look that told him to be quiet, which led the man to grumble further. At least it wasn't until the Halfhand himself glanced back with those cold eyes of his that the troublesome ranger quieted down.
The group of nine tried their best at moving like phantoms. They were only alive due to Qhorin Halfhand himself. The legendary ranger had been about to go on another mission, a mission assigned to him by the Lord Commander himself, when tragedy struck.
The very weather turned against them as all of a sudden, they felt the full brunt of winter upon them. There had been no prediction of a snowstorm previously; nobody could have guessed one could just appear from nowhere deep in the night. The snowstorm quenched their fires, and that was where the true horrors started.
The animals, horses, and other farm animals used to cater to the expedition began to make a ruckus. That was the first sign something was wrong, but the act had been mistaken for the terror of the night and the sudden snowstorm. Maester Aemon once said animals were always the first to sense such changes. That was the first mistake, but not their last.
The attack came in the middle of the snowstorm, moans, grunts, and scrambling heralding them. In the confusion of the snowstorm, many a black brother killed another by sheer mistake as they did the attackers. Then came their third mistake.
The Lord Commander had rallied with a cry, his sword of Valyrian steel lifted high like a torch in a stormy night, and he had rallied what was left of the men on watch as well as anyone wielding a blade and able to recognize their Lord Commander's voice. They were mustered into a counterattack, prepared to crush the opportunistic wildlings that had struck with the aid of the snowstorm.
They were not prepared to face horrors from the long nights and the legends that followed them. Jon Snow had already been sorted into Qhorin's special squad by then, but since Samwell was a tent away, he pulled the chubby boy alongside him as they charged. Then he met his first opponent. This close, and even with the snowstorm making it hard to distinguish who was who, Jon could not mistake the shrunken, skinny, and barely dressed figure for a brother of the Night's Watch, so his blade sang.
Castle-forged steel parted the grasping hand at the elbow, then with a smooth lunge, his talent with the blade showed as he buried the tip of the long sword as well as half of its length into his opponent's chest, even with the snowstorm threatening to blind him. One down, hundreds more to go. That was what Jon had thought, until he tried to rip his sword out of the man, only for a hand to grip his forearm tight.
The snowstorm died down enough for Jon to see the bright, empty blue eyes that stared back at him. The man's face had been ripped off partially. His entire jaw was gone, down to his throat, leaving a gaping maw. There was no way he could have survived that, then survived Jon's blade to his chest. His opponent had been dead for a long time. His wide, confused eyes stared into dead blue, and that was when Jon began to hear it. He might have been the first person to experience it, but he was not the last.
He could hear the screams of fear, surprise, and pain as his brothers fought against men and women who had no reason to be standing, much less attacking them. Jon jerked his arm back, but the dead man held on like a dog that had been given a bone. Jon tried to take a step back, but a second later, he felt something grasp at his feet and pull him down. He only had a second to glimpse that the arm he had cut off previously was now attached to his leg, then he fell.
However, Jon was no rabble, or common thief, like a great part of the Watch. He had been trained, trained as well as any noble trueborn child in the art of war and personal combat, and in that, he had shone.
He allowed himself to fall and released the sword in that moment, but the dead man's grip had been tight on his arm, which meant he was pulled alongside him, but Jon was ready for it. It took him a second to find the dagger strapped to his hips, and another to bury it into the dead man's inner elbow, forcing the hand to spasm and release his forearm. Then his back hit the ground, the snow cushioning his fall. He immediately buried his knife into the dead man's eye and straight into his head. Then he took a moment to let out a shaky breath, until the second blue orb blinked. It was still moving.
Jon scrambled to throw the dead man off him, but the weight, as well as the snow and ice-slicked ground robbed him of leverage, until he felt it. A calling, instinctive in its urgency. Jon immediately put a knee between him and the dead man, and with a roar of effort forced it back in the slightest, pushing its face away from him. A second later, a great maw closed around the dead man's head. Jon watched it happening in slow motion, the way the jaw tightened and the blue dimmed, then with a wrench the dead man's head was ripped off, and the body fell limp on Jon.
A second later, somebody pulled the body off him, allowing him to roll away, his sight blinded by the black congealed blood that had escaped the dead man's neck when its head was ripped off. His right hand instinctively sought his sword, while his left frantically used snow to clean his eyes. He heard the crunch of footsteps and swung his sword blind.
"Peace, Jon!"
The high pitch of Samwell's voice froze his hand mid-swing, and when he succeeded in regaining his sight, he was greeted with the red face of Samwell Tarly. "Sam? I thought I lost you in the initial rush?"
He immediately let the sword drop, but already he could hear the clash of steel against meat, and the screams and cries of men and women responding in pain and horror.
"Ghost found me." Sam gestured toward the great and silent white wolf that had padded up to Jon's side, red eyes staring at his gray with furious intent, its maw stained black and red from the putrid blood of the dead man he had rescued Jon from. Jon allowed his gaze to travel back to the dead body, which was fortunately still now.
"What is this?" he asked, voice hollow. The insanity of the situation was only beginning to sink in.
"They're wights. We're being attacked by wights! The wildlings were speaking true. The Others are back."
Before Jon could muster a response, Ghost let out a growl. One so quiet that only Jon, with his familiarity with the direwolf, heard it. He pivoted on the spot, sword swinging and catching the rabid mad attacker along the throat. The force of the blow decapitated the woman. Jon was a fast learner.
However, when her head dropped to the ground and rolled to face him, its blue eyes continued to stare at him. Jon instinctively turned back in surprise as the beheaded body scrambled towards him, but Ghost was there first. The great white beast pounced, appearing like his namesake, and slamming into the wight, then with furious movements it dug great claws into the wight's back. The force of the attack broke the spine, cracked open ribs, then with a lunge, Ghost shot its head through the hole it had made and ripped out its heart while giant paws ripped the body messily till it finally grew still.
When Ghost raised its head up once more, Jon was greeted to the terrifying sight of the white beast's maw further stained with black congealed blood. He staggered back in surprise, and something he imagined was hurt crossed the wolf's red eyes, and it immediately retreated, bounding into the snow and disappearing.
"Ghost, wait..."
The sound of a great horn rang out an instant later. "That's the sound to retreat," Samwell said, and the chubby boy scrambled up to him, before pulling and tugging at his arm. As one, the two of them retreated, running into the mist, before coincidentally finding a group of other survivors led by Qhorin.
"Getting lost in your thoughts now is stupid of you." The calm yet dry voice of the legend rang out beside him, and Jon flinched before letting out a defeated sigh.
"It's all happened so fast."
"Yes, it did, but we still live. And if we do, I'm sure a great many others do. I saw the Lord Commander as well as some sixty-odd men retreating on horseback. I've been plotting a course to catch up with them by cutting through the forest to meet them ahead. If we survived and they did as well, then surely other groups did," Qhorin said. Jon wasn't certain the older man was trying to comfort him; however, even if he didn't intend to, he was certainly being comforted, he realized.
There was a rustle in the distance, and when Jon turned to look, he realized Qhorin was already looking in the same direction. "It's that beast of yours. It's been trailing behind us the entire trip, killing any of the wights that get too close to us." The older man gave Jon an empty and unreadable look. "You're either lucky or blessed, Snow, to hold such a connection."
The older man knew, or suspected, Jon realized, but he didn't say anything, and neither did the older man. Instead, they continued their march forward. Jon slowed down to allow Sam to catch up to him. "How are you holding up, Sam?"
Sam gave him a red-faced smile before shrugging tiredly. "As best as I can, Jon, as best as I can. I can't fight, not like you guys. So if the wights do catch up to us, I would be useless... dead weight, in fact. So the least I can do is to make sure to keep up."
Jon nodded at the sentiment. There was no time to cajole, or lie, or encourage. The truth had always been plain. Samwell Tarly did not have a martial bearing or demeanor, but Jon had learned early on that wasn't all there was to a man. His dull grey eyes ranged across their group. They had started off with thirteen men in total. Thirteen had been cut down to nine on the first day. Two men had simply fallen to their injuries. The third had hanged himself while they slept, and the fourth had simply disappeared in the night.
The rest of them were on edge and desperate; however it spoke to something about Samwell that he was able to keep his attitude up and had been strong enough to keep up, even if he was red-faced like a tomato and almost always out of breath. His effort showed true.
As luck would have it, Qhorin had been correct. The sound of hoofed feet racing across snow was distinctive, and as one the group tensed, before bursting into motion. Sprinting across the snow and the forest pathway they had charted, they burst into the actual road formed from generations of trekking by wildlings and Night's Watch that had taken the path.
The lead riders sighted them and immediately began to slow down, until they stopped shy of them. At the sight of their black cloaks, the cry rang out and the message was passed down. "Survivors!" There were ragged cheers, from both the riders and the stragglers that followed behind the sixty-odd riders. Jon felt his body ease at the sight of the group. Surely things would only get better from here.
x
"Things are not getting any better from here." Jeor Mormont started with a tone that set the conversation going forward. The Lord Commander was an old man, and while he had hidden the rigors of the past few weeks of ranging well enough, what he couldn't hide was the effect of the past two days. His already white hair had turned a dull shade of grey and his frame seemed to have shrunk somewhat, although that was easily hidden by sheer virtue of the amount of furs he wrapped himself with.
The group of seven sat in a rapidly raised tent to house the eldest, most experienced, and highest ranking rangers present, with the exception of Jon. The only reason he was in this meeting was because Qhorin had claimed him as his second and had dragged him along. Jon wasn't blind to the fact that he was the only second present, owing to the fact that he was the only one standing while the rest of the men were sitting. His presence had been noted with side eyes and a little mumbling, but the bunch of grizzled and weary men had bigger worries than his company.
"What are our supplies like?" Qhorin questioned as the freshest man in the group.
"As I'm sure you can imagine, sheep and goats, as well as grain, were not a priority while scrambling to flee from the horde of the dead that seemed determined to kill us," Ulmer of the Kingswood replied, in barely hidden jest.
The old grizzled man was almost as legendary as Qhorin, even if his own fame and infamy were mostly from his status as one of the famed brotherhood that had required the Kingsguard to deal with.
"They're not great, my friend," the Lord Commander said, cutting Qhorin off before he could reply, and the whole discussion was turned on its head. "We have wounded men among us that won't survive the return to the Wall or Castle Black. Every day we get half a dozen or more survivors, and every day we lose more of them. To sickness, to injuries, and to other things that move in the night."
"Wights, and the Others that control them. I glimpsed one of them, I swear it. Glimpsed it in the initial fight; it rode upon a giant ice spider, and it surveyed the entire fight with cruel blue eyes," Ser Mallador Locke said, his voice tired and weary like he had repeated the story a hundred and one times. The rest of the group said nothing until Qhorin spoke up once more.
"Were we the only ones hit? What about the free folk?"
"Undoubtedly, they were attacked as well, but their fate is no trouble of ours. We must continue south as fast as possible, but I fear we would not make the journey, not if those monsters continue to hound us every night."
"Craster's keep," another man suggested, an unfamiliar man but with the same grizzled features and hard eyes that spoke of experience. "I doubt the old lecherous bastard would be happy to see us, but he should have enough supplies and a roof over our heads for us to rest a day or two before continuing our journey to the Wall."
"We would lose too many men," Qhorin countered. "Craster's keep is too far; by the time we get there, we would only have an estimated half of our number remaining... if we are lucky. Less so if we're not. Worst case scenario, we might not even make it all together."
"That's good enough for me," Ulmer replied with an ugly grin.
"You assume you would be one of the lucky few who would survive. One in three men, and that is the best case scenario. Are you ready to bet your life on those odds, Ulmer?"
Ulmer frowned, and his reply was clear. So Qhorin continued, knowing all eyes were on him.
"I say we go to the Frostfangs and the castle perched there."
"The same strange magical castle you warned us away from?" the Lord Commander asked with a furrowed brow, and Qhorin nodded in agreement, although the worry on his face was plain to see. That he was more worried about the castle than the wights and others was an unappealing thought.
"It is closer, and it is also big enough to house the eighty of us or so that remain. Although I estimate only about seventy would live to see its walls, considering the... inhabitants and the strength of it, it would hold. And if we are lucky and are able to cut a deal, it would serve us better than Craster's keep."
Jon kept quiet as the rest of the men murmured as they thought Qhorin's words over. It was not the best solution, but Jon could already tell they would agree to it because it was the only one they had.