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Chapter 192 - Chapter 192: The Fight Begins

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The north wind howled with a jagged, freezing edge. Dolorous Edd stood upon the high battlements of Castle Black, adjusting his grip on a heavy tripod-mounted spyglass. Through the lens, the Haunted Forest was a dark, brooding mass of black pines under a sky that had turned the color of bruised iron. A monstrous, swirling vortex of ice and snow, the storm of the Great Other, pierced the heavens like a spear, dividing the sky into two distinct halves.

To the south, the world was bathed in a pale, cold sunlight. To the north, the darkness was absolute, swallowing the stars and the moon.

Edd wiped a layer of frost from his eyelashes, squinting. He wasn't a man who believed in miracles, but what he saw next made his blood turn to ice. The line of darkness was moving. It crept forward, swallowing the white snow of the plains, and from its depths, thousands of grey, blue-eyed shadows began to crawl.

They were no longer lurking in the trees. The army of the dead was marching.

"Ring the bells!" Edd shrieked, shoving the young recruit beside him toward the bronze bell-rope. "Blow the horn! Three times! Blow it, you idiot, or we're all dead before the sun sets!"

Ooooh—Ooooh—Ooooh!

The three long, terrifying blasts of the horn, the signal for the Others echoed off the ice, sending a wave of panic through the courtyard below. Edd ran for the iron cage lift, desperately throwing himself inside as the winch-men frantically worked the gears to bring him down.

The iron cage swayed violently in the freezing gale. Edd gripped the bars, his eyes fixed on the seven-hundred-foot-tall Wall. To reach the castle, the dead would first have to climb this sheer cliff of ice. The Watch had the height, the oil, and the wildfire. They could hold.

Then, the world went silent.

It was a suffocating, heavy silence, followed by an ancient, shivering hum that resonated in the very marrow of his bones. The Horn of Winter had been blown.

BOOM.

The impact was a physical force. The Wall, standing immovable for eight thousand years groaned. A deep, thunderous crack echoed from the foundations, and before Edd's terrified eyes, a massive, jagged spiderweb of fractures spread from the bottom to the top of the ice.

The iron cage lift shuddered, its chains snapping with a violent ping. The cage free-fell the last ten feet, slamming into the snow with a force that knocked the wind from Edd's lungs. He scrambled out of the bent iron door, his knees shaking as the ground beneath him began to shake.

CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

Edd looked back. A section of the Wall, nearly six hundred yards long collapsed with a roar that sounded like the sky falling. A colossal cloud of white mist and ice shards shot into the heavens, swallowing the sunlight.

From the ruins of the ice, a pair of pale blue eyes emerged. Then a hundred. Then ten thousand. They were wights, their limbs covered in frost, their black hands tipped with jagged ice crystals. They marched through the gap, step by silent step, toward Castle Black.

Edd drew his sword, striking a flint against the steel. The blade erupted into green, hissing flames—the new wildfire-laced oil taught by the Alchemists. "To the breach!" he screamed, his voice lost in the wind.

"FORM THE SPEAR-WALL!"

At the mouth of the massive gap, Prince Oberyn Martell stood at the head of five thousand Dornish spearmen. They had formed a deep, crescent-shaped hedgehog formation, their dragonglass-tipped spears forming a pocket of black spikes.

"FIRE!"

A rain of black arrows, tipped with obsidian, hissed through the mist. They found their targets, and the first wave of wights simply dissolved into ash and bone. The Dornishmen let out a ragged cheer.

But the cheer died in their throats.

Out of the snow-smoke lumbered a dozen frost mammoths. Their eyes burned with the same pale blue fire, and their decaying hides were reinforced with a thick armor of ice. They charged, their massive tusks shattering the first layer of the spear-wall.

"HOLD!" Oberyn roared, thrusting his own spear forward. The dragonglass tip bit deep into a wight's chest, turning the creature to dust, but the momentum of the mammoths was too great. The Dornish line began to leak blood.

Men who fell to the ice-shards of the wights stood up again within seconds, their eyes now burning blue as they turned to strangle their own comrades. The living were being devoured by their own dead.

BARRR-RUM!

The crowned stag and the flaming heart banners of Stannis's vanguard arrived at the breach, their heavy cavalry slamming into the flank of the wights.

High above, a shadow fell over the field. Three roars - one black, one green, one silver shattered the sky. Drogon, Viserion, and Rhaegal dove through the clouds.

[Active Skill: Golden Fireburst cast.]

Viserion, willed by Eddard's mind, spewed a lake of golden flame across the center of the breach. The heat was instantaneous, melting the ice and turning the charging wights into pillars of ash. Rhaegal's green fire followed, creating a wall of heat that halted the advance of the dead.

From the rear, the Alchemists' new wildfire-tar catapults began to sing. Hundreds of burning barrels arced over the Wall, exploding in a green, sticky fire that burned stubbornly even in the snow.

Eddard, riding Viserion, soared high above the field. He looked north.

The Haunted Forest was a sea of blue eyes. There were no longer patches of white snow; the ground was entirely black with the host of the dead. Giants, wight-bears, undead horses, and endless throngs of wildlings stretched as far as his telescope could reach.

How do we kill a million? Eddard thought, a cold dread settling in his gut.

He gritted his teeth and willed Viserion north, straight into the dark, howling storm of the Great Other. The silver dragon roared in protest, the magical cold of the storm biting into his scales, causing his wings to stiffen.

[Active Skill: Magic Armor cast.][Soul Power Cost: 100 SP.]

A shimmering, transparent force field enveloped Viserion, blocking the freezing wind and the jagged snowflakes. The dragon's confidence returned, and he beat his wings harder, driving deeper into the darkness.

But as they cleared the first line of pines, the sky itself began to move.

A massive, white cloud of birds, undead eagles, crows, and hawks, their eyes burning with the pale blue fire of the cold god rose from the canopy of the Haunted Forest, swarming Viserion like a storm of feathered knives.

[System Notification: The Battle of the Black Gate: Active.] 

Plz Drop Some Power Stones.

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