The cold beyond the Wall did not merely chill the flesh; it hunted the soul. It was a predatory, ancient thing that gnawed at the edges of a man's sanity before it finally froze the blood in his veins.
Samwell Tarly collapsed into the snow, his lungs burning as if he had swallowed a fistful of crushed glass. The heavy black wool of his Night's Watch cloak was caked in ice, stiff and useless against the biting gales. Around him, the Haunted Forest was a chaotic blur of panicked shadows. Men were screaming, their voices abruptly choked off by the horrific, wet sounds of tearing flesh and snapping bone.
The Fist of the First Men had fallen. The dead had come in the night, a tide of rotting limbs, rusted iron, and glowing, star-cold blue eyes.
Sam scrambled backward, his gloved hands slipping on the slick, frozen roots of a massive weirwood tree. A shadow loomed over him. It was a brother of the Watch—or at least, it had been. Now, the man's throat was a ruined crater of frozen blood, and his eyes burned with that terrible, unnatural sapphire light. The wight raised a jagged, rusted axe, preparing to bring it down on Sam's whimpering face.
Sam squeezed his eyes shut. He waited for the dark.
Instead, the sky tore open.
It wasn't a crack of thunder. It was a sound that defied the very laws of nature in Westeros—a horrific, shrieking metallic roar that vibrated through the bedrock of the earth. It sounded as though the firmament itself was being ripped apart by colossal claws of iron.
The wight paused, its head snapping upward. Even the mindless dead were given pause by the wrath of the heavens.
High above the canopy of the ancient pines, the storm clouds violently parted, revealing a swirling vortex of aggressive, crackling purple energy. From the heart of this unnatural tear, three meteors of searing, blinding white fire plummeted toward the earth. They were moving too fast, too deliberately, burning with an intensity that immediately turned the falling snow into hissing steam.
THOOOOOM.
The impact was cataclysmic.
The ground bucked like a wounded beast. A shockwave of superheated air and displaced snow blasted outward in a perfect ring, snapping century-old pines like dry twigs and throwing dozens of wights into the air like discarded ragdolls. The wight standing over Sam was violently disintegrated, its upper half sheared away by a flying shard of superheated rock, while Sam himself was thrown backward into a snowbank, temporarily deafened.
For a long moment, the clearing was dead silent, save for the hissing of melting ice and the crackle of burning timber. A massive crater, forty yards wide, now scarred the center of the Haunted Forest. Thick, churning clouds of white steam obscured whatever had fallen from the sky.
Slowly, the surviving wights began to gather at the edge of the crater. From the shadows of the treeline, a figure emerged, riding a dead, skeletal horse. It was a White Walker, its flesh the color of pale milk, its armor resembling shattered glass. It drew a blade of pure, unnatural ice, staring into the steaming pit with a cold, calculating malice.
Inside the crater, beneath layers of scorched earth and melting permafrost, Arthur Sterling groaned.
His head pounded with a localized migraine that felt as though a railroad spike had been driven between his temples. He blinked, his vision swimming with digital overlays, glowing amber runes, and scrolling data cascades. He wasn't in his laboratory in London. He wasn't sitting in front of his quantum-displacement array.
He was suspended in a neuro-kinetic pilot chair, surrounded by the humming, pulsing thrum of a localized zero-point energy core.
"Temporal displacement complete. Spatial coordinates... unknown. Atmospheric composition: 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, localized temperature -24 degrees Celsius. Warning: Hostile biological anomalies detected in immediate perimeter."
The voice echoing in Arthur's mind was deep, resonant, and thrummed with ancient, metallic authority. It was the voice of Vanguard.
Arthur unbuckled the primary restraint harness, rubbing his eyes. "Vanguard," he rasped, his throat bone-dry. "Report. Did the other two make it through the rift?"
"Affirmative, Arthur. Aegis and Paladin are online. Core temperatures stabilizing. We have breached an uncharted dimensional fold. The indigenous entities surrounding us possess no heat signatures and register as necrotic tissue animated by unknown thermic-negative energy fields."
Arthur brought up the external optic feeds. Holographic screens flickered to life around his command chair. Through the swirling steam, he saw them. Hundreds of rotting corpses, armed with primitive weaponry, staring down into the crater. And behind them, a pale demon on a dead horse, wielding a sword of ice.
A chilling realization washed over Arthur. The clothing, the environment, the ice demons. He was a man of science, but he was also a man of culture. He knew exactly what he was looking at.
"It's not possible," Arthur whispered, his heart hammering against his ribs. "We jumped into a fictional construct? Game of Thrones... the mutiny at the Fist... this is Season 3."
"Clarification required, Arthur," Vanguard rumbled. "Are these entities hostile?"
Arthur watched as the White Walker raised its ice blade and let out a sound like cracking glaciers. In response, the horde of wights shrieked and began to pour over the lip of the crater, a waterfall of decaying flesh rushing to consume whatever lay at the bottom.
"Extremely," Arthur said, his voice hardening as the adrenaline finally kicked in. He gripped the haptic control spheres on his armrests. The neural link snapped tight, a rush of power surging from the machine into his mind. He could feel the cold steel of the colossal chassis as if it were his own skin. He could feel the plasma rushing through the power conduits like blood in his veins.
"Vanguard. Aegis. Paladin. Assume Knight-King configurations. Purge the immediate area."
"Command accepted. Transforming."
To the wildlings, the Night's Watch, and the White Walkers, the world suddenly shifted on its axis.
From the billowing steam of the crater, a sound erupted that Westeros had never heard. It was the heavy, rhythmic grinding of impossibly massive gears, the sharp hiss of hydraulic pressure releasing, and the booming clatter of alien alloys shifting and locking into place.
Three towering silhouettes stood up from the wreckage.
When the wind finally swept the steam away, Samwell Tarly, peering over the edge of his snowbank, felt his mind fracture in terror and awe.
Standing in the center of the devastated forest were three gods of iron and light. They were easily thirty feet tall, humanoid in shape but constructed of gleaming, impossibly complex metal. Their armor was styled in a way that vaguely resembled the plate mail of Andal knights, but infinitely more advanced, sleek, and lethal.
The center machine—Vanguard—was plated in gleaming silver and deep cobalt. A metallic crest shaped like a king's crown adorned its helm, and its optics burned with a fierce, piercing blue light. A segmented cloak of overlapping metal scales draped over its broad shoulders, clinking softly as it moved.
To Vanguard's left stood Aegis, painted in brutal gunmetal and blood-crimson. Aegis was broader, a walking fortress, wielding a shield on its left arm that seemed large enough to cover a keep's main gate. To the right was Paladin, obsidian-black with accents of regal gold, sleek and lithe, its optics glowing a dangerous, burning amber.
The charging wights didn't care about the majesty of the machines. They swarmed Vanguard's massive, greaved legs, hacking at the alien alloy with rusted iron swords. The weapons sparked and shattered against the Cybertronian metal without leaving a single scratch.
Inside the cockpit, Arthur felt the slight vibration of the impacts. It was like gnats hitting a windshield. "Eliminate them," he commanded.
Vanguard reached over its shoulder. The metallic grating sound of a weapon being drawn echoed through the forest. In its massive, articulated hand, the machine held a broadsword proportional to its size—nearly twenty feet of dark metal.
Suddenly, the edge of the blade ignited. A corona of superheated, blinding white plasma roared to life along the length of the sword, emitting a hum that made the ground vibrate.
Vanguard swung the thermal broadsword in a wide, horizontal arc.
The blade didn't just cut through the horde of wights; it vaporized them. A shockwave of searing heat followed the swing, instantly turning thirty rotting corpses into drifting ash and superheated steam. The snow beneath the strike melted instantly, turning into boiling mud.
Aegis stepped forward, raising its massive left arm. The center of its tower shield irised open, revealing a glowing, crimson plasma battery. THUMP-THUMP-THUMP. Three spheres of compressed plasma shot into the densest concentration of the undead. The resulting explosions were deafening, sending plumes of blue fire and shattered bones a hundred feet into the night sky. The concussive force knocked the remaining wights off their feet.
Paladin did not use a blade or a cannon. The black-and-gold Knight-King lunged forward with terrifying, predatory speed, completely ignoring its massive weight. It grabbed a charging wight in each hand, crushing them into paste with a sickening crunch of hydraulics, before spinning and delivering a devastating backhand that shattered a dozen frozen corpses like glass dolls.
The White Walker, observing from the treeline, remained expressionless, but its mount took a nervous step back. The ice demon raised its hands, attempting to channel the deep, freezing magic of the lands of always winter to extinguish the heat radiating from the metallic titans. A wave of localized blizzard, cold enough to shatter steel, swept toward Vanguard.
Inside the cockpit, warning runes flashed. "External temperature dropping at an anomalous rate. Magic-equivalent energy field detected," Vanguard reported.
"Divert auxiliary power to thermal shielding," Arthur commanded, his eyes locked onto the pale rider. "And Vanguard? Show him what real power is."
Vanguard's optic visor flared brightly. The colossal machine did not flinch as the unnatural blizzard washed over it; the frost simply hissed and turned to vapor against its energized plating. Vanguard raised its plasma-wreathed broadsword and pointed the tip directly at the White Walker.
From the center of Vanguard's chest plate, a secondary array opened. A beam of concentrated, blinding blue energy lanced across the clearing, moving at the speed of light.
It struck the White Walker dead center. There was no struggle, no resistance. The ice demon and its undead horse were instantly erased from existence, leaving nothing but a scorch mark on the snow and a dissipating cloud of superheated mist.
With their master destroyed, the remaining wights seemed to lose their coordination. They wandered aimlessly for a few seconds before Aegis and Paladin mercilessly swept through the clearing, crushing, burning, and eradicating every last trace of the undead presence within a two-hundred-yard radius.
In less than three minutes, the massacre of the Night's Watch had been halted, replaced by the overwhelming, brutal efficiency of Cybertronian warfare.
The three massive Knight-Kings stood in the center of the clearing, the fires from their weapons casting long, terrifying shadows against the remaining trees. The air smelled of ozone, melting ice, and charred bone.
Arthur exhaled a long, shaky breath, releasing his grip on the haptic spheres. He looked at the monitors. Scattered around the edge of the blast radius were a dozen surviving members of the Night's Watch. They were on their knees, staring up at the giant metal kings in absolute, paralyzed shock. Samwell Tarly was weeping silently, his hands clasped together as if in prayer to the old gods and the new.
Arthur knew he couldn't stay hidden in the cockpit. If he was stuck in this brutal, primitive world of ice and fire, he needed to establish a foothold. He needed to be a god, or at least play the part of one, until he figured out how to get home.
"Vanguard, open the chest carapace. Extend the platform."
"Arthur, the external temperature is hostile to your biological frame."
"I know. Just do it." Arthur grabbed a heavy, insulated tactical coat from the emergency locker behind his seat and threw it over his shoulders.
Outside, the Night's Watch brethren flinched as Vanguard's chest plates hissed and unsealed. A ramp of glowing metal extended outward, suspended thirty feet in the air.
Arthur Sterling stepped out onto the platform. The cold hit him like a physical blow, stealing his breath, but he forced himself to stand tall. He looked down at the shivering men in black.
He had three invincible war machines, the knowledge of the future of this world, and a galaxy of advanced technology at his fingertips. The game of thrones was about to change forever.
"Men of the Night's Watch," Arthur's voice boomed across the clearing, amplified by Vanguard's external acoustic casters, echoing like the voice of a thunder god. "You can stop running now. The North belongs to me."