Chapter 138: Hell Comes South (1)

It took two whole days for the horde to cross the ground between the Great Green Forest and the Wall.

In the years that followed, when survivors spoke about the calamity, those two days would be remembered as nothing but Hell.

Facing ten thousand Roamers was one thing. The men of the Wall knew that the horde was coming, and the council had spent six months preparing for it. They had filled the granaries, repaired weapons, moved supplies into the towers, dug trenches, placed stakes, cleared the killing ground, and worked until their bodies could barely keep up with the demands placed upon them.

They had expected the fighting.

What they had not expected was the waiting.

There was something deeply unsettling about standing on the Wall and watching the enemy slowly come toward you, knowing that there was nothing left to do except wait for it to arrive.

For a while, some of the men still tried to convince themselves that what they were seeing was only bad weather.

From the highest towers, the first movement along the northern edge of the forest had looked like a dark line passing through the trees. The tops of the trees were bending, and from a great distance it was possible to mistake the movement for a powerful wind blowing through the forest.

A storm, perhaps.

A few men even said so.

After all, a storm could flatten trees, darken the sky, and make the entire forest move at once. More importantly, a storm eventually passed.

That explanation became harder to maintain as the hours went by.

By the first evening, the line had spread across miles of forest.

By the second morning, the men could see what was actually happening.

The trees were disappearing.

The old trees that had stood in the Great Green Forest for decades, some of them perhaps for centuries, were being crushed beneath the advancing mass. The Roamers did not move around the larger trunks or slow down when the forest became too dense. They simply forced their way through it, snapping branches, breaking trunks, and trampling everything beneath their feet.

From the Wall, the horde looked less like an army and more like an ocean.

Grey, black, brown, and red bodies moved together beneath the trees, pouring south through every opening and breaking through every obstacle that stood in their way. There was no visible formation, no recognizable command structure, and no sign that the creatures were even aware of one another, yet the entire mass continued in the same direction with a terrifying consistency.

South.

Toward the Wall.

Towards where they stood.

For most of that first day, the sky above the Wall was filled with birds.

They came from the north in enormous numbers, crossing over the parapets in dark sheets before disappearing toward the lands beyond the Wall. Some were familiar forest birds. Others were strange creatures that the soldiers had never seen before, driven from their homes by something far worse than the men below the Wall could imagine.

Even the birds seemed desperate to escape.

By the afternoon, there were fewer of them.

By evening, almost none remained.

Then the sound began.

At first, it was so faint that the men could mistake it for the wind.

It was a low, flat noise that seemed to come from the ground itself, without any single source that could be identified. There was no great roar from the horde and no unified cry from thousands of beasts. The Roamers were not charging into battle with the fury of soldiers.

They were simply moving.

The sound came from thousands of bodies breathing at once, from claws and feet striking the earth, from animals pushing through one another, from branches snapping beneath their weight, and from entire sections of forest being crushed as the horde passed through.

As the horde drew closer, the sound became louder.

Men stopped talking whenever it reached them.

Some watched the northern horizon for hours without saying a word, while others tried to occupy themselves with pointless tasks simply because standing still and listening was worse.

A few veterans told the younger soldiers that they would get used to the noise.

They were wrong.

The men would eventually discover that the sound would not stop for the next nineteen days.

✧ ✧ ✧

Encrid pulled the work gangs back when the horde was only half a day from the Wall.

The defenses were not finished.

The third trench line had reached twenty-two miles instead of the planned thirty, while four sections of the stake funnels had only been measured and marked with string and had never been dug. At the eighteenth mile, another work gang was still three days away from completing the diversion channel that was supposed to redirect water and make part of the northern ground difficult for the Roamers to cross.

There were unfinished sections everywhere.

The men had known that they would not complete everything.

They had simply hoped they would have another day.

Perhaps two.

Instead, a single command came from the Watcher’s office.

"Come in. Leave everything."

That was all.

There was no explanation attached to it.

Nine hundred men began returning across the killing grounds in the middle of the afternoon, leaving behind the work because there was no longer enough time to collect their tools. Shovels remained buried in the earth, hammers lay beside unfinished trenches, and bundles of stakes that had already been carried out of the Wall were abandoned beneath makeshift coverings.

Some of the men tried to take their tools with them.

Their officers ordered them to leave them behind.

There was no time.

The horde was coming.

From the parapet, the unfinished work could still be seen clearly. The shovels stood upright in the ground like thin markers scattered across the northern fields, and one of them had a strip of cloth tied around its handle.

Nobody knew who had tied it there.

Perhaps the owner had done it so he could recognize his own shovel when he returned.

Perhaps he had simply wanted to leave some small mark behind.

Either way, it was a sign that someone had still believed he would have the chance to come back.

At least someone had still had hope.

✦ ✦ ✦