Chapter 183: Not the Elder [Bonus]

The pressure faded an hour after sunset.

It did not stop all at once. It thinned, slowly, the way cold fog thins when the sun comes out. Men who had been on their knees all afternoon stood up. They looked at each other. Some of them laughed, shakily, the way men laugh when they realize they are still alive.

The horde however, did not calm down.

It was still throwing itself against the Wall. It was still climbing over its own dead. But the madness in it had cooled a little, like a fire that had been blazing and was now only burning.

Encrid found Rael on the ninth mile.

He was sitting against the parapet with the borrowed sword across his knees and his bandaged hand held against his chest. Ilse was sitting beside him. She had a long cut down one side of her face that had not been stitched yet.

Hask stood a few paces away, leaning on his glaive, watching the killing ground.

Rael looked up as Encrid came along the walk. He did not say anything. He only moved over a little, and Encrid sat down beside him.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

"You were close to it," Encrid said finally.

Rael knew what he meant.

"Close enough to put my sword in its eye."

"The pressure today. Was that the Elder?"

Rael was quiet for a long time.

Then he shook his head.

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"I’m sure." Rael looked north, into the dark. "When I was standing beside the Elder, I could feel it. It was heavy. Huge. Like standing next to a mountain. But it was slow. It was old. Even when it woke up, it felt like something that wanted to go back to sleep."

He paused.

"This wasn’t slow."

"What was it?"

Rael thought about it. He was not a man who used words carelessly. Encrid watched him search for the right one.

"Awake," Rael said at last. "It was wide awake. And it was looking at us."

"Looking how?"

"Like we’d insulted it."

Encrid felt soething cold settle in his stomach.

"The Roamers," he said. "Did you see how they moved today?"

"They were mad."

"They weren’t mad," Encrid said. "They were being driven. The way you drive a horse that’s disobeyed you." He looked at the killing ground. "Something wants the Wall to fall.."

Ilse had been listening. Now she leaned forward.

"Something stronger than the Elder?" she said.

Rael did not answer her.

He did not need to.

Hask turned around from the parapet. He had not said a word since Encrid arrived.

"In the Far-Watch," he said slowly, "the old scouts used to say there were places in the deep forest where the Roamers went quiet. Where they stopped fighting each other and just stood there, facing the same way. Like men in a temple."

"Did you ever see one?" Encrid asked.

"No." Hask looked north. "The men who said they had never went back."

Nobody said anything after that.

Encrid stood up. His legs were stiff from the cold stone. He looked down at Rael, at the bandaged hand and the borrowed sword and the bloodstained ribs.

"Go to the Healers’ Hall," he said.

"Tomorrow."

"Rael."

"Tomorrow," Rael said again, and did not move.

✧ ✧ ✧

Encrid walked back to the Watcher’s Office alone.

He did not go inside. He stood in the dark outside the door, looking north over the rooftops toward the Wall, and he let himself think about the thing he had been trying very hard not to think about all afternoon.

The Last Age of Radiance.

Encrid had read every Chapter of that novel.

The Wall had fallen before the story began. That was all the novel had ever said about it directly. A single paragraph of history, mentioned in passing.

But the Wall’s fall had been connected to something else.

The Sin of Pride.

Encrid remembered the character. Of course he remembered. The Sin of Pride had been one of the most terrifying things in the entire novel. The strongest of the Seven Sins. A pale, man-shaped figure that bent the light around it. It had fought the Sword Saint to a draw in the twelfth volume.

The novel had never explained where the Sin of Pride came from.

It had only said that its story began where the Wall’s ended.

Encrid had known that for a year and a half. He had assumed the Sin of Pride would come after the Wall fell, in some later Chapter of history that he would not need to worry about if the Wall held.

He had never once imagined it might be the reason the horde came to the Wall in the first place.

He thought about the Kalaeris.

In the Novel, whenever they referred to this incident - they mentioned something they called an Ancient.

An Ancient!

Encrid had assumed it was a figure of speech.

Now he stood outside his office in the cold and thought about a pressure so vast that it had brought the strongest commanders on the Wall to their knees. A pressure that had come from somewhere in the forest, from something that was not the Elder.

Something wide awake.

Something proud.

He thought about the windows he had opened that afternoon. Dozens of them. Every Roamer he had looked at had said the same thing.

Compelled & Enraged. Source out of range.

Something was giving the horde its orders. It had been giving them since before the bloodlust, perhaps since the horde first gathered in the basin. Today, it had simply stopped being patient.

He did not say the name out loud. He did not write it down.

But he thought it.

And he did not sleep that night.

✧ ✧ ✧

The horn came just before dawn.

Not from the north. From the south.

From the Mouth.

Encrid was still standing outside the Watcher’s Office when he heard it. He turned. Everyone on the inner road turned. Porters stopped with their sacks on their shoulders. Soldiers coming off the parapets stopped on the stairs.

It was not the Mouth’s own horn.

It was deeper. Brassier. It sounded three times, long and steady, and the echoes rolled up the inside of the Wall like thunder.

Encrid knew that horn.

He had heard it on the day he left the Gannon estate, when the knights of his father’s house had formed up in the courtyard to see him off.

It was the horn of the White Griffin.

Encrid started running.

✦ ✦ ✦

Bonus Chapter for 100 Powerstones~