Chapter 224

The Vale. Gulltown. 301 AC.

Axel Arryn.

“Do you believe in myths, Lord Arryn?” young Jon Snow asked, an interesting question indeed.

However absurd it might have sounded, I wasn’t in any hurry to laugh it off. Myths… ancient folk tales passed down to convey how people understood the origin of the world, the workings of nature, gods and heroes. More often than not, myths explained the origins of everything that existed and, through their stories, offered people guidance and taught them morality. Most peoples thought of their myths as something distant and unreal. Even in Númenor, the most advanced realm in all of Arda, that same tendency held true. The Númenóreans knew for a fact about the “higher powers” and the making of the world, but for ordinary folk, everything tied to the War of Wrath carried more the flavor of legend than of grim reality.

The human mind simply couldn’t grasp a scale like that. The Maiar had fought shoulder to shoulder with mortals, whole stretches of the continent had been swallowed by the sea under the sheer weight of those battles, the fighting had been so vast and so merciless that the earth itself split open, hills were trampled flat into the ground, and plains rose up where none had been before. Hoards of orcs, a hundred dragons, the largest of which blotted out the sun itself, a dozen of Balrogs in full armor. More died in a single second of that war than had died in the whole of this civil war combined.

Even I, a King of Arathal south of Umbar, understood all of it to be true, yet some part of me never fully believed it. My own skepticism had its roots in the deeds of my ancestors: while one man was exalted for some invented feat, another who had actually accomplished something close to a miracle was slowly forgotten. Time rarely left the past anything but abstraction. I had always taken the chronicles of the War of Wrath for gross exaggeration. It turned out to be quite the opposite. Sauron himself, who had lived through those events firsthand, had told me everything that truly happened in those terrible times.

“I consider them an interpretation of real events.”

And where in my past life I had known for certain that gods existed, I couldn’t give so clear an answer about this world. There were simply too many religions, each with its own particular features, and yet each of them also carried elements of the very same underlying pattern. Just as the Grey King by the will of the Drowned God, had crossed the sea and found a new land, so too had King Hugor of the hill been given a divine vision set in motion the Andal invasion. Gelithocs, the fire god of the Valyrians, had taught his sons how to make fire to drive back the darkness of night, and R’hllor had given men the fire light to stand against the Long Night. That last pattern in particular could be traced almost everywhere. There were a great many such coincidences, and the sheer distances separating the various points where these religions had first taken root ruled out any possibility of one borrowing its stories from another.

“Consider it a myth come to life, one bent on wiping out everything living in this world.” I tried to say something, but the bastard raised a hand to stop me. “I understand how that sounds, which is why I ask you to come with me. I’ve brought proof.”

That last part caught my interest. I wasn’t worried about my safety. The Starks were scrupulous enough about matters of honor as it was, and beyond that I had plenty of guards of my own, and I was no pushover myself either. The bastard asked for a secure room, and without any fuss he was given a rather spacious one, formerly used as a holding cell. While my guard spread out along the perimeter, four northerners hauled in an enormous crate and set to work briskly cracking the locks, linking chains together as they went. An unpleasant sense of foreboding pricked at me; there was something vile and repellent about that chest. Snow stepped into the center of the room and announced:

“The sight might be unpleasant.” Before any of us could brace ourselves, he tipped the crate over.

“SHRIIIEEEK!!!” With a hideous shriek, a blue eyed thing lunged straight for me.

My shock did nothing to slow my reflexes. There was no time to draw my sword, so I reached instead for a small dagger of Morgul steel. Runes lit up along the black blade, and the edge itself was wreathed in a faint greenish haze. One of the first rules of necromancy: learn to destroy what you plan to raise. I could turn entire cities into graveyards and lay whole necropolises back to rest. A single walking corpse held no terror for me.

By the time the dead thing had covered half the distance between us, the northerners finally came to their senses and hauled the creature back. Within moments they had it pinned down with chains from several directions, and now the thing could do nothing but shriek and flail its arms uselessly. Everyone present was a veteran of many campaigns, but none of them had ever seen anything like this. Panic spread quickly through the room, though it settled again within a couple of minutes.

“We call it a wight, the backbone of the White Walkers’ army,” Snow said, once the men had calmed down enough, launching into his impromptu lecture. “This one used to be a brother of the Night’s Watch, before the Others raised him as a wight. My lords, if we do not unite, this thing will threaten the entire world.”

It was startling to see such a thing with my own eyes, but reason reasserted itself soon enough.

“How many of them are beyond the Wall in total?” I wanted a clearer sense of the scale of the problem.

“Hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. There are dead animals in their ranks too, birds, spiders.” Something about those numbers didn’t add up to me.

“Spiders?!” Someone clearly hadn’t understood the bastard’s explanation.

“Ice spiders,” Snow added, and that cleared things up at once. Who hadn’t been frightened as a child by tales of giant flesh eating spiders?

“Can they wield weapons?”

“Um… yes, but only the ones that haven’t decayed too far. I’m afraid I don’t know much more than that.”

“Intelligence?” Realizing my question had been too vague, I decided to clarify. “Can they make decisions on their own, or do they need the Others to direct them?”

“Isn’t the desire to kill itself a sign of intelligence?” That told me exactly what to expect from men who understood nothing at all about necromancy.

“…It will take me a month to gather my vassals here to see this for themselves, but I’m already prepared to offer the North my full support. Let’s continue this in my study.”