The cold didn't merely settle in the North; it preyed, dug deep, and made bones creak. The cold turned their breath into shards of glass, turned their armor into cracked shells. The deeper Tywin and Kevan marched into the frozen wasteland towards the Wall, the more intense the cold grew. Soon, no man could warm himself. Men began to stagger, their feet turning blue. They began to groan. The more veteran the soldier, the more likely he would fall and die from the cold.
Tywin knew when it would start, the instant morale would break. He didn't speak; he simply thought, and with the power of the System he drew forth the Molybdenum within his augmented body. Tywin didn't shift his form where they could see; he simply used his Molybdenum to generate heat. The heat radiated off Tywin like a shimmering haze and washed over the army. Men stopped shivering, looked about them in bewilderment, and felt a gentle heat, a welcome heat. They looked at each other in surprise, and then at Tywin, who rode on Strider without a care, without a smile, as if nothing were wrong. He said nothing at all.
When at last the colossal wall of ice loomed before him, Tywin found it just as memories from another life predicted: a great white barrier, a huge wall of ice. There was no welcome committee so much as a desperate assemblage of the Wall's inhabitants; Lord Commander Qorgyle and his bodyguards, Maester Aemon, Ser Wynton Stout, and the slow, cautious Denys Mallister, standing there looking at the Lannister host, at the odd aura of warmth that seemed to hover about the Lannister.
"Lord Lannister," said Qorgyle, the chill in the winter wind had killed his throat, "you bring your army to the edge of the world, where we cannot feed the handful of men we have. Tell me, what brings you this far north?"
Tywin took off of Stider. He did not offer a hand. He looked up at the Wall, and then at the men before him. "For eight hundred years, the Night's Watch have been holding the line against wildlings and their own stories of old gods and monsters," said Tywin. "You have forgotten what you were guarding us against."
Maester Aemon was silent. "And yet you, my lord, appear to know," he said. "What is it you see that we do not?"
"The Long Night is coming," Tywin said, turning his gaze south toward the horizon where he could see a darkness in the sky that could not be of this earth, a winter that had not ended, and an enemy that would never cease to fight. "I have come to end the war before it has even begun."
The lords exchanged glances of skepticism, though Tywin pointed towards the crates of dragonglass being carried behind him. They looked at the black, glittering spears, silent for the moment. Tywin had no need for their opinions as he began to inspect the walls, mentally calculating the trajectories of a war that hadn't yet begun, but which he had already decided to win.
"I hope that the notion of going on the offense appeals to you," Tywin said, his tone sharp as a knife through the icy air, and then without waiting to see if he'd impressed his point he said, "There's a reason I ordered black shipments. The Night's Watch is here to protect the people. But you've all been here waiting for the Night to arrive rather than the going to the Night."
Lord Commander Qorgyle's eyes flicked back and forth between the strangely warming presence of Lord Lannister and the black. "Go past the Wall? That's suicidal, my Lord Lannister. Even if the Night King exists, wildlings would kill us."
"The wildlings are an annoyance, the dead are an apocalypse," Tywin said, feeling the System hum through his skin like a presence. He could have convinced himself he was the only human in existence. "The Night's Watch has taken an oath, which you recite every day, but never keep. You can sit here, freeze the tips of your toes off, or come with me and ensure there is something worth protecting."
It was an easy thing, the way he said it. He sounded to the Watch men like a man who'd finished a book and decided he didn't care for it. Some of the bodyguards glanced at the horizon, wondering at the thought of a clean death, a good cause for a purpose. They were tired, of course, of starving to death in their watchtowers.
Qorgyle glanced at Maester Aemon, then nodded at Tywin with the sound of a great, crumbling ice floe. A week it took to get the whole organization in order. The men of the Watch were to be organized, and the dragonglass to be doled out like a university registrar with final exam results.
The handful of Northerners and Starks had kept their peace, knowing well enough the way cold and the dead could be. Their blades were sharpened, they fell in behind the golden lion without a word being spoken.
The climb to the top had been a vertical gauntlet of rattling chains and roaring gale, yet the march past the Wall proved far more harrowing for the cold. They walked amid a landscape where the horizon was a blur of bruised purples and oppressive whites, the air tasting of old frost and ancient stone. For the first three days, the only sounds were the rhythmic thud of boots and the occasional, guttural command of the Lannister officers.
The next, a whistle was heard and the Wildlings emerged like ghosts woven from grey wool and animal hide, circling the column with the predatory patience of wolves. Their leader, a scarred woman with eyes the color of a winter sea, stepped forward, her obsidian axe raised. They had expected shivering Southerners huddled together for warmth, slow and clumsy; instead, the Lannisters rode on without even a shiver. Tywin was on Strider, his eyes blank and Molybdenum's heat pulsing through his body like a clockwork heart, while the men with him moved like warm water in the cold, the Free Folk was left thinking that it was the Lannisters and Starks who were masters over the cold weather.
It hadn't been a battle: it was a massacre. The Wildlings had attacked, but had found the Lannister lines unbroken. Spears made of dragonglass had punctured them cleanly, as though by design. Some Wildling jumped down from higher ground, shouting, but a Lannister sergeant had stood aside nonchalantly to let him fall upon his dragonglass pike, the dragonglass pointed in the other man's windpipe freezing into red ice before the blood had even stopped spurting. Tywin had watched the whole process as if correcting an exam paper of dubious quality.
They had been in the cold their whole lives; they didn't understand, in any case, that the golden lion had a heat to it that was as deadly as a weapon. You came to the lion for warmth, drawn to its heat only to end up in the reach of the pike. They were fighting against the wind, but Tywin Lannister was the storm.
When it was dark the Wildlings had melted away into the white night and the word had begun to spread through their numbers: Tywin Lannister. The Nightmare of Winter.
He made the sign for the column to march on, and he was in no way displeased. That battle was a joke, a minor brushfire of a skirmish. Let them be scared. It was fear that Tywin Lannister was skilled in wielding, and he had no lack of tools at his disposal.
The System hummed in his arms and neck with the thrill of being exactly where he wanted to be.
The quiet after the slaughter was heavier than the ice. For several days, the column tramped over snow-cracked rocks and desolate bone until it was just a constant clatter of armor with the deep wheezing of Strider to punctuate it. The wildings had withdrawn, not out of mercy, but out of a sudden, instinctive terror; they had felt the shift in the wind, a predatory chill that made even the Free Folk feel like prey.
The Lannister soldiers, protected from the cold by the artificial heat that Tywin gave off, advanced with a cocky sense of self-confidence; dragonglass-tipped spears stuck from their ranks. Then the cold changed into stillness. A whiteout began to swirl from nowhere and a thing glided out of it, thin and ghostly, made of translucent ice and old evil with frozen sapphire eyes that looked dead and cold.
The army froze together. The Starks gripped their pikes tighter, and the Night's Watchmen gasped, their breath hitching in their throats. For a moment, the suspicion that Tywin Lannister was merely a madman with a penchant for obsidian was eclipsed by the terrifying reality that he had been right all along.
The White Walker lifted its ice sword, a noise like ten thousand broken mirrors resounded throughout the valley. The White Walker advanced at supernatural speed, yet Tywin Lannister did not move nor react. The sergeant before him made a groan, thrusting his dragonglass spear against the White Walker, piercing it. The White Walker disintegrated, a thousand fragments flying and then vanishing in a sudden gust of ice.
"One," said the king, dry as dead paper.
He did not even look at the White Walker's dismembered form, his gaze instead shifting forward, where the sky was turning a pale blue color. "A scout. Not a very good one."
They walked another two days. The silence between the men was somehow louder than before, the warm around the King the only thing keeping them alive, keeping their chests pumping. When they reached the final pass of the Frostfangs, the silence broke. The ground began to hum beneath the king and his army, a deep thrumming that grew louder as the group moved further down the pass and entered the valley below. The valley was made of ice, filled by thousands of White Walkers. So these were the others: thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, the frozen and dead, the twisted and rotting, standing in an immense, orderly mass, all with their ice blades raised.
Tywin, Brandon, and their forces drew up a battle line at the top of the hill and looked at the endless army in front of them. Then doubt crept into all of their minds. Tywin sat on top of Strider, looking over the sea of corpses like an uninterested man grading a student's paper with low scores.
"They lack tactics," Tywin noted through the wind, "Only fear and numbers. No strategy, flanks or shield wall."
"My Lord, they are thousands, while we are hundreds," Ned said to Tywin.
"It is a simple variable. The numbers versus the quality." He turned his attention toward the System in his mind, a System that he only could see.
Then Tywin didn't call out an order to charge at them. Instead, he lifted his hand to the engineers with them, who then released the pressure on the massive ballistas they had carried all the way to the top of the hill with them, launching massive bolts of dragonglass tipped naphtha into the enemy army. The bolts pierced and exploded in their midst, sending fire throughout their ranks and melting the snow below them.
The army of the dead suddenly found itself being attacked by the enemy, its mindless coordination now broken by the sudden, violent introduction of fire.
"Now," Tywin ordered.
The Lannister soldiers charged forth with purposeful unity, clanking together in an overlapping shield wall. The Starks attacked with brutal force, driving their sharpened pikes into the joints of the stiff dead, as the Lannister infantrymen operated with machine-like efficiency. The soldiers carefully moved together and struck at precise moments. When the dead attacked, an additional Lannister soldier would appear to stab a dragonglass blade into the back of the dead.
Tywin rode atop Strider, his eyes blazing green. Tywin knew the entire battlefield perfectly, down to the smallest detail. He could clearly see exactly where each weapon would go and he knew that the White Walkers were walking forward, commanding the dead. The Molybdenum in his bloodstream began to glow, the heat inside him increasing exponentially.
Suddenly, a White Walker attacked from the rear. The White Walker, much taller and much more graceful than the dead, rushed toward a fleeing and terrified Night's Watchman, a sharp blade in his hand. Suddenly, the White Walker's feet suddenly erupted with Molybdenum. A spike of superhot, molten Molybdenum suddenly shot up from the icy soil, and the molten metal pierced into the White Walker's leg, instantly burning away the creature's icy skin. The White Walker screamed in agony, the screeching of melting glaciers. The sergeant didn't have to think at all to react as he ran up to the White Walker and stuck his dragonglass spear through the undead creature's chest. The White Walker burst apart into shards, the dead's control over the creature briefly disrupted.
"The flank is falling!" Brandon yelled. "It's breaking!" he shouted, covered in black blood. He was grinning with the same thrill of bloodshed he felt every day for fighting with a sharp blade.
"Hold the line," Tywin said, cutting through the noise. Tywin didn't look at the carnage; his super-senses were busy analyzing the situation. To the rear, somewhere in the midst of the army of the dead, was a source of intense dark and cold. He was their master of sorts, a conductor of sorts if you will.
His eyes narrowed and, without a second glance at the horrified Starks or the remaining members of the Night Watch, Tywin turned Strider into a gallop, the black destrier kicking his way through the wights. Tywin's focus narrowed and, while tearing away at the army, focused on his system. He focused on the Molybdenum and allowed it to become the brightest of white hot temperatures, and like a comet streaking across the heavens, he tore his way through the valley of wights, leaving fire in his path, literally melting the snow beneath his mount.
Stopping a mere 50 paces or so from where the Night King stood, Tywin dismounted as his eyes met those of his adversary. His skin a stark, dead moon-white and his eyes, dark and cold as a winter night, Tywin stood still. The Night King, however, did not and raised a hand. As the cold rushed forward, wrapping around him, Tywin realized he was being attacked not by the cold, but with the cold.
In his mind's eye, Tywin heard the words of the Night King, sounding like the cracking ice in the depths of the world. "You are strange. You smell of a different world, a different sun. You are unlike any being who has come before, and the spark that resides within your soul, you are not a King, but merely a wolf in sheep's clothing."
He remained still, a face as blank as any statue, but Tywin could feel the cold trying to get inside his bones, and then the System ignited, roaring to life like an all-consuming furnace, and he felt the chill recede.
"Observation is the first step in any successful campaign, "Tywin mentally responded, and his voice came through like the cool, sharp blade of a blade. "You've figured it out: I am the unknown in your equation."
"You will not stop at the Wall," the Night King said, his blue eyes sharpening, "and you will not be content with a kingdom of men. You will build an empire of logic and iron that will stifle the very soul of this world. You are a greater threat to the living than I could ever be, for you seek to perfect them into something devoid of feeling."
Tywin narrowed his eyes in the flickering firelight, and for a split second his irises flared emerald green. "That may be," Tywin said calmly, "but a world under my administration is a world that persists. Your victory is merely a silent graveyard. I prefer a functioning machine to a frozen wasteland."
The Night King leapt in and thrust out his sword, the icy edge whistling through the air with a speed that would have decapitated any other man. But Tywin turned just as swiftly, and with an elegant grace that belied the bulk of his arms, thrust a hand forward and projected a beam of light from his eyes. It was like an unerring spear of green energy that punched through the icy sword like an iron through butter. In the same instant, Tywin commanded the earth, and the molybdenum in the ground rose up in the form of molten slag that struck the Night King while still in mid-air and pinned him to a spire of ice.
He let out a scream, loud enough to shake the snow that surrounded him; his next move was to conjure a blizzard in an attempt to obscure Tywin from sight, but Tywin just walked straight towards him. He extended a hand to seize the Night King's neck. When he touched it, he released the heat that he could control, so hot that the storm that had started to fall dissipated into vapour before it could even begin to touch his clothes.
"Your mistake," said Tywin, in his calm and even voice, "was assuming that I am bound by this realm's logic." The System granted Tywin the power to fire a thermal blast, obliterating the Night King from the inside out. He was blown up, with the sonic boom and the shockwaves of golden and emerald light radiating outwards.
As the Night King disintegrated into thousands of useless pieces, he released the wights from his control, and, with one final scream, all the dead fell to the ground and the White Walkers melted away; they were no more. He had broken the link. He had ended the army of the dead, Tywin had won the battle. He stood there, the only living person in the area, while his face remained as stoic and indifferent as he would have been if he were explaining his investment strategy to an audience of bored accountants. Tywin turned his attention back to the soldiers of the Lannisters and Starks gathered on the ridge, their expressions showcasing shock and awe.
"It is done," Tywin said outloud. "Get someone down here and get a census taken of the remaining biomass before dusk. I want all of this taken care of."
Ned came down the hill and stood at the foot of the ramp. His face showed bewilderment, but a new, hard respect for Tywin. "You fought him. You talked to him. What did he say?"
Tywin was on his way down the ramp. "He expressed a concern that my ambition might outweigh the capacity of the Seven Kingdoms to contain it. He had a problem with how little I care."
"And was he right?" Brandon said, coming alongside.
"He saw a cemetery," Tywin said as he vaulted onto Strider. "The Night King viewed power as a cycle of death and rebirth, a cold inevitability. I view power as a resource to be managed, optimized, and expanded." The horses snorted in their chests. "He was a magnificent specimen.... of a failed philosophy."