Note on the Story's Pacing
I want to make it clear that the slower pacing at the beginning of the story was not entirely planned. I started writing on impulse, without a defined plan and without really knowing where the story was going. As I kept going, I realized that going on hiatus, which, to be honest, on the internet often means killing a story, was not an option I wanted to take.
Because of that, I ended up stretching and exploring as much as possible what I already had in mind at the time: the Blacktyde Invasion. This arc ended up serving as a foundation while I figured out the world, the characters, and the overall direction of the narrative. A clear example of how I started having better ideas for the future is the changes I made to earlier chapters, tweaking and adjusting small details here and there to better align them with the story's current direction.
Now, however, things are different. I already know, for the most part, where the story is going, and that has started to directly reflect in the pacing. Starting with the second arc, which begins in chapter 12, the rhythm becomes better, and in the more recent chapters ,17 and 18, it becomes noticeably faster.
Thank you to everyone who has been following the story since the beginning, and I hope the reading experience from here on out is even more engaging.
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The pain and dizziness that had previously consumed every fiber of Alaric's being vanished in a burst of vitality. The moment the transformation was complete, human suffering was obliterated and replaced by a torrent of adrenaline and raw power. He was no longer a cornered man; he was the apex of the food chain.
Feeling himself in the body of a bear in its physical prime was like trading a rusted tool for a perfectly lubricated war machine. Every muscle beneath the dense fur vibrated with a promise of destruction. The excitement was intoxicating, a heat that climbed his spine and manifested in a low growl, vibrating the ground beneath his claws.
If he were to use the Feat: GM Eyes, he would realize that his ability scores were the same as the last time he transformed to fight the other "Bear":
Strength: 19
Dexterity: 10
Constitution: 16
Intelligence: 13
Wisdom: 14
Charisma: 7
The four Ironmen who had previously surrounded him now looked small, slow, and desperately fragile. The terror in their eyes was Alaric's first feast. In a movement that defied the massive weight and the 10 Dexterity of his new body, Alaric lunged. He didn't run; he exploded, throwing himself toward the first man.
The soldier tried to raise his shield, but to the bear, it was little more than a sheet of paper. With a lateral swipe of his forepaw, Alaric didn't just deflect the shield, he broke the man's arm in two different places. Before a scream could escape the soldier's throat, Alaric leaned in and locked his jaws over the man's head. The sound was like a watermelon being crushed under a hydraulic press. The man's body went limp instantly, dropping into the mud like a sack of flour.
[System Notification]
Level 4 Enemy Eliminated.
Participation Reward: +90 Exp.
The other three, witnessing the scene, lost every shred of military discipline. Panic, blind and visceral, took hold. They spun on their heels, running frantically toward the gap in the Northern shield wall, the only path left to freedom. But Alaric's speed defied his bulk.
Whenever one of them neared the exit, the bear appeared, barring the way with a roar that made the air tremble. Trapped, the Ironmen began running in circles within the perimeter formed by the Northern shields to escape him, like rats caught in a bucket.
The second man was caught while trying to climb the shield wall itself. Alaric pulled him down with a claw dug into his back and, with a fluid motion, repeated the execution: a decisive bite that split the skull and silenced his screams of terror.
[System Notification]
Level 2 Enemy Eliminated.
Reward: +80 Exp.
The third and fourth met the same fate seconds later. Alaric did not grant them the dignity of a fight; it was a harvest. Their heads, whether protected by leather helms or not, were no match for the crushing pressure of his jaws.
[System Notification]
Level 3 Enemy Eliminated.
Participation Reward: +65 Exp.
[System Notification]
Level 2 Enemy Eliminated.
Participation Reward: +40 Exp.
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As Alaric finished clearing the inner circle, the impact of his presence began to reverberate across the external battlefield. The remaining Ironmen, still trading blows with the Northerners, began to notice something wrong. The sound of breaking bones and bestial roars wasn't coming from their own allies, but from something much larger.
Looking over their shoulders or through the gaps in the formations, they saw the massive silhouette of the bear, covered in blood, looming over the corpses of their comrades. Panic was instantaneous. The sight of a predator of that magnitude appearing in the middle of an already bloody battle, and worse, killing their own, shattered the soldiers' morale. Some lowered their guard for a second, time enough for the Northerners, though also terrified, to seize the opening.
Northern blades found flesh. Several Ironmen took deep cuts to their arms and legs. They weren't mortal blows, but they were serious wounds that left them out of the fight, groaning on the ground as they tried to understand if the nightmare was real.
The Northerners themselves were on the verge of collapse. The fear of the unknown was stronger than their loyalty to the fight.
"Shit, the bear is eating their heads!" shouted a young soldier, not quite understanding what he was witnessing.
"Let's scatter or we'll be next!" suggested another, his voice failing as his eyes never left the figure of Alaric, who was finishing off the last Ironman.
Chaos was about to dissolve the Northern formation until a cry, charged with authority and urgency, cut through the air. One of the warriors who had been closest to Alaric's initial transformation raised his voice:
"Stop, you cowards!" he bellowed, pointing at the beast. "That bear... that is Alaric! I saw it with my own eyes! He changed shape! He's on our side!"
Silence fell for a brief moment over the Northerners, broken only by the sound of Alaric's heavy breathing.
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"Don't retreat!" the soldier continued. "Push those bastards toward him! Let the bear devour them! Push the Ironmen toward Lord Alaric!"
Alaric, having just finished crushing the head of the last of the initial four men, turned his massive neck. His small, dark eyes focused on the fourteen remaining Ironmen. They were being pushed back by the line of nineteen Northerners who, now emboldened by the revelation, advanced with renewed vigor.
Alaric's snout was soaked. Warm, viscous blood ran from his mouth and dripped onto his furry chest. In that moment, an internal battle began. His new bear instincts, powerful and wild, screamed for him to clean his face. His rough, wet tongue wanted to lick the blood, to taste the iron and the life that remained there.
However, Alaric's human mind fought back with disgust. He felt nausea battling instinctive hunger.
'This would be cannibalism,' he thought, forcing his will over the flesh. 'Even in this form, I am still human. If I give in to instinct, if I start ingesting this flesh, what will be left of me when I turn back?'
The fear of contracting some mental degradation, an irreversible madness caused by the act of consuming his own species under the guise of an animal, was real. He refused to risk his sanity for a biological impulse.
Ignoring the urge to lick himself, he roared again, wanting to scare away not just his enemies, but his own desires.
Alaric then charged at the Ironmen fighting the Northerners at the shield wall. At the same time, the same Northerner from before continued to shout: "Push! Push them to Alaric!"
Encountering one of the Ironmen head-on, he didn't attack with claws first; he used his mouth. When he reached a soldier trying to hold his ground, Alaric lowered his head and bit the man's leg, just below the knee. The teeth pierced flesh and bone with the ease of a nail through rotten wood.
With a violent tug, he dragged the man away from his compatriots. The soldier, in an act of absolute desperation, began striking Alaric's face and head with his sword. The blows cut the skin, opening bloody furrows on the bear's forehead and near his ears.
Alaric felt the pain, but it was a distant pain, almost irrelevant. He ignored it completely. He knew something his enemies did not: the damage was temporary. The moment he returned to human form, every one of those cuts would vanish. Even if the situation reached the extreme, even if he died in this bear form, he would simply return to his human form exactly as he was at the moment of transformation. He was, for all practical purposes, a biological kamikaze tank.
After pulling him far enough away, he released the man's leg only to climb on top of him. The weight of hundreds of kilograms of muscle and bone compressed the soldier's chest. The sound of air being forced from the man's lungs was audible, a stifled "ugh" as his ribs began to give way.
The Ironman, fighting for his life, tried to drive the point of his sword into Alaric's neck. With a swift swipe, Alaric struck the man's wrist, disarming him and sending the sword flying meters away. The bear then opened its mouth, aiming for the exposed throat. The soldier, in a final reflex, crossed his arms in front of his face, trying to protect his neck with the metal and leather of his bracers.
An ordinary bear, acting on pure instinct, would have simply bitten the arms, trying to tear them off or chew through them, wasting precious time while other soldiers might try to intervene. But Alaric was no ordinary bear; he was more.
He paused the attack for a fraction of a second, tilted his neck sideways, and positioned his head horizontally. With this angle, he bypassed the barrier of the man's arms. Instead of the throat, he aimed for the top of the head, the forehead.
His jaws snapped shut. With a pressure of 540 kg, Alaric applied all the strength of his massive muscles. The frontal bone offered no resistance. There was a dry crack, followed by the sudden silence of the man who had been fighting just moments before. The forehead was completely crushed, obliterating the brain instantly.
Alaric stood up, the enemy's body now just a carpet of flesh beneath his paws. He looked at the other thirteen men, some looking back, watching the scene with the horror of those who see their own fate, only to be immediately punished for their distraction by the Northerners in front of them.
The Ironman's body beneath Alaric's paws still suffered involuntary spasms, a remnant of nervous life fading fast, while dark blood bubbled between the gaps of the deformed helm.
In the corner of his peripheral vision, something flashed. A translucent green panel floated in the air:
[System Notification]
[Level 3 Enemy Eliminated.]
[Participation Reward: +90 Exp.]
One of the enemy soldiers, just a few meters away, having witnessed the brutal death of his companion, let out a sound that wasn't a war cry, but a whimper of pure existential terror. He looked at the mass of muscle and fur before him, a monster that possessed not only the strength of a beast but the precision of an executioner, and his courage, already fragile, collapsed completely.
"By the gods... he destroyed him like a twig!" the man screamed, his voice rising several octaves. "Run! Run to the ships! The sea is safer than this cursed land! Retreat!"
The order, though it didn't come from a captain, was the catalyst all twelve other Ironmen needed. They were no strangers to death; they were invaders hardened by raids and storms. But fighting men is one thing; facing a force of nature that boasts predatory intelligence is another entirely. Like a single organism driven by panic, they abandoned their formation, lowered their shields, and spun on their heels, running desperately toward the breach in the Northern wall where they had entered.
Alaric watched the stampede. His bear senses picked up the scent of fear, a sour, pungent odor emanating from the fugitives. He remained motionless in the center of the circle, a statue of contained fury. However, he did not intend to let them leave without a reminder of who now dominated that soil.
As the Ironmen passed him, trying to maintain as much distance as possible, Alaric let out a short, guttural roar whenever one of them got too close to his personal perimeter. The sound was like the impact of two large oak trunks, a vibration the soldiers felt in their own teeth. One of the fugitives tripped in the mud upon hearing the sound so close, scrambling up with frantic agility before even touching the ground, propelled by the dread of imagining Alaric's jaws on his neck.
The Northerners, seeing the invaders in full flight, felt their blood boil with the desire for vengeance. The humiliation of being surrounded and nearly annihilated cried out for retaliation.
"They're running!" shouted one of the young Northerners, raising his bloodied spear. "Don't let a single one reach the coast! Kill them all from behind! After them!"
He took the first step to break the line and begin the pursuit, but a firm, calloused hand gripped his shoulder, pulling him back. It was Roluf, the warrior who had watched Alaric transform.
"Stay where you are, boy!" Roluf ordered, his voice raspy but authoritative.
"But they'll escape, Roluf! We have to end this!"
"The fight is already won here," Roluf countered, looking seriously at the group of nineteen men who remained. "Look at yourselves. Half are bleeding, the rest are exhausted. Prolonging the fight would only bring more loss of men and time we don't have. We have brothers dying in other corners. Jeor, Jorah, and Lady Maege are still fighting their own battles. They need us more than the sea needs twelve more corpses of Iron Islands trash."
Roluf then extended his arm, pointing to the massive figure of the bear still standing guard in the center of the courtyard.
"Look at him," Roluf said, lowering his tone to a respectful whisper. "He's letting them leave. He knows the immediate threat is over and that our strength is needed elsewhere. He thinks like a commander, not just a beast. If Alaric lets them go, we let them go too."
With the complete withdrawal of the Ironmen, a heavy and uncomfortable silence settled over the palisade. The only sound was the heavy, almost noisy breathing of the bear. Alaric turned his body slowly, facing the Northerners.
The suspense was palpable, like a rope stretched to the breaking point. The nineteen soldiers remained in an irregular semicircle, weapons still in hand, but tips lowered. There was a clear divide among them: some, like Roluf, looked at the bear with a mixture of reverence and awe, processing the marvel they had just witnessed. Others, however, gripped the hilts of their swords with white knuckles, their minds refusing to accept that this monster was the young lord they knew.
The image of Alaric was disturbing. The blood of the Ironmen ran down his jaw, dripping rhythmically onto the muddy ground. That sight, a predator that had just crushed human skulls, made ancestral survival instincts scream within the Northerners. They wanted to believe it was Alaric, but what they saw was death incarnate.
Neither side moved. Alaric knew that any sudden movement could trigger panic and distrust among his men. He needed to stay calm, suppressing the agitation of the animal form that still craved action.
The impasse was only broken by the distant, but approaching, sound of boots hitting the muddy ground coming from the Northerners' left flank. Jorah Mormont appeared, bursting into the courtyard followed by fifteen men. The sight of Jorah's group was a testament to the ferocity of the battle they had fought: three of his men were being carried or supported by the shoulders, with improvised bandages already soaked in blood, and everyone else had cuts on their faces, arms, and torsos. Jorah himself had dented armor and his left eyebrow was sliced, nearly reaching his eye.
Jorah, having approached close enough, stopped upon seeing the group of Northerners standing in absolute silence, just staring at a circle formed by themselves, which was inaccessible to his eyes. His gaze swept over everyone present in the circle, searching for his brother. Not seeing him anywhere, and noticing that many were still staring at the center of the circle even with the approach of their future Lord, a negative premonition began to grow within him.
"Where is he?" Jorah asked, without needing to explain whom he referred to, his voice charged with a cutting urgency. Receiving no immediate answer, he pushed forward into the center of the group. "Where is Alaric? The battle is over, where is he?! Speak, you curs, where is my brother?"
Panic began to seep into Jorah's voice. He saw the strange looks, the lowered heads, and the hesitation of his veterans. In his mind, that silence could only mean one thing: Alaric was dead, his body lying among the many others on the ground.
Roluf took a step forward, intercepting Jorah's frantic gaze.
"Lord Jorah, this way. Follow me," Roluf said, pointing toward the center of the circle, where the bear's silhouette was still partially obscured by the remaining soldiers.
Jorah didn't wait for explanations. Roluf's vague tone only served to confirm his worst fears. Leaving Roluf behind, Jorah charged forward and shoved the soldiers in front of him aside, breaking through the formation as if he were cutting through the enemy.
As he threw the last man aside, Jorah came face to face with the beast.
He stopped so abruptly that his boots skidded in the mud. The shock was visceral.
"What the fuck is this?!" Jorah exclaimed, recoiling two quick steps, his hand flying instinctively to the hilt of his longsword. His eyes widened at the size of the bear, the width of its shoulders, and especially the fresh blood covering its entire snout and chest.
Jorah's mind raced at high speed, connecting the dots in a way that was wrong, but logical for a common man. Combining the bloody bear, the courtyard covered in bodies, and Alaric's absence, horror hit him like a punch to the stomach.
"No... it can't be," he whispered, his voice failing. "Alaric..."
He began to look frantically at every corpse scattered on the ground around the bear. He searched for a familiar tunic, for a young face, for any sign of his brother. He refused to take his eyes off the bear for more than a second, fearing the beast would spring at him at any moment, but his search was desperate.
"Where is he?" Jorah roared into the air, rage replacing fear. "Where is Alaric's body? What did this beast do to him?"
He was ready to draw his sword and charge the bear, believing the beast had devoured his brother or that Alaric lay dead somewhere behind it. The tension was electric. Alaric, for his part, only stared at him with supernatural calm, his small eyes showing an intelligence that Jorah, in his state of shock, could not yet process.
Before Jorah could make a fatal mistake, he felt a heavy hand rest on his shoulder. It was Roluf again. Jorah spun around, the hope of seeing Alaric alive flashing for a millisecond in his eyes, only to be replaced by bitter disappointment at seeing the soldier's weary face.
"Get your hand off me!" Jorah hissed. "Where is my brother?"
"Lord Jorah," Roluf said, his voice firm and calm despite the situation. "The bear... the bear is Alaric."
The silence that followed was absolute. Jorah looked at Roluf, then at the bear, and then back at Roluf. His expression was one of pure incredulity, as if the man had just told him the sun was made of cheese.
As if to confirm the statement, the bear gave a small roar. It wasn't a roar of defiance or hunger, but a short sound, almost like a vocal nod, a direct response to Roluf's words.
Jorah felt rage bubble up. He thought he was the target of a sick joke in the midst of a massacre.
"What is your name, soldier?" Jorah asked, his voice dangerously low.
"Roluf, my lord."
"Roluf... how do you dare?" Jorah took a step forward, getting eye-to-eye with the man. "How do you dare play with my brother's life at a time like this? Do you think the death of a Mormont is a reason for fairy tales and mockery?"
"I am not joking, milord," Roluf replied, without looking away and remaining as polite as possible, even though he was older than Jorah. "I saw it with my own eyes. Alaric was surrounded. He was wounded, about to be killed. And then everything turned green and he transformed. He became this beast right before us and tore those Ironmen apart like they were rag dolls."
The bear gave another short roar, receiving looks of pure shock from the fifteen men who had just arrived with Jorah. They backed away, hands trembling on their spears.
Roluf continued, his voice gaining strength as he narrated the impossible:
"The thunderous noise that you surely heard... It was him. Alaric called upon the Old Gods and invoked the lightning that struck down the Ironmen. He threw himself into the middle of twenty men, drawing all the attention to himself so that we could breathe. If it weren't for him... if it weren't for this... this magic... the Ironmen would have run over us and burned everything to the ground."
Jorah felt a lump form in his throat.
"Magic?" he repeated, the word sounding strange and heavy on his tongue. "You expect me to believe my brother is a sorcerer? That he hid something like this from his own family all these years?"
A second Northerner, an older man with a deep cut on his arm, stepped forward to support Roluf.
"It's the truth, Lord Jorah. I saw it too. I didn't see the exact moment he turned into a bear, as I was busy trying not to get my throat slit, but I saw his skin. Before he changed, Alaric's skin turned to wood. Like the bark of an ancient weirwood, hard and impenetrable. The Ironmen's swords struck, but they didn't go in. And the thunder... I was five paces away."
Jorah was speechless. He looked at the bear again, which had given another small roar when Alaric's name was called once more, but this time, he wasn't looking for a monster. He was looking for his brother.
It was an unbearable cognitive dissonance. In his mind, Alaric was the boy who preferred the silence of the library, or the company of wild animals, over training in the courtyard with him. Jorah remembered countless times finding Alaric sitting in the gardens with one of Maester Yves's crows perched on his shoulder, or feeding squirrels that seemed to have no fear of him. He had always thought his brother was just someone with a gentle soul, perhaps too gentle for the North.
To think that same young man was capable of invoking the fury of the heavens and transforming into such a massive predator was almost impossible to process. The thunder Jorah had heard while fighting on the other side of the palisade had been so intense he thought it was the prelude to an unprecedented storm, a sign from the gods that the day would be grim. Knowing that power had, perhaps, emanated from his younger brother made his world spin.
He watched the bear closely. There was something in the beast's eyes, a depth, a recognition. The bear wasn't trying to attack him; he was waiting. He was waiting for Jorah, his own blood, to accept him.
Jorah looked at Alaric's hands, or rather, at the immense claws stained with blood. He looked at the trail of destruction the beast had left behind. Reality was there, naked and raw, bathed in blood and shrouded in mystery. The brother he thought he knew had died that night, and something much more powerful and terrible had been born in his place.
"Alaric?" Jorah whispered, his voice barely above a breath, as he took a hesitant step toward the bloodied mass of fur.
Alaric, feeling the weight of Jorah's gaze, a mixture of horror, disbelief, and a spark of fear, abruptly turned his face away. The bear lowered its head, focusing its attention on the ravaged ground.
Ignoring his brother's state of shock, Alaric began to act. He extended one of his forepaws, whose dark, curved claws were still soiled with remnants of flesh and armor, and began to strike and drag the tip of a claw against the deep, viscous mud of the courtyard. The movement was frantic but strangely controlled.
Jorah stepped forward, hand still on the hilt of his sword, watching with morbid fascination.
"What... what is he doing?" Jorah murmured to himself, his voice barely a confused whisper. "Is he drawing on the ground?"
The sight was almost absurd. An elite predator, capable of crushing a man with a single blow, was crouching over the mud like a child learning to write in the sand. But there was nothing childish about it. The speed with which Alaric's paw moved demonstrated a desperate urgency. He had no time for subtleties. The sound of claws tearing the damp earth was interspersed with low, impatient growls that Alaric let out, frustrated by the lack of dexterity in the hands of his new form.
As soon as he finished the last stroke, Alaric stood up abruptly. He let out a short roar, almost a command, and without looking a second time at Jorah, he spun his massive body and charged toward the gap in the palisade, leaving only the trail of his immense footprints and the silence behind.
Still in a trance, Jorah approached the spot where the bear had been working. Roluf, the warrior who had become the eyewitness to Alaric's ascension, followed closely.
Jorah analyzed the furrows in the mud. At first, it seemed like a chaos of meaningless lines. He saw a large, crude arrow, pointing decisively to the right, but above it was a word he couldn't decipher. The letters were upside down.
"What is this?" Roluf asked, frowning.
Jorah began to walk around the drawing. He went completely around the arrow, changing his physical perspective relative to Alaric's "work." When he finally stopped on the opposite side, so that the arrow now pointed to his left, the world seemed to click into place. The letters, though rudimentary, angular, and dug with brute force, formed a name Jorah knew better than his own.
J E O R
Jorah felt an icy chill run down his spine, a cold that had nothing to do with the breeze of Bear Island. The image of his father, Lord Jeor Mormont, fighting in some other corner of the island against hordes of invaders, exploded in his mind. Alaric wasn't playing in the mud; he was reminding Jorah that the battle hadn't ended with the flight of those twelve men. Bear Island was still bleeding.
'Father!', the cry echoed silently in Jorah's mind, loaded with sudden guilt for having let himself be carried away by shock while the Lord of the Island might be surrounded.
The confusion in Jorah's eyes vanished, replaced by the steel coldness of a Mormont commander. He stood tall, his stature seeming to increase under the moonlight. He looked at the assembled Northern soldiers, men who seemed lost between the fear of the bear and the exhaustion of battle.
"Listen to me now!" Jorah shouted, his voice cutting across the courtyard like a whip. "There is no time for questions!"
He began to point, dividing the men with a speed that admitted no hesitation.
"We divide again! All of you who carry shields and still have strength in your arms, follow me out of this wall now!" He pointed in the direction Alaric's arrow indicated. "We're going to hit the other Ironmen from the other battles from the rear!"
He then turned to the men who had arrived with him and to the survivors of the palisade defense.
"The rest of you, leave immediately to reinforce Lord Jeor's positions, or my aunt Maege's! See where the fight is fiercest and throw yourselves into it! Don't let the Ironmen breathe!"
Jorah looked at the soldiers who were visibly wounded, some barely able to stand.
"You three," he said to the least injured among the nineteen, "take the incapacitated to the Mormont Keep right now. Find Maester Yves. Tell him I demand that every one of these men be treated with the utmost zeal. They saved my life today."
As the men were about to move to fulfill the orders, a sound of groaning and dragging metal caught Jorah's attention. He turned and, near a pile of debris, saw an Ironman. The fellow was beginning to regain consciousness, shaking his head in confusion.
If Alaric were there, he would have recognized the man instantly. It was the invader who, driven by blind fury after seeing his leader assassinated by him, had tried to kill him with almost suicidal desperation. He had been knocked down and left behind in the flight of his companions, who thought he was dead like all the others lying on the ground, when in fact, he had only been knocked unconscious by receiving a shock current to the head.
Jorah walked toward him. The Ironman didn't seem to have visible injuries that would prevent him from fighting once the shock passed. Jorah could see the glint of hatred and fear returning to the enemy's eyes. He knew he couldn't leave that man free.
Without a shred of hesitation or mercy, Jorah drew his longsword. He didn't take advantage of the confusion to seek a mercy blow to the neck; he had other plans for him. He drove the tip of the sword into the man's left thigh and, with a sharp, brutal movement, twisted the blade.
The Ironman's scream tore through the night, a high-pitched sound of pure agony.
"Ahh!" the man screamed, his voice failing as blood gushed from his leg. "I surrender! I surrender!"
Jorah stared at him with eyes of ice, ignoring the pleas for surrender. He withdrew the sword only to bury it again, this time in the right thigh, repeating the twisting motion. He felt the man's muscles tear under the steel. Now, the invader would not walk without help, let alone pose a threat to the wounded Northerners.
"Take this piece of trash with you," Jorah ordered the men headed for Mormont Keep, wiping the blood from his blade on the sobbing invader's tunic. "Make sure he stays alive. I want him for interrogation as soon as the island is secure. I want names, numbers, and the location where their ships are anchored. If he tries anything, cut his arms off too."
With the last order given, the Mormont war machine ground into motion. The eleven fit men who had followed Jorah since the beginning of the night marched quickly toward Jeor and Maege's sectors, driven by the urgency of the name Alaric had drawn in the mud. They knew that the presence of reinforcements could be the difference between the survival of the Mormont line and total destruction.
Meanwhile, the wounded transport group, whose number had been increased by one to handle the addition of the Ironman, began their slow and painful journey toward Mormont Keep. The three Northerners carried their brothers with reverence, while the fourth dragged the wounded Ironman in the rear, his groans of pain diminishing as blood loss plunged him back into semi-consciousness.
At the same time, Jorah led the other fifteen men through the gap in the palisade. He thought of his brother, wondering if Alaric could return to what he was before, or if he would remain transformed into the beast forever.
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