Chapter 420: Priests of the Cold God
The Night King did not send so much as a single wight toward Westwatch-by-the-Bridge.
This decision was made without a shred of emotion, based entirely on rational calculation: First, Westwatch lay to the west, possessing no strategic value for his host; attacking it would force the army of the dead to move away from the Wall, squandering critical time. Second, Westwatch had a small population composed entirely of combatants; the fresh recruits gained from taking the fortress would be far fewer than the potential cost of the assault, making it a losing bargain.
Mortals called them the Others, but the Night King knew better. He and his subordinates were no mindless monsters—they were the Priests of the Great Other, the Cold God. They were the manifestations and spokesmen of one of the world's two true deities, the executors of His will and requirements.
As the leader of all the Cold God's priests, his every action had to completely discard emotional factors such as hatred, loathing, or desire. His primary—and only—criterion was the realization of his deity's grand objective.
He was not a creation of the Cold God; the Children of the Forest had made him first, forging him as a machine for their war against mankind. After an indeterminate age of mindless existence, that Great Being had awakened his consciousness, granting him the capacity for reason and thought. He had been guided to break free from his creators and controllers, provided with a grander and more noble purpose: to end all slaughter by restoring the world to its original state—cold, orderly, and serene.
Indeed, the living would never believe it: the King of the Others, manufactured as a killing machine, actually loathed killing.
The Children of the Forest, whom he hated most, were relics of the past. However, the greed and violent impulses required to seize resources and spread genetic material were buried deep within the genes of every living thing; they were beyond saving. To solve this problem, his God had proposed the ultimate solution: eliminate every living creature on earth. When life vanished entirely, slaughter would naturally cease to exist.
...
To achieve this, and ultimately fulfill the goal of overwhelming R'hllor and seizing control of the world, the Cold God needed to destroy the Wall's magical isolation as quickly as possible. He had to release His power from the Lands of Always Winter into the whole of Westeros.
For the three dragons could return to the battlefield at any moment to fight alongside the men defending the Wall.
The Cold God did not fear dragons, nor did He worry about human armies. Compared to His priests—powerful combat machines maintained by sorcery—the living were merely potential puppet soldiers, and the symbols of magic in human eyes were naught but flying lizards. Dragonflame, rumored to have the power to break magic, was to a priest little more than a hot wind that might make them sweat.
As long as one was willing to expend magical energy, any enemy in the world was as insignificant as clay—provided the priests remained saturated in the thick essence of the Cold God, possessing an ample and inexhaustible source of power.
However, while the Wall's magic remained in effect, the priests of the Cold God risked their forms by crossing into the realm of the living; it was like fish leaping onto dry land. Just as a fish struggles to extract oxygen from the air, the priests could not replenish the Cold Magic they relied upon south of the Wall. Every drop of energy had to be husbanded with extreme care.
A human army or a dragon could be dealt with easily enough in isolation. But to fight both while the Wall's magical shielding was active was like a fish trying to battle land creatures while gasping for breath; the chances of victory were slim.
The only way to break the stalemate was to capture the Nightfort before the three dragons returned, destroying the magic within the ice and demolishing the dam blocking the Cold Magic—flooding all of Westeros with water.
Once the vast power of the Cold God surged south through the Wall, no force on earth could stop His advance.
Therefore, the army not only had to move in the right direction; it had to move fast.
The Night's Watch had defense protocols, and the Night King had an offensive one.
After successfully crossing the Great Gorge, the first thing the Others did was launch an all-out assault to uproot Gorgeview—the small, wooden temporary outpost at the midpoint of the gorge used for logistical transit.
In this siege, the Night King saw the application of the humans' new weapon for the first time: small spherical objects that did not create a sea of green flame like wildfire, but instead sprayed countless fragments of frozen fire. A single sphere could threaten a wide area, severing the link between dozens of wights and the Others.
This unprecedented new threat was quickly broadcast to the mind of every priest through the Night King's magical link. The Others' counter-strategy was simple: stay as far from the walls as possible during attacks, relying on the dead rather than leading from the front to avoid injury from this new weapon. If they absolutely had to draw close, they would condense ice armor over their bodies to defend against the shards.
The deployment of dragonglass bombs cost the Night King far more wights than anticipated to take Gorgeview. But it was, after all, a temporary post rather than a permanent fortress, lacking deep trenches or sufficient supplies. After a desperate half-hour of resistance that cost the dead several thousand wights, the post was inevitably swallowed by the tide.
After killing the thousand-odd defenders and turning them into puppets, the Others directed the wight army to their second task: the total destruction of the last scattered weirwood trees along both sides of the gorge path.
Though the Wall still stood, clearing the gorge—this weakness in the flank—allowed the Cold God's power to seep slowly and continuously south through this fifty-mile gap. If the recovery speed of the Others' magic was 100 beyond the Wall and 0 within it, then the destruction of the weirwood groves was the qualitative shift that turned 0 into 1. This small breach was like waves constantly spilling over a levee—insufficient for a flood, but providing a slow, steady minimum of energy for the Others' operations south of the Wall.
Though they still had to be stingy with their magic, they no longer had to fear total exhaustion and the subsequent dissolution of their forms.
Before such massive numbers, over a thousand weirwood trees were cleared in an instant. Bathing in the thin, seeping power of their God, the Others led the army of the dead to their final preparation: building ramps overnight at the gentlest slopes of the gorge. This allowed the wight mammoths and giants—those too large or physically incapable of scaling the cliffs—to pass through from the gorge floor.
Their path east to the Nightfort was barred by several formidable human fortresses. Though such strongholds were fragile before a Priest of the Cold God, given the need to conserve magic, the Night King believed he would find use for these thick-skinned heavy weapons to handle the grunt work.
The servants of the Cold God understood that a sharp axe makes for short work. While the Shadow Tower and Westwatch-by-the-Bridge trembled in anticipation of a strike, the wight host spent the early hours of the night finalizing their preparations. They then turned in a massive column, stretching out like a long dragon, and began their march toward the heart of the Wall.
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