Chapter 423: The Others Take the Field
The Night King had no flesh, yet at this moment, he was experiencing a very real sense of "pain."
That armored wight giant had lost contact with him mere seconds after entering the human fortress. The interval was so brief that he hadn't even had the chance to observe the interior layout of the stronghold through its eyes. From the fragmented final pulse of the magical link, he could feel a surge of fire-aspected sorcery—vibrant and powerful, a thousand times stronger than frozen fire—boring into the giant's chest. It had instantly dispelled every shred of the cold magic he had infused into the body for control.
The Night King could guess it was some kind of magical weapon, but what he found incomprehensible was how a remote fortress at the westernmost tip of the Wall possessed such a divine relic capable of countering his kind.
Wight giants and mammoths? He still had more than a dozen in his host. But such massive assets were meant to be used for sudden, overwhelming strikes. Now that he knew the enemy possessed a counter-weapon, to continue sending them in like fuel for a fire would be a waste, even for him.
Of course, this reluctance was purely due to the scarcity of mammoths and giants, unrelated to personal emotion. As the premier servant of the Cold God, the Night King's perception of battle loss was fundamentally different from that of humans. In his eyes, there was no concept of the lives of brothers. All wights, including the priests and even himself, were merely consumables prepared for the realization of a much greater goal.
Once the Wall's function of shielding the Great Other's power was destroyed and the vast tides of cold magic surged south, there would be plenty of living humans waiting to be extinguished and converted into puppets. He was a general who never lacked for recruits, a commander who never feared casualties.
However, the infinite supply of soldiers was a luxury that would only come after breaking the Wall's magic. For now, at least, he could not allow his wights to be consumed pointlessly.
As the target of the defense, no one understood the strength and invulnerability of the Wall better than the Night King.
The physical majesty and sturdiness of the ice wall required no elaboration, but one should truly marvel at the at least three types of magic woven into its foundations:
The first was the Isolation Magic, spread evenly across its entire length with a constant intensity. The invisible barrier it formed cut off the power of the Cold God, blocking it north of the Wall. This made it impossible for a small raiding party of the enemy to slip south and slaughter at will. A Priest of the Cold God could not wake the dead within the realm of the living from across the Wall, nor could a wight taken south relay information back to its master. The wights the Night's Watch had previously taken to the North and King's Landing remained undetected and uncontrolled precisely because of this magical shield.
The second was the spell maintaining the structural stability of the ice. The part of the Wall above ground was made of ice—not because Brandon the Builder thought it looked cool, but because ice was the only substance in nature that simultaneously met three criteria: abundant and easy to obtain, immune to cold magic, and lightweight yet sturdy.
Despite its advantages, it had one fatal flaw: it melted in the summer.
The insulation magic woven within was designed to solve this. In warm weather, the Watch might see water running off the surface or minor sections of frost falling away, but those were merely surface accretions of snow and sleet—chaff, not the core body of the Wall. The true Wall maintained its temperature below freezing and even possessed the ability to slowly self-repair after minor external damage. Combined with the external help of the Night's Watch stonemasons, it had endured countless seasonal cycles while maintaining its height and form, a steadfast guardian of the realms of men.
The third, and most troublesome for the priests of the Cold God, was the Suppression Field radiating from the energy core at the Nightfort.
Wildling residents and Night's Watch rangers, through observations of wight and Other behavior, had independently reached a logical conclusion: the closer the enemy got to the Wall, the weaker they became.
This judgment was essentially correct, though the details required refinement.
The more accurate fact was that cold magic became increasingly suppressed the closer it got to the giant, glowing heart tree beneath the Nightfort.
Furthermore, this suppression produced distinct effects on wights and Others.
A wight's resurrection relied on a spark of cold magic injected by a priest, but its combat strength was entirely physical. When approaching the suppression source at the Nightfort, its link to the Other would weaken—manifesting as delayed commands, shortened control range, or even total disconnection. However, whether in the Lands of Always Winter or right beneath the Wall, a wight remained a wight; they were either dead or active, controlled or uncontrolled. They did not become physically stronger or weaker based on location.
The Others were different. Because their forms were 99% magic, they possessed near-total immunity to physical harm and could wield incredible sorcery, but they were also subject to the crushing weight of the suppression field. Merely being near the Wall reduced their magical potency significantly. After crossing the Great Gorge, the priests found their magic recovery rate suppressed to 1% of its original speed, and their spell power halved.
And this was merely at the Shadow Tower—the westernmost edge. As the army moved toward the center of the Wall, this suppression would grow more intense. Outside the Nightfort, the priests might only be able to manifest ten or twenty percent of their full power.
Worst of all: this magical field only affected cold-aspected magic. It was harmless or even beneficial to all other forms of sorcery.
The massive structure, the complex magic, and the largest standing army in Westeros combined to form mankind's iron shield. Had the Night's Watch massed their forces at the Nightfort for a final showdown, the outcome would have been uncertain.
This was why the Night King, despite his goal being the Nightfort, did not bypass the other castles. He intended to break the lines at the ends of the Wall far from the Nightfort, killing human defenders one by one and seizing the stairs to the top of the Wall. After securing the tactical objective of the Wall's summit, he would send wights along the top toward the Nightfort, coordinating with the army on the ground for a multi-dimensional assault from two heights separated by seven hundred feet. This would ensure the Nightfort was isolated and the Wall's magic source destroyed, even while his own magic was suppressed.
In the long run, wights were a renewable resource that required no conservation... but while the Wall's magic remained intact, the Night King still had to rely on these puppets to fight the living.
A weapon that could one-shot a wight giant could surely one-shot a Priest of the Cold God. They needed enough wights as cover to ensure human heroes couldn't identify and assassinate them. They needed enough wights to storm up the stairs after taking the Shadow Tower to cut off reinforcements between castles. And they needed a vast enough host to eventually storm the largest fortress of the Watch when their own magic was at its weakest.
But currently, the human defenders were better prepared than imagined.
Taking the gorge defense line had cost less than an hour and nearly twenty thousand wights. Yet, in less than half an hour at this small fortress, that strange fuel had reduced thousands more to ash—a loss that couldn't be replaced even by killing everyone inside. That terrible green oil seemed inexhaustible; if he had to lose thousands at every castle along the way, the priests would be fighting as lone commanders by the time they reached the Nightfort.
The Night King observed the Shadow Tower with eyes sharper than an eagle's. He finally found the reason for the defenders' ample supply: on that sturdy wooden staircase built against the Wall, dozens of living men were panting as they climbed up and down. They were hauling liquid fuel from other castles along the Wall!
Realizing the plan to wait out the enemy's supplies had failed, the Night King knew he could not allow this to continue.
He turned to the other Priests of the Cold God beside him and issued a command in the sharp, piercing Ancient Tongue. Three subordinates nodded silently and trotted forward on their dead horses. Amidst a surge of magic, a layer of armor-like ice capable of withstanding ordinary frozen fire condensed around their forms. The sea of corpses began to churn as well. Countless speed-type wights—transformed from bears, wolves, and other beasts—pushed through the humanoid ranks to follow the Other vanguard toward the brilliantly burning gates of the Shadow Tower.
Maintaining this ice armor consumed significant magic; to wield other powers simultaneously was a heavy burden for an ordinary priest. But to stop the mounting loss of his wights, the Night King decided it was time for a display of ultimate power.
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