POV - Steve (vi)

Rogers hugged the tree and peered around its trunk; the normally dark furrowed bark of the fir was wet and cold under his free hand. The branches were thick with thin-stalked needles and inch long, green, and coated in a thick layer of ice so heavy that the normally head-high branches touched the ground. The strong resin smell of the sap was heavy in his nostrils despite the freezing air, and sticky on his gauntlet. Many more needles concealed his vision, his serum enhanced eye-sight watching the column of animated ice stand eerily still fifty feet away.

The Others were all tall and gaunt, with flesh pale as milk and brilliant blue eyes that seemed to burn like miniature blue stars. Even as he watched them, Steve could tell his feelings towards these things was changing. Rather than seeing monsters, cold and dead who hated life as the men at the Wall and hundreds of books had told him, they were instead beautiful, albeit strange living beings. Dangerous, inhuman, but elegant. Each wore armor that he could barely see; reflective, camouflaging suits that projected its surrounded like a clear, still pond.

Looking more closely the Others, or White Walkers as some were calling them, left no prints in the snow to mark their passage. His ears could hear some of them speaking to one another, without turning their heads or even barely moving their lips, but he couldn't make sense of it. It was like listening to ice crack.

His stomach knotted as it always did before battle. He never did like fighting, seeing it instead as something only needed when words won't be heard, but it was his friends and countrymen waiting in the Castle to be saved. He had his plate armor, and he was an experienced commander used to impossible fights like this, but he didn't like it.

Steve glanced away for only have a second, looking down to check his footing on the slippery rocks at the base of the tree, and when he looked up they were atop him. The dead were in a single block a hundred strong, honed steel moved and caught the moon-light. Enemy spearmen broke into a trot as they approached, their sometimes booted feet hitting the ground with a uniform pounding thump that Steve could feel though the bottom of his steel shoes. Their ragged, often rusted mail coats jingling and clashing as the skirts swirled around legs and exposed bones. They came with whatever they had when they died; big kite-shaped shields, small swords, massive greatswords, broken spears, their unseeing eyes glaring from either side of helmet nasal bars.

Shit.

They surged forward with an unearthly shriek, whirling their weapons up overhead and ready to drop at him. Steve surged forward at them, his own shield up as he drew a Valyrian steel sword he borrowed from Jon. The Others followed behind their thralls, their icicle-like swords raised but mostly they watched and waited.

A spear point flashed past his eyes. Steve caught the ugly glint of moon-light on the ancient steel as it drove at the narrow slit of his visor and ducked his head; the twelve-inch blade slashed a furrow across the smooth enameled metal of his helm, a aching thumping blow even with steel and padding. He snarled behind the faceplate and cut over the top of his shield, aiming at the man's neck. The spearman didn't even react as the blade took the undead's head from his body.

He continued to slid forward, hooking his shield under a swordsman's tightly held blade and heaved it and him aside with a twisting wrench of body and shoulder and arm, using it like a boulder to clear a path. Steve's blade punched up under another undead's chin, forgetting for a moment that it wouldn't stop them, and so he wrenched the blade free with such an effort that the face of the creature came free as well. He grimaced as he shook the decayed flesh free and bowled the next man over, sending him backwards to disrupt the others. Three more spears probed for him; he caught one on his shield, but the other two glanced and broke off his armor. The plate wasn't invulnerable, but it gave him a terrible advantage.

Undeterred he pushed on; a swordsman who tried to jump on him lost the top right quarter of his body to a blade that sliced it the way a knife would a boiled egg.

But there are too many of them, he thought.

The noise of combat grew worse as more and more of the undead swarmed around him like bees. He had killed dozens already, and still they came. Steve controlled his breathing with an effort, dragging air down into his lungs, holding it for an instant to get all of the oxygen out of it.

The undead and Others had been hefting their weapons, closing in and getting ready to put an end to this fight. Then they froze, their heading turning up and to the east. The blazing blue eyes of the Others went wide in shock, and the next yells were their alarm.

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRR!