44

44.

One King.

Void eyes.

Dark blood.

The cry of the motherless.

A fallen king.

A standing king. 

One king.

Beric stood unmoved, listening to those words escape in tiny whispers from the priestess's lips, her darkened eyes caught elsewhere...in a vision perhaps. In a call from the red god perhaps. Be that as it may, night had fallen, and the smell of death was foul, strong, and ever closer. 

"My lady, my lady," Beric gently shook her out of her trance. "We have to keep moving toward Winterfell. Get there in time to fight at Jon Snow's side."

Lady Melissandre came to herself and looked at him as if she had discovered something unsettling. "There is a dragon under the dead," she replied, ambiguously, swallowing hard. "You are in the right. We should get there as soon as possible."

Beric felt ill at ease. A sharp cold draught of air carried the smell of death. 

***

Arya turned around abruptly at the three blasts of the horns heralding the beginning of the battle, and the arrival of the dead at Winterfell. That was it. This is how it starts, she thought. In her hand, she carried the double-pointed dragonglass spear that Gendry had fashioned at her request. She regretted the loss of Catspaw but knew that Jon held it and that reassured her.

Turning again, she met Sansa's petrified face. As planned, she and the non-combatants would flee through the tunnels under the castle. Sansa refused to be escorted ahead and would remain behind until the last moment.

"Then take this," Arya said, handing her a simple dragonglass dagger. "And remember, no matter what, if the dead rise..."

"I know," Sansa cut her off before she could finish, her sapphire eyes glistening with tears. She breathed out harshly and pounced on her little sister, embracing her tightly. "Survive, please! All of you!"

It was the only thing she could do: wish for the impossible. Sansa felt that helplessness stronger than ever.

***

Jon was the first to withdraw.

"Don't stay," he said, an unbendable command. "The Neck will be where the real battle happens. But I'll make sure he gets there decimated."

"I won't leave," Dany said stiffly. Her heart sunk at the thought of leaving him and Rhaegal behind. "We stopped him here once, we'll do it again...together."

Unbridled she reached out for his hand. Jon allowed himself to be reassured by her touch.

"Dany," Jon called gravely, but calmly, "Remember what Bran said. What he's been doing to me. He knows all about it. He won't risk losing his second chance so easily."

Her eyes glittered with uncertainty and fear. How he wished to offer her words that might bring her calm but there was a tinge of defeat that already tainted his words.

"Jon..." she said in barely a thin voice.

He did not hesitate for a moment when he decided to take her and kiss her. Her lips were warm and soft, slightly wobbling before she kissed him back just as fiercely. 

***

Bran's eyes in the sky spotted a group of walkers who glanced skyward, aware of his vigilance. He could fly everywhere and still don't find the Night King. His dead army was marching like the mindless stampede of rotten bodies they were as his walkers scattered about. There was a chance that he might change his route now that he knew what had happened here the first time.

The human part of him feared that his mind would be taken again, but it was up to him and his powers to hold the slightest advantage. Another part of him, the collective memory that inhabited him, reminded him that if he died that night, the continuity of time would be altered...even destroyed. Chaos. Exactly what the Night King wanted. 

Theon and the archers arranged themselves around the Heart tree as they had done the first time, Bran just below the crimson crown. They would all be dead by the time dawn came if it came.

"Theon," Bran called him loud and bluntly; his father's former ward stared at him with a distraught expression. "You're a good man, Theon. Thank you."

Theon stood unflinching as the feeling sank in. Bran saw through him, the longing to feel redeemed. For years he had regretted the betrayal that cost him everything, having discovered the true meaning of loyalty in the cruelest and vile way. 

At least this, Bran could grant him.

***

As much as Podrick would have wanted to stay by the young Stark's side, they needed every swordsman that could fight on the battlefield.

Brienne gave the young man a slight shake and encouraged him with the words, "You have come far...I am proud of you."

They meant as much to him as they did to her. For much of her life, she'd searched for someone who would show her the path; finally, she became that person.

It was a final but good feeling. 

Her promise to Lady Stark had not been in vain, and though Brienne could not forever ensure the welfare of her daughters, both girls were strong enough to fend for themselves. Their mother would be proud of the woman those girls have become.

Brienne continued to issue orders to the men under her command and strode determinedly up to the parapets, from where the vast, thick darkness of the night stretched out. Below them, the trenches and hoardings prepared as a first defense against the dead's attack. Archers were at the ready in the towers.

Even with her mind going over every detail, her spirits fretted with the most primal fear of death. Deep down she knew that to die the death of a Knight was the most honorable thing she had ever dreamed of achieving. As she was deep in these conflicting thoughts, beside her she felt a presence.

Jaime took a sharp breath and stood firmly at her side.

Brienne looked at him intently, a few words stuck in her throat as she watched him astonished. 

"What are you doing here?" she asked him.

He eyed her briefly, swallowing. 

"I think it will be a...great battle," Jaime responded quietly. There was a trace of playfulness in his expression but seriousness overtook him at the same time as if he really wanted to say that he was only there for the rapture of the fight. Every bit the warrior he was.

Yet as he maintained the veil she could tell he was trying not to show that he was afraid. How could they not be? If the enemy hiding in the shadows had the face of death. Right in the abyss between death and oblivion, Jaime Lannister was the honest man she always refused to believe he could be.

***

One of her escorts, Ser Derryl, was breathing obfuscatingly behind Sansa in something of a tantrum-like reproach. Sansa turned to look at him with a sharp glare.

"Be gone, Ser," she commanded, "I'd fancy most the company of these shadows than that of your groans."

Ser Derryl snarled and trotted away, giving Sansa an angry glare. It's on the battlefield that we met our foes and true friends, her father used to say. 

Several minutes after the last batch of non-combatants had passed through the tunnel, only she remained, waiting. A screeching noise blasted out and Sansa started, closing her fist around the knife Arya handed her while the other hand reached out for the torch sconce.

The sound of creaking iron followed by footsteps quickened his breathing; but a familiar figure loomed from the other end, in hurried steps. It was Tyrion. Their gazes clashed as they became aware of each other's presence, Sansa a little startled while he turned from surprise to regret.

"I'm only a hindrance back here, I'll become one of them...And the truth is, I'm afraid," he confessed. 

Sansa was not one to hold expectations of his person nor to feel owed an explanation for the lack of fault in them.

"Courage was never one of your assets, my Lord," she said quietly. 

He nodded and smiled ruefully. 

"Yes. But it's been always yours."

They held each other's gazes for a long moment and then he walked on, past her and into the tunnel to flee with the others. 

***

Arya wore a solemn expression as she watched Drogon take off south toward The Neck. An uneasy feeling turned her stomach. This is not right, she thought, turning and heading down the wooden steps. A suffocating pressure settled in her chest. The fear of losing the ones she loved all of a sudden was as real as when she was just a child, far from home. 

She swept past the throng of people filling every corner of Winterfell when she collided with The Hound, being seized by him before falling flat on her face.

"Hey," he growled, "Watch yourself, child!"

Child, he called her and it enraged Arya to the point she was pushing him off violently. It even took him unawares. 

"What's wrong with you," The Hound barked out. 

Everything was wrong with her, from her inability to protect her own to this new weakness that was compounded by fear. Her strength, her skills, her prowess, all of it futile in the face of this threat. 

Arya looked impossibly wide-eyed at the Hound and did something she had never thought of. She hugged him. She lunged at him and wrapped her arms tightly around him.

"Thank you, Sandor," she said in a muffled voice as he quietly, still awestruck, returned the embrace. 

***

Jon found himself again in the quiet darkness, behind him only the sound of Rhaegal's whirring breathing. The dragon craned its neck and let out a ring of smoke from its nostrils. They both smelled death in the air. 

Jon's hand closed over the dagger at his belt, the Targaryen dagger passed down from generation to generation until it was lost and found its way to him. The purpose of which was to put an end to the Night King, by any means necessary.

Dany's face flashed across his mind at that moment, her face full of unease and sincere concern. His heart skipped a beat, as his mind wrestled with all the guilt that still weighed on him in relation to his actions toward her, and her ability to still feel for him after that. If Jon were to live even after all this, and if she still will it, he would spend the rest of his life building up what he had destroyed. 

But now there was a war ahead. 

He turned around ready to mount Rhaegal and commence the battle, Ghost standing near him in silent vigilance. The wolf looked at Jon with withering eyes.

"Don't lose your ear now, boy," Jon told him.

***

Arya tensed defensively as the priestess walked into the castle, passing by with a decisive and unfazed look on her face. Gendry and Ser Davos near her could not avoid the same reaction, both for different reasons, equally affronted by the red woman's actions. Their behaviors, however, were not the same. Ser Davos walked toward her like an animal stalking its prey while Gendry shifted uncomfortably.

The young Stark reached for her friend's hand, reassuringly as they closed on the haft of his hammer, a tool forged in honor of his true Baratheon blood. Though he tried to detach himself from the knowledge of it, Gendry could not hide the fact that knowing his origin gave him a sense of belonging that nothing else did. Arya felt for him. That this was tainted by the actions of the red witch unnerved her.

When their gazes met, an undeniable truth was laid bare. 

***

Jon and Rhaegal lit the thatched hedge where the front line of the army of the dead met their first obstacle. No cavalry was spent in vain — a ring of ditches, sharpened stakes, and high wooden fences were prepared.

The light from the burning firepit allowed the archers in the towers to aim and loose, illuminating a thick second line coming up behind, piling mindlessly on top of the first.

It was not long before the blizzard that the Night King brought with him hit him hard, sending Jon above the clouds again.

***

Swallowing the bile of anger he held back, Davos let the red witch go and focused his attention on the now, on the battle. He climbed the parapets to watch as Jon got lost above the dark clouds blocking the light. The blind darkness was coming.

In less than half an hour the army had overcome the fire to charge against the castle walls, its monstrous bellowing arousing the most primal fear in soldiers and warriors alike. Davos thought he heard moans, shudders, and even water running. With no sign of Jon, he decided to issue the order to begin the counter-attack.

Buckets of boiling oil ran down the walls, preventing the undead from climbing. Their faces, disfigured by rotting, emitted no expression of pain, they moved at the sole impulse of their master. Eventually, they piled on top of each other to reach the top and start pouring into the castle.

And so the battle started. 

***

His sword of ordinary steel was a poor replacement for Widow's Wail and though he wanted to make it count by cutting through the mindless beasts that attacked him, it was Brienne's sword, Oathkeeper, that finished them off. Suffering the same struggle was her apprentice, little Podrick Payne, to the brim in dead that kept pushing him to the edge of the parapets. 

You never believed in any of this, father, Jaime found himself rambling, but I wonder what you would have done if you had found yourself here, with an enemy you could neither subsume to your unbeatable will nor coerce with fear and blood. What would the magnanimous Lord Tywin have thought of his last hope of legacy, fighting at Winterfell under the command of House Stark and House Targaryen? 

Thus the pride of a House that boasted of always paying its debts collapsed and died. At least James could fulfill his vows in such a way. 

The wooden platform beneath them gave way and began to collapse, Brienne's broken cry startled him up and he turned to see her watch in horror as her young apprentice was dragged away from her.

***

Rhaegal let out a shriek and Jon followed with a bellow as a violent draught hit them from the side almost blindly, as the whirlwind of fog and snow blinded him to an unknown route. From up there caught in the snowstorm he had no visual advantage and soon began to hear the whistling of spears being shot at them. Ice spears. Although Rhaegal deftly dodged them, the sharp spikes scraped his emerald stone armor. Jon held on to him as long as he could but soon saw the need to get away from there. Remembering his time with Dany, he soared high above the storm, hovering where the air was coldest and harsher. Finding himself impeded by the attack in the sky and disoriented, he closed his eyes and felt the wind. When he opened his eyes he knew where he should fly to and commanded Rhaegal to the south.

Landing on the hills behind the king's road, Jon leaped down from Rhaegal in a single bound, rolling over himself and bolting up almost instantly. With a silent command, Rhaegal took flight again, away from the battle. Jon slipped away and watched from afar, Winterfell being engulfed by the army of the dead, the walls barely holding themselves together. Without another thought, he charged his way across the battlefield, leaping over pits and stakes and the pieces of still-reanimated bodies that sought to cling to his legs. A mixture of rot, flesh, wood, and burned rock poisoned the air.

Ice crackled and swords sang, men fell bellowing from towers as the beastly sounds emitted by the beasts sought to drown out the wailing of the living. Longclaw gutted left and right, Jon's mind clouded by the sole consequence of reaching the Night King. Soon he found himself inside Winterfell, stumbling back to his feet after receiving blows of debris and rubble on his head, his face, and his entire body bruised and cut. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw familiar images again, Gendry as a savage hammering away at a mountain of dead men seeking to bring him down. Sam painfully slashing with a dragonglass dagger. Jon did not stop. Unlike Daenerys, he did not think to avoid the inevitable, to change what was meant to be. It was his own actions that he would own this time. 

His heartbeat thundered inside his head as his breathing came out ragged like that of a dying man. Jon trudged through the snow toward the Godswood, stumbling over corpses that lay heaped on the cold ground, half-buried, walking past them warily lest they wake. This time he was not stove off by a dragon breathing blue fire. The stench of decay permeated the air and clung to his mouth. The branches of the trees greeted him like swords in the dark, brushing him sharply as he dodged them toward the Heart Tree. 

***

"Brienne, up, up, up! The battle rages on!" Jaime shook her with a strength he didn't know where he got from as she mourned the loss of the Payne lad. "Ser!" called Jaime in a more blunt tone. "The King needs us," he warned her.

All but in name, Brienne was a knight. The bravest and most deserving that Jaime had ever known in his life. If she was lucky enough and came out of it alive, greater battles and losses awaited her. She could not let herself fall now.

Jaime saw out of the corner of his eye the ice knights pass by, one of them returning a sinister glare. In their midst was, he knew, the Night King. Hampered by the dead that still overtook them he saw no point in following those beings, but soon after he saw Jon Snow cross the courtyard, and blindly follow the convoy.

***

Melissandre turned, knowing that not far away were the walkers of darkness, coming in search of the memory that guards the history of man. Somewhere else she knew that Arya Stark was fighting her way here, the clearing in the forest where her brother lay unprotected after his archer's shield was breached. She saw it again, 

Void eyes.

Dark blood.

The cry of the motherless.

A fallen king.

A standing king. 

One king.

She served no lord but the Lord of Light. She bowed to no king but to the chosen one. Walking purposefully toward him, Melissandre watched him with burning eyes.

The Three Eyed Raven looked at her with a vacant stare. 

She lifted his jaw with one hand.

"Void eyes. Dark blood. The cry of the motherless. A fallen king. A standing king. One king," she chanted to him, "Light will prevail and fire will rule the kingdom of men."

Her voice trailed off on the last words, as a sword crossed her midriff, bright ice blue jagged with flecks of her own dark blood. 

The illuminated stone on her necklace flickered, glowing one last time before fading completely as the priestess turned to dust, revealing the Night King.

***

Jon stopped at the obstacle in his path.

Five walkers stood awaited him, glaring, unfazed, and armed with their ice swords. What he felt at that moment could only be annoyance. The image of them once left him pale with dread but now it was merely another enemy in front of him to deal with. 

The first one stepped up and attacked immediately, driving Jon back on his heels with one long looping cut after another. Soon he was followed by the others, till Jon's arm had gone numb from the exertion although he never withdraw. He staggered, yes, his head ringing with a high-pitched sound as the world became was a blur. But then another pair of steel swords joined the fray, and Jon was no longer alone.

***

Bran looked upon the Night King's contemptuous face in the same fashion he had quietly stared at Melissandre's a few moments before. He sensed already that he knew, as Bran knew that this could only end with one of them dead. 

Melissandre's words were not lost on him. Void eyes. Dark blood. The cry of the motherless. A fallen king. A standing king. One king. Arya would not arrive in time to save him, without Melissandre's guidance. By the time his siblings were to arrive, it would be too late, and the consequences would be immediately apparent. Chaos would be unleashed with temporality affected, and darkness and nothingness itself would reign in a world without order and form. 

As it has been since the beginning, which is also the end, Bran heard in his mind, a voice that was new to him.

A devilish grin spread across the Night King's face, his finger rising to touch Bran's forehead.

All he saw then was darkness.

***

Jon gained enough of a lead to outrun the walkers and continue on his way, as Brienne of Tarth led the fight. When he looked over his shoulder it was as if time slowed down for a moment, and he was trapped there, between mortality and eternity. Exhaustion weighed on him, his wounds bleeding and throbbing as he limped towards the Heart Tree. His despondent heart took it for granted that he had failed, that the Night King had come to Bran and that was it.

They had failed. 

For the quietest second Jon gave in to a bark of laughter — he was tired of fighting, and a part of him rejoiced in the victory of his enemy. What a surprise awaited him when he found Bran beneath the crown of red leaves, his face distorted with an expression of horror.

Jon neared him and asked him what had happened. 

"Burn it all!" Bran said, despaired, "We must burn them all!"

***

Sansa felt the vault's ceiling shaking as the dust of earth rained down on her head, the thudding and thumping indicating the commotion upstairs sending her heart to a race. She looked back as a cool breeze caressed her face and back again so that one side of her face was lit by the fire of the crypts and the other by the darkness of the corridor that invited her to flee. 

The creaking iron rattled and she heard a heavy presence descending the steps bringing along a sharp breeze that wavered the flames of the lit candles of the crypts. It was no longer the ceiling above her head shaking, but the walls, the stone structure that kept guarded their dead's final rest. From the other end of the corridor came a shadowy, devilish figure, with ice skin and winter eyes. 

Sansa let out a gasp and the dagger she held so fiercely in her grip fell to the ground, shattering. The Night King began his steady advance toward her, raising his arms and the bodies inside the crypts. Her inert body was unresponsive. 

A whistling sound came.

A dark-tipped arrow pierced the Night King's neck from behind. 

At the bottom of the steps a distance away, Theon stood, readying another arrow.

"Sansa!" he shouted, "Now!"

It was like a thunderous roar.

Her heart ached inside her but she threw the torch on the oil that had been strategically spread in the crypts. The fire erupted violently, making the bodies groan and shriek as they tried to rise from their eternal rest.

Her face streaked with tears, her throat beginning to close, Sansa dared one last glance at Theon, who smiled happily at her, before disappearing into the tunnel and making her escape.

***

Sansa lagged behind, surging somewhere in the forest, far from any family and friends. Alone. After so long, alone again. The night was dark and she thought to hear wolves singing somewhere not far away. Tired and with sulfurous emotions running high, she sat down on the snow with a blank stare. 

A sudden glow and she looked up, bolting up to her feet to see Winterfell, her home, burn completely to the ground.

She started weeping.