Chapter 105 – The Wights
"Snow! Snow!"
Beneath the encircling wall, a black-clad, heavyset man cowered beneath a crude shelter formed by intersecting rocks and iron cages. Inside one of the cages, ravens flapped wildly, screeching a single name over and over.
The shrill echo of the horn still seemed to linger in the frozen air.
The entire camp had plunged into chaos.
An ugly man with a massive pink tumor bulging from his neck ran past the fat man, swearing loudly as he went. A dark trail dripped from his trouser leg and froze almost instantly on the ground—he had been scared so badly that he'd wet himself.
"Form up! All hands assemble!"
The aged yet thunderous command rang out from deep within the camp, carrying faintly through the storm.
The fat man jolted upright at once. Instead of running immediately, he unlocked the cages and released the messenger ravens, watching them vanish into the blizzard. Only after carefully gathering his belongings—checking them one by one—did he finally draw his longsword, hands shaking violently, and hurry toward the main force.
By now, the brothers in black were already forming defensive lines along the wall.
Torchlight flickered in the snowstorm as tense faces stared into the darkness ahead.
Three horn blasts.
Three.
One blast meant brothers returning.
Two meant enemies approaching.
But three…
How long had it been since anyone had heard three?
Three blasts meant the White Walkers.
The Others.
"What… what do they look like?"
An archer whispered, bowstring drawn tight, his voice quivering.
"Who knows?"
Before the answer could finish, a shadow emerged from the snow-covered slope ahead.
A wildling—if it could still be called that—charged forward. His clothes were torn and rotting, his flesh split and decayed. One of his legs was nothing but bare bone from the knee down, yet it didn't slow him in the slightest as he sprinted across the snow.
Behind him, shapes poured out of the storm.
Death-hounds with exposed organs.
A massive bear missing half its jaw.
Skeletal warriors with ribcages yawning open.
Flesh and bone stripped apart, all signs of life grotesquely inverted.
Under the howling wind, an army of the dead surged forward.
As the horror closed in, one archer broke first—loosing an arrow without orders. It struck a wight square in the forehead.
The creature didn't even stagger.
Instead, it seemed enraged—its pace increasing as it charged faster.
"Fire! Light the arrows—fire arrows!"
The shout snapped the men awake.
In frantic haste, flaming shafts were launched into the storm, streaking through the snow in blazing arcs.
Fire rained down.
The leading wights ignited one after another. Silent screams twisted their burning forms as they thrashed, turning into walking torches.
"They burn!"
Someone breathed in relief.
But the moment didn't last.
The fire could not stem the tide.
More and more wights emerged from the darkness, countless shapes rushing forward beneath a sky smothered in black clouds. Snow fell in thick, blinding sheets, and the dead poured out endlessly—so many that their true numbers were impossible to gauge.
Once the enemy closed the distance, bows became useless.
The archers roared, dropped their bows, and seized spears and polearms.
Only a few heartbeats later—
The wights slammed into the line.
The flood of corpses crashed down.
Under the berserk charge, even the ancient stone ring wall atop the mountain seemed to tremble, rumbling beneath the impact. Long spears pierced through the withered bodies of the wights, yet the effect was pitiful—nothing compared to the devastation caused by fire arrows.
One Night's Watchman was caught completely off guard.
He drove his spear with all his strength into a wight's neck, nearly severing its head. Yet the creature behaved as if nothing had happened. Its desiccated hands clamped onto the shaft of the spear, and with uncanny agility it climbed up along it, pouncing straight onto the Watchman and knocking him to the ground.
A longsword slashed in from the side, chopping off the wight's head.
But even that failed to halt it.
The decapitated corpse continued to flail wildly, its shriveled hands clawing at the fallen Watchman's face. Blood streamed from deep gashes; filthy bone fingers gouged out his eyes. Amid screams and spurting blood, it was obvious he would not survive.
He was far from the only one.
All around them, the Night's Watch fell into despair at the wights' horrifying nature.
Spears could not stop them.
Even severing their heads did not immediately kill them—only provoked even more frenzied retaliation.
Though several hundred brothers still held the ring wall, its defensive advantage now felt meaningless. They were like a crude wooden fence trying to hold back a tidal wave of death, moments away from being torn apart.
In truth, if the enemy frontage here had been even slightly wider, they would already have been annihilated.
The battle line—only recently formed—was on the brink of collapse.
---
The ring wall was not tall.
As wights began piling atop one another, climbing higher and higher, every man felt his legs start to shake.
"We should retreat!" someone shouted urgently to the bald, white-bearded old commander.
"Retreat! Retreat!"
The raven perched on the old man's shoulder echoed the cry in a shrill voice, perfectly voicing what everyone was thinking.
Holding the line was suicide.
But retreat promised little better.
Yet they had no choice.
"Ser Othell," the old commander barked, "take your men and lead the breakout through the rear!"
"Yes!"
"Thoren, you and your men will cover the retreat. Buy time for the others. Can you do it?"
"I can!" Thoren answered through clenched teeth.
Seeing his resolute expression, the Lord Commander opened his mouth to issue another order—
And suddenly, a burst of white light exploded beyond the ring wall.
The light bloomed without warning, illuminating everything outside the mountain stronghold. Every wight was revealed in stark clarity. They recoiled in terror, screaming as the light washed over them.
Those preparing to flee froze in disbelief.
As they watched the wights begin to smoke and blister under the radiance, a wave of desperate relief washed through them.
But then—
A strange, distant howl echoed across the darkness.
The white light vanished instantly.
Darkness fell again.
The wights surged forward once more, and the Night's Watch broke into a panicked retreat.
---
Following the commander's orders, a group of just over twenty men formed a rearguard—a suicide squad. Their faces were tight with fear and resolve as they faced the oncoming horde.
But numbers told the story.
They lasted barely ten seconds before being completely overwhelmed.
And by then, the main force had not yet fully withdrawn from the mountain.
What followed was inevitable.
---
Charles watched everything in silence, utterly powerless.
Gathering purifying light in the dead of night was already difficult—let alone under the suppression of that unknown force.
The flash of light he had just summoned had taken an absurd amount of effort to manifest, and the enemy hadn't even shown itself before extinguishing it with a single roar.
All he could do was watch as countless men died before his eyes.
He had briefly considered using corpse reanimation to counter the undead army—but the enemy was far faster.
Yet that, at least, allowed him to see the truth.
The creation of wights was nothing like necromancy.
What he witnessed shattered his assumptions.
When the rearguard Watchmen died, their souls crawled out of their bodies—but only briefly. Under the wights' gnawing, those souls were torn apart just like their corpses, dissolving into gray mist and vanishing completely.
At the same time, the mangled bodies—half-buried in snow—suddenly opened their eyes.
Their pupils glowed an icy blue.
"This isn't necromancy at all," Charles realized.
Standing amid the "empty" camp as countless horrors rushed past, a chill ran through him.
Necromancers wield death and souls.
But this power devoured the souls of the living and then granted the corpse an entirely new existence.
If wights were merely soldiers—
Then what, exactly, were the Others?
He didn't know.
And after what he'd just witnessed, he couldn't even be certain that his current state was completely safe.
Charles cast one last glance at the sky.
Golden flames flared across his brow.
And his figure vanished from the mountain.