A/N: Ohhh weee, now we are moving. I would like to also mention that I made some updates to the ending of chapter 46 and also for Leia's POV in chapter 27 about the pregnancy. Enjoy the chapter! :)
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Year 299 AC/8 ABY
Hyperspace
The mottled blue tunnel of hyperspace stretched out before the cockpit viewport, a swirling, hypnotic vortex that usually offered Leia Organa Solo a sense of suspended peace. It was the space between worlds, a place where politics, war, and the endless responsibilities of the New Republic could not reach her. But today, the infinite tunnel felt less like a sanctuary and more like a cage.
She shifted in the co-pilot's seat, the worn leather creaking beneath her. Her hand moved instinctively to the swell of her stomach, resting there as if to steady the lives growing inside her against the unnatural speed of their travel.
From the main hold, the familiar, domestic sounds of the Millennium Falcon drifted forward. There was the sharp clatter of holographic monsters engaging in combat, followed immediately by a mournful, frustrated groan from Han.
"That's not a legal move, fuzzball!" Han's voice echoed down the corridor, carrying that specific tone of indignation he reserved for losing at Dejarik. "You can't just reach across the board and—hey! Don't give me that look. I know what a Strato-strider does, and it doesn't do that."
A low, vibrating roar rumbled in response, sounding distinctly smug.
Leia allowed a small, tired smile to touch her lips. It was a comfort, that sound. It was the sound of home, regardless of where in the galaxy they were.
C-3PO bustled in, his golden plating gleaming under the harsh cockpit lights. He moved with that perpetual, fretful energy that had been his defining trait for as long as she had known him.
"Princess Leia," the droid began, his voice pitched to a tone of high anxiety. "I have taken the liberty of calculating the optimal spinal curvature for a human female in your... delicate condition. The co-pilot's chair is woefully inadequate. Might I fetch you a nutrient pack? Or perhaps a lumbar cushion? I have located one in the emergency stores that appears only slightly singed."
Leia turned her head, offering the droid a gentle look. "I'm fine, Threepio. Really."
"But Princess, the stress of re-entry—"
"Is nothing I haven't handled before," she said, her voice firm but kind. "Go strap yourself in. We're close."
"Oh, very well," Threepio fretted, waving his arms slightly. "Though I must state for the record that this entire expedition is highly irregular. The Unknown Regions are uncharted for a reason!"
As the droid shuffled out, muttering about the probability of asteroid collisions, Leia turned back to the blue swirl. Her hand pressed firmer against her abdomen.
She felt them then. The dual presence in the Force, two distinct, flickering lights orbiting one another within her. They were restless today.
The twins were awake, their nascent consciousness brushing against hers like moth wings against a windowpane. They felt agitated, swirling with an energy that mirrored the chaotic vortex outside the ship. They knew. Somehow, in the way that Skywalker blood always knew before the mind could comprehend, they sensed the destination.
"Hey."
The voice was soft, stripping away the bravado of the Dejarik game. Han slid into the cockpit, checking the chrono, his face bathed in the blue light of the hyperdrive. For a second, he didn't look at the controls. He looked at her. His hazel eyes searched her face, taking in the fatigue around her eyes, the protective hand on her stomach. It was a look of raw, unguarded affection that he would have denied under torture.
"You doing okay?" he asked, his voice low.
"We're fine," Leia said, including the twins in the answer. "Just ready to be out of this tunnel."
Han nodded, masking the tenderness with his usual smuggler's focus. He turned to the console, flipping switches with practiced ease. "Coming up on the coordinates. Strap in. Chewie!" he shouted over his shoulder. "Get up here! We're dropping in three!"
Chewbacca squeezed into the cockpit a moment later, barking a confirmation as he strapped into the navigation seat behind them.
"Alright," Han said, his hands gripping the twin levers of the hyperdrive. "Let's see what kind of rock the kid found this time. Three. Two. One."
He pulled back on the levers.
The blue tunnel snapped. The swirling vortex elongated into infinite lines of white starlight, stretching and thinning until they shattered into the hard, black void of realspace.
The Falcon shuddered as it decelerated, hanging in the silence of the void.
And then it hit her.
It wasn't a physical impact, not against the hull of the ship. It was an impact against her soul.
Leia gasped, the sound tearing from her throat as she doubled over. Her hands clawed at the console, her knuckles turning white.
The Force here was... wrong.
No, not wrong. Loud.
It was thick and heavy, a churning ocean of energy that washed over the ship with suffocating intensity. In the known galaxy, the Force flowed like a river—light and dark, yes, but structured. Here, it felt wild. Ancient. It felt like the air before a thunderstorm, charged with ozone and violence. It pressed against her shields, against the bright sparks of the twins, demanding to be felt.
"Leia!"
The chair beside her spun around. Han abandoned the controls, leaving the sublight drift to Chewie. He was out of his seat in an instant, his hands gripping her shoulders.
"Leia? What is it?" His voice cracked, sharp with panic. His eyes darted to her stomach, terror written plainly on his face. "Is it the twins? Is something wrong?"
Leia squeezed her eyes shut, trying to build a mental wall against the onslaught. She forced herself to breathe, inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth, finding the center of the storm.
"No," she gasped, shaking her head. She opened her eyes, finding Han's terrified gaze. She reached up, gripping his forearm to anchor herself. "No, Han. The babies are fine. We're fine."
"Then what?" Han demanded, his grip on her shoulders not loosening. "You look like you just took a blaster bolt."
"It's not us," she whispered, looking out the viewport at the planet rotating below them. It was a beautiful world, swathed in white clouds and vast blue oceans, with continents of green and grey. But to her second sight, it was blazing. "It's... this place."
Han looked at the planet, then back at her, confusion warring with relief. "I don't feel anything but a headache coming on. But if you say it's the planet..." He exhaled, a long, shuddering breath, the tension draining from his frame as he realized his family wasn't in immediate medical danger. "Okay. Okay. It's the planet."
He stood up, running a hand through his hair, shifting instantly from terrified husband back to mission commander. He stepped back to the pilot's chair and sat down, though he kept glancing at her.
"Is it Luke?" Han asked, staring at the world below. "Is that what you're feeling? Can you sense him?"
Leia frowned, closing her eyes again. She tried to extend her senses, to find the familiar, bright signature of her brother. Usually, Luke was a beacon to her—a clear note in the galaxy's song.
But here, the song was a cacophony.
"I... I can't isolate him," she admitted, frustration bleeding into her voice. "The background noise... it's too loud. It's chaotic. There's so much life down there, and death. It's all mixed together." She opened her eyes. "But he is there. I know he is."
"That's good enough for me," Han said. He turned to the sensor array. "Chewie, run a full scan. Let's find a place to set her down."
Chewbacca growled a negative, tapping a clawed finger against his monitor.
"What do you mean 'interference'?" Han snapped. He leaned over his own display. "Blast it. Look at this."
The nav-computer screen was flickering, lines of static scrolling through the topographical data. The sensors were struggling to lock onto anything specific.
"Magnetic interference?" Leia asked, leaning forward, the initial shock of the Force pressure fading into a dull, throbbing ache at the back of her mind.
"Maybe," Han muttered, tapping the gauge. "Or maybe it's whatever voodoo you're feeling out there messing with the circuits. This planet's got an atmosphere thick enough to chew on."
Suddenly, a light blinked on the dashboard.
It was faint. Passive. A rhythmic, pulsing amber light that cut through the static on the comms board.
Ping... Ping... Ping...
Han froze. He reached out, isolating the frequency. He adjusted the gain, filtering out the atmospheric noise until the signal was clear.
"I know that code," Han said softly.
Leia looked at the readout. It wasn't a voice. It was a digital handshake, a loop of binary encryption. "Old Alliance," she realized. "Pre-Endor codes."
"R2," Han said, a grin breaking across his face. "That little rust bucket. It's running on low power, probably standby mode."
He punched a few keys, triangulating the source. The computer fought him, the static trying to obscure the location, but the signal was persistent.
"Gotcha," Han said. "The longer continent. Looks like... mountains? Or a forest? Hard to tell with the sensors jumping around like this."
"Is Luke with him?" Leia asked, leaning closer to the screen.
"The signal is stationary," Han said, analyzing the data. "He probably left the droid to watch the ship, or maybe as a marker for a safe house. It's a breadcrumb trail, Leia. The kid knew we'd come looking eventually."
He looked at her, the old confident spark back in his eyes. "He's down there. Probably sitting by a fire, wondering what took us so long."
Leia looked at the coordinates. The signal was coming from a vast, white expanse on the northernmost part of the continent. Even from orbit, she could feel a chill radiating from that sector of the planet, a coldness that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the void she had felt earlier.
"Han," she said, a sudden hesitation gripping her. "That area... it feels... dark."
"It's just snow, sweetheart," Han said, dismissing the worry with a wave of his hand. He grabbed the yoke, disengaging the autopilot. "We've handled snow before. Remember Hoth?"
"I remember freezing," Leia said dryly.
"Exactly. We'll be fine." Han turned to Chewie. "Lock in those coordinates. We're going in."
Chewie roared an affirmative, his paws flying over the controls to compensate for the atmospheric turbulence.
Han glanced back at Leia, his expression softening. "Hey. We found him. We're just going to pop down, pick up the kid, and get out of here before the twins decide to make an early appearance. Easy in, easy out."
"It's never easy with Luke," Leia murmured, though she strapped herself in tighter.
"Yeah, well," Han grinned, pushing the throttle forward. The Millennium Falcon banked sharply, its nose dipping toward the swirling white clouds of the northern hemisphere. "Let's go get the kid."
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Year 299 AC/8 ABY
Fist of the First Men, Beyond the Wall
The White Walker raised its blade, a shard of translucent crystal that caught the starlight and twisted it into something sickly and pale. As the weapon reached its apex, the world ended. Not with fire, but with the absence of it.
The bonfires, roaring towers of timber and oil that had warmed the summit only a heartbeat before, did not dwindle. They vanished. It was as if a giant hand had descended from the heavens and smothered the Fist of the First Men. The torches held by the Night's Watch rangers sputtered once, turning the color of a bruise, and died.
Grey twilight slammed down upon the camp, heavy and suffocating.
The cold followed instantly. It was not the biting wind of the Wall, nor the deep freeze of a winter night. This was absolute. It froze the sweat on Robb's brow into ice in the span of a breath. It turned the moisture in the air into a glittering fog of diamond dust that stung the eyes and burned the lungs.
"Fire!" someone screamed in the darkness. "The fire is gone!"
Panic, sharp and brittle, shattered the discipline of the Free Folk. For the wildlings, fire was life. It was the only thing that kept the Long Night at bay. Seeing it extinguished so effortlessly broke something primal in them.
"Charge!" The Weeper shrieked, his voice cracking with hysteria. "Kill them! Kill them before the cold takes us!"
The mob surged. Thousands of terrified men and women, blinded by the sudden dark and maddened by fear, pushed toward the lip of the ringwall. They sought to throw themselves down the slope, to meet the horror with steel and teeth rather than wait for it to claim them in the dark.
Robb saw the disaster unfolding with a clarity that felt detached. If they broke the ring, if they surrendered the high ground to charge into that freezing mist, they would be slaughtered. The dead would pull them down into the snow and add their corpses to the army before the hour was up.
He could not let them run.
He reached for the Force. It felt different here, sluggish and thick, resisting him like water turning to ice. But he grabbed hold of it, channeling it into his chest, into his throat. He drew breath, filling his lungs not just with air, but with will.
"HOLD!"
The word exploded from him, amplified by power until it rivaled the thunder of a collapsing glacier. It cut through the wind, through the screams, through the panic. It resonated in the stones of the ancient ringwall and vibrated in the bones of every man on the summit.
"DO NOT BREAK THE RING!" Robb's voice boomed, authoritative and undeniable. "LET THEM CLIMB TO US!"
The surge faltered. The sheer volume of the command stunned the wildlings into a momentary paralysis.
Mance Rayder, standing near the extinguished central fire, seized the moment. He stared at Robb for a heartbeat, his eyes wide with astonishment at the impossible sound that had just ripped from the boy's throat. He did not possess the Force, but he possessed a king's presence.
"You heard the Stark!" Mance bellowed, drawing his sword. "Shields up! Spears forward! If you run, you die tired! Stand and fight!"
"Form the line!" Benjen Stark's voice joined the chorus, steady and grim. "Night's Watch, anchor the center! Don't let them through!"
"Giants!" Tormund Giantsbane roared, leaping onto a pile of rubble at the northern breach. "Wun Wun! Mag! Get your ugly arses to the front! Make a wall!"
The panic curdled into desperate resolve. The Free Folk scrambled back from the edge, forming a ragged shield wall along the perimeter of the ruins. Thenn bronze locked with Night's Watch steel. Giants lumbered into position, their massive shadows looming in the twilight, tearing up boulders from the ruins of the First Men's fort.
Robb moved to the front, Grey Wind at his side. The direwolf was silent now, his teeth bared, his body a coiled spring.
"Steady," Robb whispered, though he was speaking as much to himself as to his men. "Steady."
Then, they came.
There was no war cry. No horns blew. The wights did not scream.
They simply ascended.
Thousands of blue stars surged up the steep, snowy slopes of the Fist. It looked like the tide coming in, a relentless wave of dead flesh washing over the rocks. They scrambled over the scree and ice with unnatural speed, fingers worn to bone digging into the frozen earth.
The terrain, steep and treacherous, was the only ally the living had. The wights stumbled, slipped, and climbed over one another in their mindless drive to reach the summit. They formed piles of writhing limbs, stepping on the heads of the fallen to gain height.
"Archers!" The Smalljon roared. "Loose!"
A volley of arrows hissed into the dark. They struck home with wet thuds, piercing chests and throats, but the wights did not stop. They did not feel pain. They did not fear death. They only knew hunger.
"Brace!" Robb shouted as the wave crested the lip of the wall.
The collision was hideous. It sounded like wet meat slapping against stone.
The dead hit the shield wall with the force of an avalanche. Spears snapped. Shields splintered. Men screamed as cold, black hands grabbed at their ankles, their cloaks, their faces.
Robb stepped into the gap between a Thenn spearman and a ranger. A wight, clad in the rusted mail of an ancient ironborn raider, lunged at him. Its jaw was gone, its tongue lolling black and swollen.
Robb didn't think. He moved.
His sword flashed, a silver arc in the gloom. He took the wight's head off at the neck. The body collapsed, but the head continued to snap its teeth in the snow.
Another came behind it. A wildling woman with a spear through her gut. She clawed at him, her nails like iron. Robb parried her clumsy strike and drove his boot into her chest, kicking her back down the slope. She took three others with her, tumbling into the darkness.
"They don't stop!" Artos Flint yelled, hacking the arm off a corpse that tried to strangle him with its remaining hand. "Gods have mercy, they don't stop!"
"Then cut them to pieces!" Robb shouted back. He severed the leg of a wight that had crawled over the shield wall. The torso kept dragging itself forward, clawing at his boots. Robb stomped on its spine, feeling the vertebrae crunch, but still, the arms reached for him.
The living had the numbers—a hundred thousand Free Folk packed onto the summit—but only the front ranks could fight. And the enemy felt no fatigue. They did not breathe. They did not bleed out.
On the flanks, the giants were earning their legends.
Wun Wun stood at the eastern breach, wielding a tree trunk like a club. He roared, a sound like a breaking mountain, and swept the log across the slope. The impact turned a dozen wights into a spray of black ichor and broken bone. He smashed them into paste, hurling boulders the size of ponies down the hill, crushing scores of the climbing dead.
But for every wight crushed, two more scrambled over the remains.
To the west, Mag Mar Tun Doh Weg held the line. The King of the Giants was a terrifying sight, clad in mammoth pelts and iron plates. He didn't use a weapon; he used his hands and feet. He stomped wights into the mud. He ripped them apart like wet parchment.
But the dead swarmed.
They didn't try to fight the giant. They climbed him.
Robb spared a glance to the west and felt his stomach turn. Hundreds of wights were piling onto Mag's legs, stabbing with rusty knives, biting with black teeth. They covered his back, his chest, his arms. He looked like a bear swarmed by ants.
Mag roared in fury and pain, ripping a handful of wights from his shoulder and crushing them, but the weight was dragging him down. He stumbled.
"Help him!" Robb shouted, trying to push toward the western flank, but the press of bodies was too thick.
Mag fell to one knee. The wights surged over his head. His roar turned into a gurgling scream as they tore at his throat, his eyes, his face. The great giant disappeared under a mound of writhing, stabbing corpses. The mound continued to shudder for a moment, then went still.
The line buckled where Mag had fallen.
"Hold!" Mance Rayder was there, his red-and-black cloak flying as he threw himself into the breach. "Fill the gap! Don't let them through!"
The battle dissolved into a blur of horror. Time lost its meaning. There was only the swing of the sword, the impact of steel on frozen flesh, the desperate struggle to keep footing on blood-slicked rocks. Robb's arms burned with exhaustion. The cold was seeping into his muscles, making his sword feel like a lead weight.
He was hacking at a wight that wore the tatters of a Night's Watch cloak when he felt it.
A silence in the Force. A void moving through the chaos.
Robb looked down the slope.
Through the melee, the White Walker ascended.
It did not run. It did not scramble. It walked. It moved with a fluid, predatory grace, its feet barely disturbing the snow. The wights parted before it like water before the prow of a ship.
It reached the line of defenders.
A Thenn warrior, a massive man with copper scars on his cheeks, screamed a challenge and swung a heavy bronze axe at the creature.
The Walker didn't even raise its sword. It caught the haft of the axe with one pale hand.
There was a sound like a crack of thunder. The bronze shattered into dust.
The Walker stepped forward and touched the Thenn's chest. The warrior gasped, his eyes going wide. Frost spread instantly from the point of contact, turning his skin blue, then black. He fell backward, frozen solid before he hit the ground.
The Walker stepped over him.
It carved a path through the defenders effortlessly. It moved with a terrifying economy of motion. A parry, a thrust, a touch. Men died, their weapons shattering, their bodies freezing.
It wasn't killing indiscriminately. It was hunting.
Robb felt the creature's attention sweep across the summit, a cold spotlight searching the dark. It passed over Mance. It passed over Tormund.
Then, it found him.
The connection was instantaneous and violent. Robb felt a hook sink into his psyche. The Walker stopped. Across the bloodstained snow, over the heads of the fighting men, its blue eyes locked onto Robb's.
It pointed its crystal blade.
You.
The word wasn't spoken, but Robb heard it in his skull.
"Smalljon!" Robb shouted, realizing the creature's path. "Get back!"
Smalljon Umber, seeing the threat to his liege lord, roared and charged the Walker. He swung his greatsword, a blow that would have cleaved a horse in two.
The Walker didn't bother to parry. It simply backhanded the giant Northman.
The blow was casual, dismissive. Yet the Smalljon was lifted off his feet as if he weighed nothing. He flew through the air and crashed into a snowdrift, groaning, his sword spinning away into the dark.
The Walker did not pause. It walked toward Robb. The fighting around them seemed to fade, the screams and the clash of steel dampening into a dull roar.
Five paces from Robb, it stopped.
The cold that radiated from it was intense, a physical pressure that pushed against Robb's mental shields. It felt violating, as if the creature was trying to peel back the layers of his mind to see what lay beneath.
The Walker looked directly into Robb's eyes. Its face was gaunt and hard, like a statue carved from glacial ice. It opened its mouth.
"I see you."
The voice was not human. Robb froze. It sounded like ice cracking on a deep lake, ancient and resonant, vibrating with a frequency that made Robb's teeth ache.
Terror, cold and sharp, tried to seize Robb's heart. He fought it down, clutching the hilt of his sword until his knuckles turned white.
"Why?!" Robb shouted, his voice cracking with the strain. "Why are you doing this?"
The Walker gave no answer. Its face returned to a mask of impassive ice. The curiosity was gone. Now, there was only purpose.
It raised its crystal sword and lunged.
Robb moved.
He didn't rely on his muscles alone. He met the attack with the ferocity of Djem So.
He sidestepped the thrust, the crystal blade passing inches from his ribs. The cold radiating from the weapon burned his skin through his furs.
Robb countered instantly, swinging a heavy overhand blow aimed at the Walker's shoulder.
The creature parried.
CRACK.
The sound was not of metal ringing against crystal. It sounded like a glacier calving. Robb's castle-forged steel did not hold. It did not even notch. It exploded.
Shards of steel sprayed the air like shrapnel. Robb cried out as a piece of his own blade sliced his cheek. He was left clutching nothing but a useless, vibration-stung hilt.
Disarmed in a single stroke.
The Walker was fast. Inhumanly fast. It did not pause to admire its work. It spun and slashed at Robb's legs with the crystal blade that had just vaporized his weapon.
Robb leaped back. He used a desperate Force jump to clear the killing arc. He landed in a crouch, weaponless and exposed.
The Walker stepped in and drove a knee into Robb's chest.
The air left Robb's lungs. He staggered back while gasping for breath. He dropped the useless hilt. The creature was strong. Stronger than the Smalljon. Stronger than a bear.
Is that all? The Walker seemed to mock, though its lips did not move.
It advanced. It swung the crystal sword in a lazy, terrifying arc.
Robb scrambled backward over the snow. Left. Right. He dodged a backhand strike that sheared the top off a stone marker beside him. Stone dust sprayed his face, cold and gritty.
He tried to stand, but his heels found empty air.
He was backed to the precipice. Behind him lay a three-hundred-foot drop into the storm-lashed valley. Before him stood death in ice armor.
The Walker loomed over him. It raised its blade for the final stroke. Its mouth curled in a sneer, and it spoke a word in Skroth. It sounded like grinding glaciers.
Robb stared at the blade. He reached for the Force. He tried to find a grip on the creature's throat, or its arm, or its weapon. He pushed.
Nothing happened.
The Walker was grounded. It felt heavy, anchored to the dark magic of the planet itself. It was a pillar of ice that could not be moved. The blade began to descend.
I'm going to die.
The thought was clear and calm.
Then a grey blur tore through the snowfall.
Grey Wind struck in silence. The direwolf launched himself from behind a rocky outcrop, fur and fury slamming into the Other's side. Massive jaws clamped onto the Walker's sword hand.
Robb heard the crunch. It was not the sound of bone breaking. It was the sound of teeth cracking against something harder than steel.
The Walker did not cry out. It merely flicked its arm. The motion was dismissive, almost gentle, yet it carried the unnatural strength of an avalanche. Grey Wind was torn loose and hurled through the air. The wolf slammed into a boulder ten yards away with a sickening thud. He slid down into the snow and did not rise.
"No!" Robb screamed.
The fear vanished. The panic evaporated. In their place, a hot, white rage erupted in his chest.
The Other turned its glowing blue eyes toward the fallen wolf. It seemed to consider finishing the beast off.
Robb saw his chance. He threw himself sideways. He rolled over the jagged stones, scrambling away from the abyss, putting distance between himself and the ledge. He came up in a crouch against the mountain wall.
The Walker turned back to him. Now the creature stood with the drop at its back.
Let go.
The voice was not Master Luke's.
It was older. It carried a strange accent, refined and patient, like a maester from the Citadel.
Your eyes deceive you, the mysterious voice whispered from the space between his thoughts. Don't trust them. Stretch out with your feelings.
Robb blinked, confusion warring with adrenaline. He looked for the source, but there was only snow.
The cold is not your enemy, Robb Stark, the voice said, wry and calm, as if they were discussing a game of cyvasse rather than a duel to the death. The Force binds the ice just as surely as the fire. Use what is there.
Robb hesitated. The advice felt alien, yet it resonated with a truth he hadn't seen.
Use what is there.
Robb stopped fighting the freezing pressure on his mind. He dropped his shields. He opened himself to the blizzard swirling around them.
He felt the moisture in the air. He felt the ice crusting the rock. He felt the water inside the snow.
You are a Stark, he told himself. The cold is yours.
He grabbed it. All of it.
With a primal scream, Robb pulled the ambient cold into a single point at the Walker's feet.
"STOP!"
The air around the Walker's boots snapped. The moisture flash-froze instantly. Ice, hard as iron and thick as a man's thigh, erupted from the rock. It encased the Walker's boots and welded the creature to the stone in a heartbeat.
The Walker tried to step toward him. It jerked forward, but its feet did not move. For the first time, the mask of impassive calm cracked. Surprise flickered in those terrible blue eyes.
It looked down at the ice anchoring it.
It looked up at Robb.
Robb did not give it time to break free.
He gathered every ounce of his will. Every lesson Luke had taught him. Every drop of Stark blood in his veins. He channeled it into his open palms.
He didn't push. He blasted.
"GO!"
He unleashed a raw, massive telekinetic wave directly at the creature's chest with everything he had left.
The impact was thunderous. It sounded like a battering ram splintering a castle gate.
The Walker's feet were locked to the earth, immovable as the mountain itself. The Force slam hit its upper body with the weight of a falling battering ram.
The creature bent backward at an impossible angle. There was a sharp, crystalline snap as the ice anchoring its boots shattered under the torque. The Walker was lifted off its feet. It was hurled backward, arms windmilling, the crystal sword flying from its grip.
It flew.
Ten feet. Twenty.
It hung in the air for a second, suspended over the grey void of the valley, blue eyes wide with shock.
Then gravity took it. The White Walker plummeted into the mist and vanished.
It smiled.
It was a mocking, knowing smile. A smile that said, You have won nothing.
It vanished into the abyss of the storm below. Silent.
Robb stood there for a second, his hand still outstretched, his chest heaving. Then his legs gave out.
He fell to his knees in the snow, gasping for air, his head spinning. The exertion had drained him dry. He felt hollowed out.
Robb stared into the dark where the Walker had fallen.
"Robb!"
He heard Benjen's voice, distant and muffled.
Robb ignored it. He scrambled on hands and knees through the churned snow, his breath coming in ragged tearing gasps.
"Grey Wind," he choked out.
The direwolf lay in a heap near the boulder where the Walker had thrown him. Robb reached out, his hands shaking, burying his fingers in the thick, storm-wet fur.
"Easy, boy. Easy."
Grey Wind shifted. The great beast let out a low whimper, a sound so unlike the fearsome shadow of the battlefield. The wolf lifted his heavy head and swiped a rough, warm tongue across Robb's freezing hand.
He was hurt, battered and bruised, but no ribs felt broken. He was alive.
Robb slumped against the wolf's flank, closing his eyes for a second of pure, exhausted relief.
Then, he noticed the sound.
Or rather, the lack of it.
The clash of steel had stopped. The screams had cut off. The unnatural shrieking of the dead was gone.
Robb opened his eyes. He turned his head slowly.
The fighting had stopped.
But the wights were not standing frozen.
They were falling.
Every single corpse on the slope—those fighting Tormund near the cave mouth, those climbing the dead giant Mag, those wrestling with the Night's Watch in the center—simply collapsed.
It looked like a puppeteer had slashed their strings with a single stroke.
Hundreds of bodies dropped into the snow. The skeletons shattered into loose piles of bone. The fresh corpses slumped over like sacks of wet grain. The terrible blue fire in thousands of eyes flickered once, then vanished.
Silence claimed the mountain.
"Seven Hells," Benjen breathed.
His uncle limped up beside him, clutching a bloody arm, staring down at the carpet of motionless bodies. "They just... stopped. All of them. You killed them, lad."
Benjen sounded relieved. He sounded triumphant.
But Robb did not feel triumph.
He stared into the dark void where the Walker had fallen. The memory of that smile burned in his mind.
Why did you smile?
Robb closed his eyes and reached out with his feelings. He tried to sense the victory, but instead, a cold dread washed over him.
The connection to the wights was severed, yes. The puppets were broken. But the line went both ways.
When he had touched the cold to freeze the Walker, when he had blasted it with the Force, he had sent a ripple through the dark side. He had lit a beacon in the middle of a pitch-black night.
Found you.
The thought wasn't his own. It was a lingering echo, vast and terrible.
Robb shivered, and it wasn't from the wind.
"We didn't win," Robb whispered, his voice hoarse.
Benjen frowned, looking down at him. "What? Look around you, Robb. They're dead. Truly dead."
"For now," Robb said. He struggled to his feet, leaning heavily on the rock, his eyes fixed on the northern horizon where the storm was darkest. "I didn't just kill a lieutenant, Uncle. I rang a dinner bell."
He looked at the fallen army, then back to the abyss.
"The creature smiled because it knew," Robb said softly. "The battle is over, but the hunt has just begun."
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