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A black tide flowed slowly across the endless white plain.
The air reeked of livestock dung, pungent and real.
Lynn rode on Winter's broad back, Arya pressed tight against his waist. Her initial excitement had settled into quiet. She looked down at the Wildling formations spread across the snow like pieces on a chessboard, at the legions of giants and mammoths stretching all the way to the horizon.
Then a scout came galloping in on a shaggy pony, face flushed red.
"Two riders to the north, heading our way!"
Tormund sat atop a tall warhorse that looked slightly ridiculous under his massive frame. He spat into the snow.
"Scouts? I'll go break their legs."
Ygritte, never more than a step from Lynn's side, already had an arrow nocked.
Lynn narrowed his eyes. The two figures were still distant black specks, but something about the way they rode was familiar.
"Wait. They're friends."
As they drew closer, Arya sucked in a breath.
"Jon! It's Jon!"
It was indeed Jon Snow. His handsome face was chapped raw by the wind, dark curls dusted with snow. Beside him rode another man with the same Stark look , taller, leaner.
Benjen Stark. First Ranger of the Night's Watch.
They reined in before Winter, their horses snorting and stamping nervously. Benjen's eyes were wide, sweeping across the sheer scale of the army. He'd already seen Winter before, but his gaze snagged on the Frost Giant and stayed there , that thing moved like a walking iceberg.
Jon dismounted stiffly, cold and exhaustion written into every movement.
"Lynn. Arya."
"Jon!"
Arya scrambled down from Winter's back, knee-deep snow be damned, and nearly threw herself at her brother. Then she remembered she was Lynn's wife now, and caught herself.
"What are you doing here?"
Lynn asked it before she could.
"Has the Wall fallen?"
"Not yet." Jon's voice was tired. "But it's cracking. A few days ago a horn sounded from the south. Lord Commander Mormont said the Wall's magic is failing."
He met Lynn's eyes directly.
"I've come to fight."
Benjen stepped down from his horse.
"So have I. A Stark must defend the North. I am a Stark first."
Jon untied a heavy bundle from his saddle. "Lord Commander Mormont — Jeor — he said this was more important." He paused. "He said helping you is helping the Night's Watch."
He placed two items carefully into Lynn's hands.
The first was a strange branch. As thick as a grown man's forearm, unnaturally white, yet warm and smooth to the touch. Red sap seeped slowly from the broken end, dark as blood. Lynn felt it immediately , an ancient power, old and alive at once, pulsing within the wood.
The second was a scroll made of black ice. A translucent sheet, thin as parchment but hard as diamond, radiating a cold that cut straight through Lynn's moleskin gloves. Its surface was covered in twisted runes, lines of text that seemed to writhe and shift. At the very top, clearly legible, was a single name.
Lynn.
"The dead delivered it," Jon said quietly. "A White Walker and several wights. They just... stood there. Handed it over. Then left."
The Wildlings around them , Tormund, Ygritte, all of them , took an instinctive step back at the word dead.
Lynn didn't move.
He recognized the power inside the branch. It was a blessed object, the same kind he'd asked Jon to search for. But this one felt different. Purer. Stronger.
This was a direct gift.
"The Night King really is a generous... person," Lynn murmured to himself.
He looked at the branch in his hand. Now wasn't the time for hesitation. He needed every advantage he could get.
He checked it first, turning it over carefully, looking for any sign of tampering. Finding none, he gripped it with both hands and bit into it without hesitation.
The taste was impossible to describe.
Sweet, rich with the scent of deep earth, yet carrying an extreme cold underneath. The wood wasn't hard at all , it dissolved in his mouth like snow, becoming a torrent of energy that crashed through his entire body.
A stinging pain lit up every nerve.
Every inch of muscle, every bone, every cell , all of it was being broken down and rebuilt under the force of something ancient and primal. It was agony. It was also the most alive he'd ever felt.
Then the notifications hit.
[Consumed: Frost God's Sacred Tree (Incomplete)]
[All Attributes +10]
[Consuming the complete Sacred Tree grants partial dominion over the Frost God's authority]
"The Frost God's, huh."
Lynn closed his fist. He didn't particularly care whose it was. Anything that made him stronger was worth having.
The world sharpened around him. The wind stopped being noise and became something close to language, something he almost understood. He felt his body , faster, stronger, more responsive. His thoughts ran clean and quick. The power moving under his skin was intoxicating.
[Name: Lynn]
[Strength: 22 (2%)]
[Agility: 21 (61%)]
[Constitution: 20 (0%)]
[Spirit: 36 (1%)]
Three Jaimes. He could put down three Jaimes without breaking a sweat, probably more. And that wasn't even accounting for the multiplier effect , pushing attributes past their limits didn't add combat power linearly. The gap between him and any human alive had just grown into something that couldn't be bridged.
No human could survive a full hit from him now.
And Spirit had always been his edge. Thirty-six points. Even the Three-Eyed Raven would be outmatched. When he had a moment, he'd use Greensight to check what that old bird was actually doing up there.
Lynn turned his attention to the ice scroll.
He unrolled it carefully. The runes glowed faint blue. It was an ancient language — not the Common Tongue, not Valyrian — but he could read it. He didn't know why. He just could.
The message was short. It sent a cold through him that had nothing to do with temperature, and confirmed everything he'd already suspected.
The raven seeks new flesh.
Do not give it. Kill the bird, and the Long Night ends.
The Three-Eyed Raven.
The Night King wasn't just a temporary ally with overlapping interests. He was actively steering Lynn. Warning him. The real enemy wasn't the army of the dead , it was the thing hiding in a cave north of the Wall, pulling strings, convinced it controlled everything. The thing that wanted a new body. A child of House Stark, maybe, or some other family. A vessel to continue its cycle without end.
"What does it say?"
Jon's curiosity had won out over his unease.
Lynn rolled the scroll up.
"It says we have a common enemy." He tucked it away. "We'll talk about it later. The Night King won't move against us for now."
That said, Lynn didn't take the Night King's words at face value. The Night King wanted the Three-Eyed Raven dead. Lynn wasn't ready for that yet. The old bird still had uses. Keep them balanced against each other , that was the smarter play. Especially right now, at this particular moment.
...
Four days passed quickly.
Lynn's army assembled outside Winterfell.
Robb Stark stood on a hastily built wooden platform alongside Greatjon Umber, Rickard Karstark, and the other Northern lords, waiting for his "ally." He'd pictured a few thousand Wildlings. Maybe some giants. He'd braced himself for a ragged, undisciplined mob in rotting furs.
He was not prepared for this.
The sound came first.
A deep rumbling that moved through the ground itself, building and building until it rolled like thunder.
Then the vanguard appeared.
The Wildling infantry weren't wearing ragged pelts. They wore standardized full plate armor. Their spears rose in a wall of steel that stretched as far as the eye could follow.
"By the old gods and the new..." Rickard Karstark's hand went to his sword hilt without him seeming to notice.
Then the giants.
Not one or two. Hundreds. Some in heavy armor, swinging warhammers twice the height of a man. Others carrying massive bows carved from entire trees, giant archers who could put an arrow through a castle gate.
Greatjon Umber's booming laugh died somewhere in his throat. His jaw hung open.
Then the mammoths.
Fifty of them, fitted with specialized heavy armor, each carrying a giant knight on its back armed with a flail. Living siege engines. Natural forces wearing steel.
And then, last of all , it appeared.
The Frost Giant.
Fifteen meters tall, built from living ice. It walked at the rear of the column, and it still dominated everything around it. A walking apocalypse. Every tremor in the ground came from its footsteps.
Every Northern lord on that platform felt it. Every battle-hardened soldier in the yard felt it. A fear that didn't come from the mind , it came from somewhere deeper, somewhere older.
This was not a thing of the mortal world. This was the Winter God made flesh, walking among men.
"Seven hells," Wyman Manderly said softly. His chin trembled. "What... what in the gods' names is that?"
But for those with sharp enough eyes, the Frost Giant wasn't the most unsettling thing.
Jaime had already spotted them. The small group walking behind it.
Ten figures. Black cloaks, hoods drawn up, moving in perfect unnatural unison , every step synchronized, every motion identical. They radiated absolute stillness. Not the stillness of discipline. The stillness of death.
They were Lynn's personal guard. The first members of his Winter Wight Corps. White Walkers, blue fire burning behind their eyes, their dead flesh driven by Lynn's power.
"What are they?" Jaime murmured. "His secret weapon?"
Robb watched Lynn drop leisurely from Winter's back.
The scales of power hadn't just tilted.
The whole damn board was about to get flipped over.
With an army like this, winning wasn't even the question. Losing on purpose would be the hard part.
He finally understood where Lynn's confidence came from.
Greatjon was the first one to find his voice. He let out a roar , not fear, pure excitement, the kind that comes from the gut.
"Ha! HAHAHAHA! Now that's a fucking army!"
He bellowed it, slapping his thigh hard enough to bruise.
"We'll grind every last Frey into paste!"
The other lords shook off their shock and erupted , cheers and nervous laughter tangled together. The fear was still there. But something else moved in faster and pushed it aside.
This unstoppable force was on their side.
...
The combined Wildling and Northern army, reorganized and counted, came to fifty thousand strong. The largest force assembled in the North in a thousand years.
They marched south, leaving Winterfell behind. The pace was fast. It stayed fast until they reached the northern edge of the Neck, and stopped dead.
Here, the world changed.
The clean white snow gave way to a vast, reeking expanse of swamp. The air turned thick and damp, heavy with the smell of rot and stagnation. Twisted trees draped in moss rose from murky pools, their branches reaching like skeletal fingers. The ground was a trap , mud and quicksand covered by a thin skin of green scum.
Fifty thousand men, tens of thousands of horses, giants, mammoths , and a swamp that went on forever.
The army ground to a halt.
The problem didn't need explaining. How do you move a force like this through terrain like this? The answer was simple: you don't. The Kingsroad was the only other option , a narrow, sunken causeway, easy to ambush, easy to flood. Better than the swamp, but only barely. Taking it meant giving up surprise, and surprise was the whole point of coming this way.
Go off-road into the swamp and the army dies slowly, swallowed by mud and rot, whittled down over months. Take the Kingsroad and lose the element of surprise entirely.
There was no good answer.
"There's no way through this." Robb stared at the swamp. For the first time, doubt showed on his face. "We'd lose half our men before we ever saw a Frey banner."
Greatjon, who was never quiet about anything, said nothing. He stood with his brow furrowed, staring at the murk. He had no answer either.
Every eye turned to Lynn.
Because Lynn had promised them. He'd told them he had a way to bring the whole army across.
Lynn stood at the swamp's edge, murky mist curling around his boots. The Frost Giant loomed silently at his back, its cold breath cutting against the Neck's wet, rotting heat. The lords were anxious. The soldiers were restless. The army's high spirits had dropped a notch.
Lynn's face showed nothing.
He looked out at the swamp — this vast, ancient thing that had swallowed armies whole , with complete calm. Then he turned to look at Robb, Jon, and the lords behind them, all those worried faces.
A faint smile touched the corner of his mouth.
"What's everyone panicking about?"
He let the question sit for a moment.
"Swamp?" There was a trace of amusement in his voice. "You call this a problem?"
He raised one hand, palm facing the murky water.
The temperature around him dropped instantly.
➤ Next: Ambush