The monsters fled.
I watched them go from the battlements of Frosthold, my hands resting on the cold stone, my body still trembling with exhaustion. The grey light of the northern dawn was spreading across the sky, pushing back the darkness that had pressed against the fortress through the long night. The frozen plain stretched before me, vast and white, littered with the bodies of the fallen.
The tide was receding. The creatures that had come in waves, that had thrown themselves against the shield wall, that had screamed and clawed and died—they were retreating now, a dark stain spreading across the snow, moving back toward the Rift where they had come from. They moved faster than they had come, driven by something that might have been fear, might have been instinct, or might have been the simple recognition that the line would not break.
The North had held.
