The Night King did not send even half a wight toward Ice Canyon Port.
This decision was not driven by emotion, but entirely by rational calculation:
1. Ice Canyon Port lies to the west and holds no strategic significance for their side. Attacking it would draw the wight army away from the Wall, delaying their optimal timing.
2. There are too few people at Ice Canyon Port, and they are all combatants. Attacking the fortress would yield far fewer new soldiers than the effort would cost, making it unworthy of pursuit.
Humans call them White Walkers, but the Night King knows that he and his kin are not irrational specters. Their true identity is that of Cold God Priests, the walking vessels and spokespersons of one of the world's only two true gods, executors of His will and needs.
As the leader of all Cold God Priests, every action he takes must be free of emotional influences such as hatred, disgust, or desire. His only guiding principle is to uphold the grand objective of his deity.
He was not created by the Cold God. The Children of the Forest created him first, using him as a war machine to fight humanity. After an unknown period of time without self-awareness, that great being awakened his consciousness, granted him the ability to reason and think, guided him to break free of his creators, and gave him a far greater and nobler goal: to eliminate killing and restore the world to its original, cold, orderly, and peaceful state.
Yes, the living would never believe it: he, who was created as a killing machine, the King of the White Walkers they call the Night King, actually hates killing.
The Children of the Forest, whom he hated most, are already history. But the greed and violence that arise from the desire to acquire, compete for resources, and reproduce are imprinted in the genes of all living things. They are beyond redemption. To solve this, the deity proposed the most fundamental solution: eradicate all living beings. Once life disappears entirely, killing will naturally cease.
...
To achieve this goal, and to eventually defeat R'hllor and claim control of the world, the Cold God must first destroy the magical barrier of the Wall, so that His power can flow from the Land of Always Winter into all of Westeros.
Because those three dragons could return to the battlefield at any moment to fight alongside the living defenders of the Wall.
The Cold God does not fear dragons, nor is He worried about human armies. Compared to His priests—magic-powered war machines—the living are merely future puppet soldiers, and what mortals see as magical symbols are, to Him, just large flying lizards. Dragonflame, said to possess anti-magic properties, is merely a warm breeze that makes the priests sweat.
As long as they are bathed in the Cold God's power, any enemy in the world can be crushed—provided the priests are within a dense field of cold magic and have a steady and sufficient power supply.
But while the Wall's magic still holds, Cold God Priests crossing the boundary into the south are like fish leaping onto land. Just as fish struggle to breathe in air, the priests cannot absorb the cold magic they need to survive when south of the Wall. Every ounce of energy must be conserved, not wasted.
Whether human armies or dragons, either could be dealt with alone. But to face both simultaneously while the Wall's magic still stands is like a fish flopping on dry land, trying to fight land animals, with little chance of success.
The only way to break this stalemate is to seize Nightfort before the three dragons return to the battlefield, destroy the Wall's magic, and tear down the dam blocking the Cold God's power—flooding all of Westeros with His energy.
Once the Cold God's power pours through the Wall, no force in the world will be able to stop His advance.
Therefore, the army must not only march in the correct direction but also with great speed.
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The Night's Watch had defensive plans. The Night King had offensive plans.
After successfully crossing the Great Gorge, the first thing the White Walkers did was to surround and wipe out Gorge Lookout—the small, wooden, temporary human stronghold built in the middle of the Gorge for transporting supplies and personnel.
In this siege, the Night King encountered a new human weapon for the first time: small spherical objects that, when they exploded, did not ignite a green fire like Wildfire but instead scattered countless frozen fire fragments. These blasts could sever the magical connection between dozens of wights and the White Walkers in a single strike.
This unprecedented threat was immediately relayed to every Cold God Priest through the Night King's magical senses. The countermeasures were as follows: during attacks on fortresses, remain as far from the walls as possible, relying on wights to storm the position rather than engaging directly. If they had to close in, they must condense ice armor around their bodies to defend against the frozen fire.
The deployment of Dragon Crystal Bombs caused the Night King to lose more wights than expected in the siege of Gorge Lookout, but it was only a temporary outpost, not a permanent fortress. With no moats, high walls, or deep stores of supplies, and after a desperate half-hour defense that only managed to destroy a few thousand wights, it was inevitably overwhelmed.
After killing the thousand-plus human defenders who had retreated into the outpost and raising them as new puppets, the White Walkers immediately turned to their next task: uprooting and destroying the last remaining scattered weirwood trees on both sides of the mountain trail across the entire line.
Though the Wall still stood, clearing out the Great Gorge—a weak point on the southern flank—allowed the Cold God's power to begin slowly leaking south through this dozens-of-miles-long gap. If the White Walkers' magical recovery rate was 100 north of the Wall and 0 in the south, then eradicating the Haunted Forest on both sides of the Great Gorge instantly raised that southern value from 0 to 1. This trickle of cold magic, like waves overflowing a dam, was not enough to fight at full power, but it was a steady and reliable source that allowed minimal action south of the Wall.
Magic still had to be used sparingly, but now the priests no longer had to constantly fear exhausting their strength and vanishing because they could not maintain their forms.
Facing overwhelming numbers, over a thousand weirwood trees were felled in an instant. Bathed in the slowly seeping power of the Cold God, the White Walkers led the dead in final preparations before assaulting the Wall: they spent the night constructing gentle slopes in the flattest parts of the Great Gorge, so that wights, mammoths, and giants who had been trapped below due to their size or weight could now move forward.
To attack Nightfort in the east, they needed to pass several human strongholds along the way. While these strongholds were insignificant before the Cold God Priests, the Night King knew that, given their limited magic, they would need these thick-skinned "siege weapons" to do the heavy lifting.
Even the Cold God's servants understood the value of sharpening the blade before cutting wood. While Shadow Tower and Ice Canyon Port trembled, awaiting a powerful enemy they expected to arrive at any moment, the army of the dead spent half the night completing their preparations. Then they turned around, forming a long column, and began their march toward the Wall.
(To be continued.)