A raven from Stone Door Fortress delivered the latest news: the wight army did not attack the fortress but bypassed it from a distance.
Initially, everyone, including Aegor, believed the enemy had skipped this final stronghold in order to launch a direct assault on Nightfort. But unlike the earlier situation outside the Wall, this time the White Walkers did not cast spells to destroy birds possessed by wargs, making aerial reconnaissance after dawn possible. By midday, large-scale surveillance quickly proved everyone wrong: signs of the wight horde were spotted northwest of Crown Town.
Perhaps they knew their movements could not be concealed, or perhaps they took pleasure in spreading fear from miles away. Under the dim sunlight filtering through the clouds, the overwhelming tide of corpses was nothing short of horrifying.
With the civilian evacuation rate reaching one hundred percent, the wights passed through countless villages along their path, yet their numbers did not increase beyond the several thousand soldiers they had killed during the night's fortress assaults. However, due to the varied speed among different types and states of wights, and the Night King's unwillingness to divide his forces, the army advanced across the snowy fields of the Gift in a loose, elongated formation. From the air, it resembled a slow-moving procession, miles long, with fluctuating density and occasional halts as the vanguard waited for the rear to catch up.
In this state of march rather than attack, the dead were not as densely packed or frenzied as when storming fortresses. But the widened spread for easier movement made them appear even more terrifying when viewed from afar. Like herds migrating across the savannas of Essos, they exuded a suffocating, unstoppable momentum that inspired despair.
The alarm bells in Crown Town rang wildly. The already tense atmosphere snapped taut. Soldiers and civilians ran in every direction atop the walls and between the buildings. But once the horde reached the outskirts, the wights did not immediately launch their attack. Instead, they slowly fanned out to the left and right, surrounding the town like a yawning abyss. In the end, they formed a massive black ring that encircled Crown Town completely. Though stretched thin, the dark tide still extended south and north to the horizon. What had once been a dense wave of corpses now appeared only as a narrow black line, yet the sheer scale sent chills down the spines of every soul watching from the walls.
...
The Night King was waiting for nightfall. This battle was unlike the assaults on Shadow Tower or Sentinel Tower. The goal was not to seize a specific target swiftly, but to slaughter and convert every inhabitant of Crown Town — including hundreds of giants — into wights, while minimizing his own casualties. In doing so, he would bolster his forces, eliminate future threats, and still turn north to take Nightfort and the Wall without ever needing to cast another spell.
To reduce his own losses, there was no more favorable condition than fighting in darkness. The cover and fear instilled by night could at least double the kill ratio in favor of the dead.
For the living, the good news was that while daylight remained, Crown Town still had time to communicate the revised defense plan — crafted overnight — to every officer, soldier, and relevant civilian, and to complete final preparations. The bad news was, only two hours remained until dusk.
---
Under Aegor's repeated questioning, persuasion, and direct orders, Bran Stark — already dressed in black and a sworn brother of the Night's Watch — finally revealed new information. He could use flocks of ravens to locate the approximate positions of the Night King and the White Walkers, even when they were not casting magic. That is, as long as they didn't cast spells to attack the ravens.
Fortunately, thanks to the protection of the Wall, this condition was barely satisfied.
Thus, under the cover of various birds controlled by wargs from different clans, many large ravens mingled within the flocks soaring above the wight army encircling Crown Town. Though not yet tamed, they resembled regular messenger ravens in size, their white, lifeless eyes constantly scanning and sensing the enemy's formation.
"Have you still not found him?" In the inner keep of Hogwarts Town, after watching Bran sit with his eyes closed, controlling the ravens for many long minutes, Aegor finally broke the silence.
"I found the Night King a while ago. He's northwest of us," Bran opened his eyes, "but I also noticed something else, something troubling, so I kept probing."
"The Night King isn't grouped together with his followers. He seems to have evenly spread the White Walkers around Crown Town."
"This is bad news." Aegor took a deep breath. "So when the battle begins, the pressure on other sectors of Crown Town might be just as heavy as where the Night King is, maybe even worse?"
"That's right."
"Understood." Aegor nodded solemnly. Fortunately, this possibility had already been accounted for in the new plan. "But no man can be in two places at once. And if we are to win this war, the only way is to kill the Night King. I have no choice. I must go to him."
"I'm heading out. Guide me with the ravens. Take me to the section of the Wall nearest to the Night King."
...
The snowfall gradually intensified, and the temperature dropped several degrees with the White Walkers' arrival. The sun, which had hidden behind the clouds all day, sank slowly below the horizon after casting only a faint light upon the world for less than ten hours. As the sky darkened, cooking smoke rose across the town. Predicting the battle would begin after nightfall, Aegor ordered supper to be served an hour early, with the garrison eating in shifts, to avoid fighting on empty stomachs.
At last, night fell. The veil of darkness spread from east to west, enveloping the sky. The wight army, standing solemnly a mile away, merged with the blackened horizon. As killing intent and unnatural cold slowly permeated the air, some soldiers, feigning calm, even placed wagers on when the enemy would begin their assault.
The answer came swiftly.
As the last sliver of twilight vanished from the western sky, the wight army did not hesitate. The full-scale attack began at once.
...
Under the wail of war horns, a battle of unprecedented scale and intensity erupted beneath the walls of Crown Town — a city that now housed nearly one-third of the Gift's total population.
Because Crown Town was not connected to other fortresses by the Wall, it could not expect reinforcements once the battle began. For that reason, war provisions were stockpiled in quantities exceeding the population ratio. Thanks to the abundant Wildfire supply, fire was used liberally in defense. The moment the tide of corpses surged forward, two great firewalls were ignited by flaming arrows, blazing in wait.
But the enemy's decisiveness exceeded all expectations. Having grown familiar with human tactics through prior sieges, the White Walkers used their trump card immediately.
Since magic would be largely ineffective against Nightfort, and saving it now was pointless, the Night King made a bold, pragmatic decision. All Cold God Priests with sufficient power were to be unleashed here at Crown Town, using magic to conserve their forces and minimize wight casualties.
As a result, the defenders were stunned to discover that in the three directions facing the town's major gates, fire would not ignite at all.
The revised plan had accounted for this possibility, but even its authors had placed it in the footnotes, never imagining it would unfold in the first minute of the battle.
"We've tried lighting it several times. It won't catch!"
"Enough! We all heard it! Stick to the plan. Bombs! Bring all the bombs over now!"
No more wights charged into the fire to die pointlessly. The tide of the dead surged with purpose, rushing through the gaps in the firewalls created by magic. Corpse elephants and corpse giants led the charge, battering the gates.
Boom!
The gate fortifications, hastily built over the past day and night, held firm. Though the wooden gates were quickly broken and forced inward, the thick layers of packed stone and frozen mud behind them held steady. The giants and elephants shattered bones in their heads and shoulders, but still failed to break through. Under the Night King's command, they changed tactics.
They squatted in place and formed ladders of flesh and bone, building a slope for the rest of the wights to ascend.
Since the fire had failed, wights struck by dragonglass arrows simply tumbled down and piled at the base of the walls. Instead of burning or breaking apart, their corpses reinforced the improvised slope. The wall stood under ten meters high. Though the defenders responded with bombs as planned, they only managed to slow the advance.
Within minutes, the walls at all three gate sectors were leveled with mounds of wight bodies. Swift units, like corpse wolves and corpse bears, surged up the slopes and onto the walls.
Facing overwhelming numbers, the defenders at the breaches were soon engulfed.
Normally, troops near the walls should retreat, climb the stairs, and fall back to the top of the Ice Wall. But Crown Town, built in the open fields of the Gift, had no such connection. The inner keep walls were slightly taller and thicker than the outer defenses, but before the tide of corpses, they were little more than fragile reefs.
The defenders had no choice. They charged forward again and again, hoping that reserves deployed immediately and reinforcements from other intact sections of the wall could reclaim the breaches in bloody counterattacks, and hold on until the enemy's magic could no longer suppress Wildfire.
Crown Town's size dwarfed that of any military fortress along the Wall. Given its vast layout, leaving all reserves under one commander would have made timely response impossible. To prevent this, Aegor had established three subordinate command centers, arranged in a triangle. Each held a sizable force, including giants and two or three skilled archers qualified to wield Lightbringer. Each sector controlled one-third of the wall, forming second and third lines of defense, with Hogwarts Town's inner keep at the core.
No one expected the second line to be triggered within ten minutes of battle, but Aegor's commanders reacted without hesitation. The moment the breaches appeared, they dispatched large reinforcements. Alongside frontline defenders rushing in from both sides, they launched a three-sided assault on the wights climbing the wall, determined to hurl them back down.
The defense plan functioned like a newly wound, perfectly tuned clock. Every enemy move was countered by contingency plans — plan one, plan two, all the way to plan n. The battlefield brought "unexpected" moments, but never "unaccounted for" ones. Only Aegor himself knew that with Wildfire, their strongest weapon, selectively failing, even if every part of the plan executed flawlessly, all the way to the last stand at the command hall, and even if every dragonglass bomb killed a hundred wights, the final result would still be the same.
They would be overwhelmed.
Aegor had always despised last-minute heroism, desperate counterattacks, and theatrical victories snatched from the jaws of defeat. Shaped by his upbringing, he preferred overwhelming force, crushing victory, and denying the enemy any hope. But the White Walkers' magic had shattered that dream.
Now, only the final plan remained.
He had two dragonsteel bombs. Each had been forged at the cost of ten Lightbringers. His only hope was to use them to kill the Night King. End the enemy with his own hands, like the true Prophet. End the war.
But there was a problem.
As soon as the battle began, Melisandre had sensed eight distinct spell sources. Unfortunately, none of them stood out. None were stronger than the others. They were likely just ordinary White Walkers.
Worse, none of the eight were in the northwest sector where Aegor was stationed.
Did Greenseer Bran deceive them? Or make a mistake?
Or perhaps, as the true Prophet, Aegor was not meant to know the Night King's precise location. Perhaps he simply had to throw the bomb, and fate would ensure it struck its mark.
Or most likely of all, the Night King had hidden himself deep within the sea of wights, shielded so thoroughly that not even magic could find him.
(To be continued.)
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