A miracle occurred.
The ghostly blue runes covering the giants' bodies flared violently once more.
They truly seemed to have "understood" the command.
The giants at the front let out deep, rumbling growls, then bent their massive frames forward. House-sized fists swung down and smashed brutally into the solid ice beneath their feet.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The thunderous impacts were deafening.
Ice shards and chunks of frozen earth exploded in all directions.
The giants worked without fatigue, hammering with their fists or simply scooping away ice and frozen soil with their enormous palms, their efficiency nothing short of terrifying.
They hauled the massive blocks of ice and frozen earth to both sides, piling them up. Before long, across the marshland in front of Moat Cailin, they had forcibly carved out deep, wide trenches and low embankments.
Lo Quen's queens, the assembled nobles, commanders, Mance Rayder, and the wildling leaders… everyone stared in stunned silence, almost forgetting to breathe.
What they were witnessing shattered every preconception they held.
These disaster-level giants, beings worthy of fear itself, were truly obeying the king's commands and building fortifications for them.
Lo Quen explained calmly, "This is the Horn of Winter. Euron Greyjoy had it blown atop the High Tower, awakening these ice giants from the seals within the Wall, which caused its collapse. Now that the Horn of Winter is in my hands, I can command all the ice giants through it."
Lord Wyman trembled from head to toe with excitement.
"The Horn of Winter! So it really is the legendary Horn of Winter once possessed by Joramun, King-Beyond-the-Wall! The legends say that sounding it awakens the giants beneath the earth… So… so that's how it was! Brandon the Builder sealed them within the Wall, using them as its core. When the horn awakens them, the Wall collapses. Gods above! The ancient legends were true!"
Though Lord Wyman's words came out disjointed from excitement, everyone understood his meaning.
The crowd fell into stunned silence, finally grasping the truth buried beneath centuries of dust.
The magical power of the ancients far surpassed anything they had imagined.
Nearby, Ser Waymar Royce added with a sigh of awe, "I once heard Maesters speak of the ancient age. To halt the First Men's invasion, the Children of the Forest used powerful magic to shatter the Arm of Dorne that connected Westeros and Essos. Later, they summoned colossal waves to drown the Neck, creating this swamp… I used to think it was just a story, but now…"
The nobles nodded quietly, their hearts filled with reverence for that distant age.
This world was far more mysterious and vast than they had ever known.
The ice giants worked at astonishing speed, tireless and endowed with unimaginable strength.
Before long, a rough yet colossal trench system, more than ten feet deep, began to take shape along the emerging defensive line of Moat Cailin.
These fortifications, carved out by the giants themselves and reinforced by their sheer presence, were like a newly raised Wall across the vast marshes of the Neck.
Hope ignited in everyone's hearts.
Perhaps… with these giants, with the dragons, they truly had a chance to stop the Others.
...
Three days later.
The wind and snow showed no sign of easing. If anything, they had grown even more violent.
Daylight had become pitifully short.
The dim sun barely lingered on the horizon for a few brief hours before being swallowed by endless night.
The cold had reached the point where dripping water froze instantly and breath turned to frost.
At the moment of the third day's "dawn," just as the feeble light struggled to pierce the thick snow clouds, an even more shrill alarm horn suddenly exploded from the highest watchtower.
"They're coming—!! They're here—!!!"
The soldiers' cries were filled with panic and uncontrollable terror.
Lo Quen and everyone else rushed to the ramparts at full speed.
When their eyes fell upon the distant ice fields, even the bravest among them felt a chill surge from their feet straight to the tops of their heads, their hearts nearly stopping.
By the faint, bleak light, they saw countless, densely packed figures silently pouring out of the blizzard.
Among them were the skeletal remains of ancient First Men.
Rangers clad in the rotting black of the Night's Watch.
Farmers slaughtered in northern villages not long ago, frostbite still clinging to their skin.
Every fallen life had become part of this horrifying army.
At the very front of the wight horde stood an even more terrifying presence: the Others.
Their tall, gaunt forms looked as though they had been carved from ten-thousand-year-old black ice, clad in crystalline armor etched with eerie runes.
Their eyes burned like the coldest stars, aflame with merciless blue fire.
Each of the Others rode a monstrous creature of death.
Skeleton warhorses whose hooves spread frost with every step.
Colossal mammoths of decay, their rotting bodies hung with icicles along their tusks.
Ice spiders with eight blade-like limbs, skittering swiftly across the frozen ground.
Even massive direwolves of ice and death.
The Others all fixed their gaze on the fortress of Moat Cailin, their mouths twisting into cruel, inhuman smiles.
The Others.
True harbingers of death.
This was the first time Lo Quen had ever seen them with his own eyes.
They were more real, more terrifying, than anything he remembered from the hazy fragments of his past life.
His eyes swept sharply across the ranks of the Others again and again, searching, yet he found no one who looked like a "Night King."
These Others seemed to operate independently while still moving in eerie coordination, but there was no obvious central commander.
The realization made his chest tighten.
On the walls, the defenders began to tremble without meaning to, the sound of chattering teeth clear in the cold air.
Even the battle-hardened nobles and wildling warriors were breathing hard, faces drained pale.
Lo Quen forced down the unease and the creeping chill in his bones. This was not the time to dig for answers.
He drew in a long breath of freezing air, then his voice rang out steady and commanding across the battlements.
"Catapults! Prepare to fire wildfire!"
At the order, soldiers loaded sealed, ghostly green clay jars into the baskets of the catapults that had already been set in place.
This wildfire had been refined and improved again and again by the Pyromancers, backed by generous funding and relentless effort. It was stronger than ever, and far more unstable.
"Fire!"
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Countless green jars arced through the air, hurled by the great catapults, and smashed down into the approaching wight horde with the crisp crack of shattering clay.
Boom! Whoosh—!
Huge bursts of eerie, dazzling green flame exploded outward.
The wildfire roared to life, clinging instantly to the wights and spreading with terrifying speed.
A sea of green fire raced across the pale ice field, swallowing thousands of wights in a sudden emerald inferno.
They writhed and thrashed in silence, and within moments they were reduced to blackened charcoal, then scattered ash.
The surging front of the wight tide faltered, its momentum broken.
"Yes!!"
"Burn them! Burn them all!!"
The walls erupted in thunderous cheers.
Ecstasy flashed across the nobles' faces as the crushing tension eased at last.
The power of the wildfire exceeded their expectations.
Even Lo Quen felt his chest loosen slightly.
It seemed that stockpiling massive quantities of wildfire truly was one of the most effective ways to deal with a sea of wights.
Over the past few years he had supported the Pyromancers almost without counting the cost, and his reserves were immense. The temporary workshops inside Moat Cailin were still producing more day and night.
But their triumph did not last.
When the green flames inevitably splashed onto the Others' riders and their mounts, something shocking happened.
The wildfire did wrap around them, the green flames burning fiercely.
Then, in the next instant, the ghostly blue ice-crystal armor on the Others flared with light, radiating a cold so deep it seemed to swallow heat itself.
Wildfire, hot enough to melt gold and eat through iron, visibly weakened and shrank, fading at a speed the eye could track until it went out completely.
As the flames died, the Others' riders were revealed once more.
They still sat their mounts, ice-crystal armor smooth and gleaming as if untouched, not a mark on them.
Their eyes, cold as distant stars, almost seemed to carry a hint of mockery as they stared up at the walls of Moat Cailin.
The cheering stopped dead.
A heavy silence fell over the ramparts.
All their joy was shattered in an instant by that icy truth.
Wildfire was useless against the Others.