On the ramparts, the mockery on Lo Quen's face vanished, replaced by cold resolve.
He called out loudly, "Archers, suppressing fire! Cover the Dragon Soul Guards' withdrawal!"
A rain of arrows poured down. Though they were of limited effect against the wights, they still created obstacles, briefly slowing the undead advance.
Taking advantage of the momentary confusion and delay, most of the Dragon Soul Guards who had carried out the assassinations successfully pulled back beneath the walls, using lowered baskets and ropes to swiftly return to the ramparts.
But the Others' retaliation came faster, and far more vicious.
The Others riding ice spiders were clearly beyond restraint.
They urged their enormous mounts forward with terrifying speed and agility, avoiding direct fire as they skirted the frozen marshlands and swept around toward both sides of the walls.
Their targets were clear: the ice giants still locked in combat with ordinary wights.
As the ice spiders reached the towering giants, their mandibles opened and closed, spewing out thick, white strands of icy silk. The viscous webbing wrapped around the giants' legs, binding them tightly and severely limiting their movement.
Then, countless wights swarmed forward, scrambling up the immobilized giants' bodies, clawing their way upward with hands and feet. They tore at the giants' hardened forms with teeth and blades alike.
The ice giants bellowed in rage, as though even they were being hurt by the frenzied, rabid-dog assault of the wights.
"This is bad. They're trying to deal with the giants first!"
Mance Rayder's battlefield instincts kicked in immediately as he saw through the Others' plan.
The ice giants were the backbone of the flanks. Once they fell, the wight army would be able to pour through without resistance.
Lo Quen realized it at the same time.
He mounted Blooddancer and, in the same breath, issued orders to the Queens who had already taken to the sky atop their dragons.
"Jaelena, Janice! Support the giants on the left flank. Prioritize those ice spiders!"
The dragons answered with thunderous roars.
Silverfall and Duskshadow dove toward the left flank, pouring out Dragonfire in an attempt to incinerate the ice spiders that were spitting silk.
But the ice spiders were cunning.
They used the giants' massive bodies as cover, skittering across the ground with all eight legs, narrowly evading the Dragonfire time and again. Several times, Silverfall and Duskshadow nearly struck true, but the spiders' astonishing agility let them slip clear of the flames, suffering only minor scorching.
For a while, the fighting on the flank grew exceptionally fierce.
On the main front, the wights hurled themselves at the walls in a relentless frenzy.
Despite the desperate resistance of the Dragon Soul Guards and the defending soldiers, the sheer disparity in numbers began to tell.
There were simply too many wights.
The dead from Beyond the Wall and the North could remain intact for long periods without rotting, and that grim reality had only helped the Others amass a vast army.
Lo Quen had no idea how many wights there truly were, but staring at the boundless black tide, he estimated the number had to exceed a million.
Waves of wights continued to climb onto the walls, colliding with the defenders in brutal hand-to-hand combat.
The ramparts had become a bloody meat grinder.
Though Greysmoke's wounds had not yet healed, Daenerys wielded her Valyrian steel sword and charged back and forth along the battlements, appearing wherever the fighting was most perilous.
Her courage greatly bolstered the morale of the soldiers around her.
Arya fought as well, sword in hand, using the Faceless Men techniques she had learned at the House of Black and White. Like a phantom, she moved along the edges of the battlefield.
Each thrust of Needle struck true, neatly ending a wight that tried to slip through for a sneak attack.
High above, Lo Quen circled on Blooddancer, his sharp gaze sweeping over the entire battlefield.
He saw the giants struggling on the flank, the mounting pressure on the front walls, and the seemingly endless horde of wights.
He knew the stalemate had to be broken.
His eyes fixed on an Other knight on the right flank, one who was directing ice spiders in a coordinated assault against a single ice giant.
The Other rode an unusually tall skeletal warhorse, and with each swing of its ice-crystal longsword, frigid arcs of sword energy tore through the air, carving deep wounds into the giant's legs.
"Blooddancer! That one!"
Lo Quen pointed straight at the target.
Blooddancer answered with a sky-shaking roar and dove toward the Other.
Scorching Dragonfire surged ahead, blanketing the entire area.
The Other reacted with astonishing speed, yanking hard on the reins in a desperate attempt to drive its skeletal warhorse out of the way.
But the dragon's attack was too wide in scope and far too fast.
In an instant, the blazing flames swallowed the Other along with several nearby ice spiders.
A shrill, agonized scream burst from within the fire, only to be quickly drowned out by the roar of Dragonfire itself.
The ice armor covering the Other wailed under the extreme heat, melting away in moments.
Its frozen body twisted and split like ice beneath a blazing sun, then collapsed completely with a dull crack, exploding into scattered shards of blue ice.
The skeletal warhorse beneath it fared no better, coming apart under the terrifying heat and collapsing into charred fragments of bone.
The strike was clean and decisive, briefly easing the pressure on the ice giant holding the right flank.
Ghostly blue runes flickered across the giant's body as it let out a low, rumbling growl, then swung its fists with even greater fury at the wights closing in.
Yet just as Lo Quen and Blooddancer prepared to search for their next target, another change unfolded.
The already howling blizzard suddenly grew far more violent, without any warning.
The wind surged several times over, no longer hurling soft snow but hard, gravel-like pellets of ice that lashed mercilessly at everything under the sky.
Some soldiers on the walls of Moat Cailin could barely keep their footing, thrown off balance by the gale and forced to cling desperately to battlements or anything solid within reach.
Even the dragons in the air were badly affected, forced to drop lower as they struggled to maintain stable flight.
"What's going on?!"
"This wind… something's wrong!"
A deep sense of unease spread through the ranks.
Even the emotionless wights showed a slight hesitation in their movements.
The Others knights, however, reined in their mounts and lifted their gaze toward the north, where the storm was thickest.
On those faces frozen by millennia of ice, something like fear seemed to surface.
Alarm bells rang loudly in Lo Quen's mind. An unprecedented sense of danger put him on full alert.
Following the Others' line of sight, he forced his gaze through the near-zero visibility of the storm toward the northern horizon.
At first, there was nothing but a churning expanse of gray and white.
Then, a vast, indistinct shadow began to take shape within the blizzard.
It was so enormous that as it moved, the storm itself seemed to swirl and dance around it.
The shadow drew closer, its outline slowly sharpening.
When it finally tore through the densest curtain of snow and revealed its full form to every living being in Moat Cailin, time itself seemed to stop.
It was… a dragon.
A dragon so immense it defied all imagination.
From head to tail, it measured roughly six to seven hundred feet in length.
It was a mountain range given motion.
Its entire body was formed from some kind of translucent, ancient black ice, gleaming with a cold, blue crystalline sheen.
Its colossal wings spread wide, blotting out the sky.
The wing membranes were a nearly transparent, deathly white, studded with countless icicles.
With each beat of those wings, a world-scouring ice storm was unleashed.