Chapter 420

The Night King hadn’t sent a single wight toward Icebay Port.

This decision was devoid of any emotional reasoning, grounded purely in logic. First, Icebay Port, located to the west, held no strategic value for his campaign; attacking it would only divert the wight army away from the Wall, delaying his ultimate goal. Second, the port had too few people, all of whom were combatants. Attacking it would yield minimal new wight recruits at a potentially high cost—a poor trade.

Humans called them “White Walkers,” but the Night King knew better. He and his kind were not mindless specters. They were priests of the Great Other, emissaries and instruments of one of the world’s two true gods. As the leader of all the Great Other’s priests, the Night King had long since abandoned petty emotions like hatred, resentment, or desire. His sole purpose was to fulfill his god’s grand vision.

The Night King wasn’t a creation of the Great Other. He was first forged by the Children of the Forest, designed as a weapon of war against humankind. For an unknowable span of time, he existed as a mindless automaton until the Great Other awakened his consciousness, granting him reason and purpose. Freed from his creators’ control, he was given a higher calling: to eliminate violence and restore the world to its original state—cold, orderly, and serene.

Yes, the living would never believe it, but the Night King—created as a killing machine—hated killing.

The Children of the Forest, the architects of his existence, were long gone. Yet the greed and violence encoded into every living being, the instincts to consume, conquer, and reproduce, persisted. Humanity was irredeemable. To address this fundamental flaw, the Great Other devised the ultimate solution: to eliminate all life. When life ceased, so would violence.
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To achieve this, and ultimately crush R’hllor’s influence to seize control of the world, the Great Other needed the Wall’s magical protections broken, allowing divine power to flow south into Westeros.

The urgency was clear: those three dragons could return to the battlefield at any time, bolstering the defenders of the Wall.

The Great Other did not fear dragons or mortal armies. To the Great Other’s priests, magic-wielding constructs bound to its power, humans were merely potential recruits, and dragons were no more than flying lizards. The so-called dragonfire that humans hailed as a magic bane was, at best, an irritating heatwave.

If the priests were willing to spend their power, any enemy could be crushed—provided they remained immersed in the concentrated force of the Great Other’s magic. However, south of the Wall, where the Wall’s enchantments still held, the priests were like fish stranded on land. Without the “cold magic” they relied on, every ounce of power had to be rationed with the utmost care.

Individually, humans and dragons posed no threat, but facing both simultaneously while cut off from their power was a losing battle.

The only solution was to strike Long Night’s Watch Keep before the dragons returned, shattering the Wall’s magical protections and flooding Westeros with the Great Other’s power. Once that torrent poured south, no force could stand in the Great Other’s way.

Thus, the army needed to move swiftly and decisively.
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Just as the Night’s Watch had their defensive plans, the Night King had his own offensive strategy.

After breaching the canyon defenses, the first step was to surround and overwhelm the human outpost at “Canyon Watch,” a temporary wooden supply depot and staging ground. Despite its makeshift nature, taking the outpost proved costly.

Here, the Night King encountered humanity’s new weapon for the first time: small, round devices that exploded not into wildfire but into countless shards of icy fire. One blast could sever dozens of wights from their controlling White Walker. This previously unseen threat, identified through the Night King’s magical awareness, was immediately relayed to every White Walker. Their countermeasure was clear: avoid the fortifications, rely on wights to spearhead assaults, and, when necessary, encase themselves in ice armor to mitigate the weapon’s effects.

The use of dragonglass explosives caused significant losses, far more than expected. Even so, Canyon Watch fell within half an hour. Overwhelmed, the defenders perished, their bodies claimed and added to the ranks of the undead army.

With the outpost eliminated, the wights moved on to their next task: the complete destruction of the weirwood groves lining the canyon’s defensive roads. Though the Wall still stood, clearing these groves created a breach in the Wall’s magical defenses. Even a small gap allowed the Great Other’s power to trickle southward, like water seeping through a broken dam. While the flow was minimal, it was steady, enabling the White Walkers to sustain themselves south of the Wall.

Now infused with this faint but constant power, the White Walkers no longer feared dissipating entirely. Their magic still needed to be conserved, but survival was no longer an immediate concern.

Thousands of weirwood trees were felled within hours. Standing in the faint glow of the Great Other’s power, the Night King’s forces began their final preparations. At the flattest sections of the canyon, ramps were constructed to allow larger wights—such as undead mammoths and giants—to ascend from the canyon floor. These creatures, too large to climb steep paths, were essential for assaulting the fortresses that lay between the army and the Wall.

Though the human strongholds were no match for the Great Other’s priests, the Night King knew the value of conserving magic. These massive wights, with their raw strength and resilience, would serve as “siege weapons” to break down physical defenses.

The undead army took the rest of the night to complete their preparations. As dawn neared, they turned east, forming a single, unbroken column, and began their march toward the Wall. Behind them, Canyon Watch and the weirwood groves lay in ashes, and ahead, the Great Other’s grand design loomed closer with every step.