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POV: Ser Jaremy Rykkar, Ranger of the Night's Watch
The wind screamed through the pines like a dying beast.
Jaremy Rykkar adjusted his grip on his axe as snow lashed across his face. Behind him, four brothers trudged silently—Boot, Mael, Kedd, and young Laren. Southron lads, most of them. Not built for the cold.
They were two days beyond the Shadow Pass, following reports from Craster about missing game and unnatural silence.
Craster was a wildling by blood but a man who kept to his own—half-mad, holed up in his foul keep beyond the Wall, with too many wives and too few scruples. He gave the Watch information in exchange for protection, ale, and the promise they'd leave his daughters alone.
"The wildlings are gone," Craster had said this morning. "Not dead. Just gone. Like smoke."
Jaremy didn't like it. Wildlings didn't go quiet. They screamed, raided, and cursed the Wall.
This silence was wrong.
That night, they camped beneath a cliffside. The fire cracked weakly against the cold, casting long shadows that danced like ghosts.
Boot was sharpening his blade. Kedd was muttering prayers. Laren was asleep, curled tight under his cloak.
Mael stared into the dark woods.
"It's too quiet," he said.
"It's the snow," Jaremy replied. "Muffles everything."
But even as he said it, he felt it—that pressure in the air. Like before a storm. Or a battle.
A crunch.
Snow.
Too heavy to be a fox.
He rose, axe in hand. "Eyes up."
Something emerged from the treeline.
Tall.
Pale.
Armor like frost-glass. Eyes like blue fire.
And behind it—
Dead things.
Dozens.
Twisted men, their skin blackened and cracking, eyes glowing faintly blue. Their movements were jerky, wrong—like puppets with invisible strings.
Laren woke with a scream.
Then the cold swallowed everything.
Jaremy fought like a cornered beast. His axe split three of the dead. Mael stabbed one through the eye.
"Fire!" Jaremy bellowed. "Use the torches!"
But the wind snuffed them.
Boot was torn apart. Kedd died screaming.
Then came the tall one.
It moved without sound. Its blade, thin and icy, struck once—Mael fell in two.
Jaremy swung, roared, cursed—
The blade touched his chest.
He didn't feel pain.
Only the cold.
It spread fast.
"So this… is how it ends."
As the world turned black, his last thought was not of victory or duty.
"No one will know."
And the frost covered the corpses like a shroud.
By morning, the clearing was empty.
As if they had never been there.