~ 💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch ⏰ Resets Monday! Thanks!
Arya's fingers were white around Needle's grip, the blade leveled at the thing kneeling on the cave floor.
The cold pouring off it was bone-deep. She could feel it trying to freeze the blood in her veins.
This was beyond anything she knew how to process.
The dead, walking. Obeying orders.
Wasn't this exactly what the bards sang about? The White Walkers, who brought endless terror in the Long Night?
She'd seen Lynn burn their corpses at the Wall. She'd watched him kill one.
And this thing looked exactly like them.
There was no question. This was a White Walker.
So then...
Lynn can bring the dead back. What does that make him?
"Relax."
Lynn's voice was calm. He didn't even glance at the creature. He just walked over and pressed Needle's tip gently toward the ground.
"It won't hurt you."
"It..." Arya swallowed. "What is it?"
"A soldier."
Simple as that.
"Absolutely loyal. Tireless. Fearless."
He turned to face the kneeling White Walker and gave it a new order.
"Get up. Go to the weapon rack. Pick a longsword."
The creature rose stiffly and walked toward the corner of the cave, each step heavy and deliberate. The rack there held weapons Lynn had gathered from everywhere , arakhs, standard Westerosi longswords, everything in between.
The White Walker extended one pale, withered hand and lifted the most ordinary knight's sword on the rack.
Its movements were still stiff. But the moment its fingers closed around the hilt, something shifted.
A warrior's presence bled out of it.
"Attack me."
Lynn pulled a longsword from the rack for himself. "Full strength. Don't hold back."
Arya's heart climbed into her throat.
Was he insane? He was going to fight it?
This was a White Walker.
The creature's eyes, burning blue, flickered.
Then it moved.
Fast.
Blindingly fast.
That body, which should have been stiff and sluggish, exploded with speed and power that had no business belonging to something that looked like a corpse. It didn't roar. It didn't hesitate. It simply swung.
And it wasn't wild. It wasn't savage hacking.
It was swordsmanship. Precise, lethal, and beautiful in the way that only truly deadly things are.
CLANG!
Steel met steel. Sparks scattered across the cave floor. Lynn was driven back half a step by the force, and for the first time, genuine surprise crossed his face.
Arya's eyes went wide.
She knew that style.
Syrio Forel had described it to her once. She'd recognized it the moment she saw it.
That was Arthur Dayne's technique. The Sword of the Morning. His dual-blade form.
Lynn had drilled it in front of her a hundred times , two swords moving like extensions of his own arms, offense and defense woven together without a single gap.
The White Walker was only using one sword. But the footwork, the angles, the subtle shifts of its body as it slipped aside , every detail was Lynn's. Exactly Lynn's.
It was his shadow.
A shadow that felt no pain, knew no exhaustion, and existed only to kill.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The sounds filled the cave like rainfall on stone. The White Walker pressed forward relentlessly, each strike faster than the last, each one heavier. It never bothered to defend , it didn't need to. Ordinary steel couldn't harm it. Every parry it threw was just setup for the next attack, the next opening, the next chance to drive Lynn back.
Lynn stopped testing it. His expression settled into something harder, and he stopped holding back.
Sword light strobed through the cave. The two figures blurred, moving faster than Arya could properly track. She could only listen to the weapon strikes hammering together like a downpour.
She'd known Lynn was strong.
She had not known he could build something equally strong.
"Switch to a greatsword."
Lynn planted a kick square in the White Walker's chest and sent it stumbling back. New order.
The creature dropped the longsword without hesitation and pulled a two-handed greatsword from the rack , the kind Ser Rodrik favored. A weapon that would've buckled an ordinary man's knees just to lift.
In its hands, it might as well have been hollow.
Lynn took an identical one.
The fight resumed.
If the first round had been about speed and precision, this was something else entirely. Pure power. Pure weight. Every swing of those massive blades tore the air with a sound like tearing cloth. The White Walker's style opened up , broad, crushing, relentless. The bravery of a Northman. Ser Rodrik's bravery.
Lynn even ordered it to take up a lance and run through Ser Garlan's charging technique , the kind that could punch through anything.
Same result.
Perfect.
Arya had gone completely numb.
She looked at the creature, still moving without any sign of fatigue. Then she looked at Lynn, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead.
A thought crept into her mind that made her skin prickle.
What if Lynn made hundreds of these? Thousands?
What kind of army would that be?
A legion of Swords of the Morning. Countless of them, all tireless, all fearless, all perfect.
Who in the Seven Kingdoms could stop it?
Not even the Targaryen dragons , not on the ground, not against an army of the dead that simply didn't care about dying.
She understood now why ordinary people hit a ceiling in swordsmanship. You could never truly go all out against a sparring partner. You held back. You worried about hurting them. And that worry was a ceiling you could never break through.
White Walkers had no such ceiling.
Lynn had poured the memories of history's greatest warriors into this creature. It wasn't something any living swordsman could safely train against. It wasn't something that could be matched by careful practice and restraint.
Fighting something like this was terrifying.
The test ended. Lynn sent the White Walker back to its corner and walked over to Arya.
He looked at her face , the shock written across it, the fear still lurking in her eyes , and asked quietly.
"Still think it's just a monster?"
Arya was silent for a long moment. Then she shook her head.
Monster?
No.
This was a weapon. The most terrifying, most lethal weapon Lynn possessed.
She finally understood why he'd spoken with such confidence. Why he'd dared to lay out that insane plan. He wasn't bluffing. He wasn't hoping.
He had a card that could flip the entire board.
"You..." Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "Who are you, really?"
The question had been sitting in her chest for a long time.
"They say the Long Night is coming. That White Walkers are the enemy of every living thing." She lifted her eyes to his, grey and steady. "But you... you're the Night King, aren't you?"
Lynn didn't look away.
He held her gaze. He saw the fear in it, the confusion , and underneath both, something more urgent. A need to know. A need for the truth, whatever it was.
He reached out and touched her cheek gently.
"I'm not the Night King."
"But I have power like his."
"Arya. Do you remember what I told you about where I came from?"
She nodded.
He'd told her once , that he came from a continent far to the east, farther even than Essos. A world with no magic. No dragons. No White Walkers.
"My power comes from the gods of that world," he said. "They gave me the ability to take the strength of those I kill." A pause. "When I killed my first White Walker, I gained... the ability to create them."
He said it the way someone might mention the weather. Calm. Unhurried.
He took her cold hand and pressed it flat against his chest.
"I've been going back and forth on whether to tell you any of this."
"This is my biggest secret. The kind that would make the whole world call me a devil."
"But..."
His eyes softened.
"You're my wife."
"You have the right to know everything about me. The good and the bad."
Arya's heart lurched.
The cold that fear had put in her , it cracked. Something warmer moved through her, stronger than the fear had been.
He was her husband.
Whether he was human, a god, or something the world had no name for , he was the man who had held her close and promised her his life.
Everything he'd hidden. Everything he'd built. All of it pointed in one direction.
Survive. Protect the people worth protecting.
And she was one of them.
The tangled thoughts in her head , the Night King, enemies, what was right and what was monstrous , fell away all at once.
Enemy?
Who was the enemy? The people trying to hurt Lynn. The people trying to hurt her family. That was who the enemy was.
What weapons he used to stop them , swords, dragons, an army of the dead , what did any of that matter?
Arya turned her hand over and gripped his.
She wasn't afraid. She realized that clearly now. She felt something she hadn't expected at all.
Safe.
Her man was the strongest, most dependable man in the world.
"I understand," she said.
She raised her head. The fear was gone from her face. The confusion was gone. What replaced them was something firm and certain , the same look she'd seen on Lynn more times than she could count.
"If they're soldiers, they need names."
"Call them the Winter Ghost Legion."
Lynn smiled.
His little wolf girl had made up her mind.
...
He created ten White Walkers in that cave.
Every one of them capable of killing Jaime Lannister.
It cost him. More than he'd expected. With a battle coming in a few days — one that would demand everything his mind could give — he stopped at ten and left it there.
When he and Arya stepped outside, the army was already assembled.
Tens of thousands of wildling warriors. Over a hundred giants and mammoths. A force that filled the ground in front of Dragonstone Castle as far as the eye could see.
Every face turned toward Lynn.
He took Arya's hand and climbed to the highest watchtower.
He looked out over them , the fanaticism, the hunger, the worship burning in thousands of upturned faces.
"My brothers! My warriors!"
His voice carried through the cold wind across the entire military town.
"The nobles in the south , the ones who call themselves civilized — they call us wildlings!"
"They look down on us. They despise us. They think we're savages who eat raw meat and take what we want!"
"They cut off our food. They want to leave us to starve and freeze up here!"
"So now we're going south!"
"To show those fools who the true masters of this continent are!"
The roar that came back shook the air. It rolled up from the formation like a wave, loud enough to make Arya's ears ring, loud enough that it felt like the ground itself was answering.
Wildlings didn't think in terms of politics or alliances. They were simple. Tell them who to fight, and they'd fight. That was all there was to it. So Lynn kept it simple. Direct. The way they could hear it.
He didn't stop there.
"To make sure our enemies get a taste of Northern hospitality before we arrive—"
Lynn reached into his coat and drew out a horn.
It was massive. Ancient-looking. The material it was made from was pale and unlike anything with a clear name, covered in runes that seemed to have been carved before anyone alive could remember. It radiated cold the way old things sometimes do , a desolation that felt like it came from before the world was warm.
The Horn of Winter.
He'd kept it as a curiosity. A relic. Something to look at.
War changed the math on that.
"Today, I'm calling a new ally to fight beside you!"
"A giant from the Land of Always Winter!"
He raised the horn to his lips and breathed in deep.
"Woo , Woo , Woo —"
The sound that came out wasn't loud, exactly. But it went everywhere. Desolate. Ancient. Like something calling out from the very edge of the world. There was no violence in it , no battle-fury , but it carried a cold so absolute it felt like it could stop a soul mid-beat.
The sky seemed to dim.
The wind died.
The snow stopped falling.
The world went silent.
Every person in that formation held their breath. They could all feel it , something vast and terrible and ancient, somewhere beneath them, stirring awake.
Then the ground moved.
The earth in front of the army buckled upward in a massive heave. Enormous ice spikes tore through the surface from below, growing and branching and fusing together in seconds, building something, becoming something ,
A shape rose from the snow and the frozen earth.
Its body was pure ice. Crystalline and translucent and absolutely solid. At its joints, deep blue fire burned. It climbed to its full height and kept climbing.
Fifteen meters. More.
Three times the height of the tallest giant in the formation.
A moving mountain of ice.
Even standing still, the weight of its presence pressed down on everything around it like a physical force. The kind of presence that made living things want to lower their heads.
A Frost Giant.
The entire army stood frozen.
Tormund's mouth hung open. His wineskin slipped from his fingers and hit the ground. He didn't notice.
The giants , proud, enormous, unimpressed by almost everything , tilted their heads back and stared up at something larger than themselves for the first time. The look in their eyes was old. Older than language.
Awe.
The Frost Giant lowered its great head, built from countless fused crystals, and turned its burning blue eyes toward the watchtower. Toward Lynn.
Slowly, it bent one massive knee to the ground.
The sound it made shook the earth.
"ROAR,—!"
Arya held Lynn's hand in both of hers, watching something that no song had ever properly described. The fear was gone. Completely gone.
What was left was something fiercer. Something that wanted to move forward.
She looked at her husband.
Lynn met her eyes, and smiled , easy, certain, like a man who already knew how the story ends.
"Not worried anymore?"
"Your husband is a lot stronger than you thought."
➤ Next: A Bold Speculation Regarding the Night King