ASOIAF/Game Of Thrones: Ruler of Batannia

The western rampart had become a butcher’s yard by the time Arthur reached it. Wights climbed over the edge in a steady stream, their frozen fingers clawing at stone, wood, leather, and flesh with equal enthusiasm. A White Walker stood just below the parapet, pale hair streaming in the wind, its blade moving with slow elegance. Every time it struck the Wall, frost spread from the impact, hardening the ice into jagged steps for the dead behind it.

Arthur drove into the press with his guards at his back. His sword took the first wight through the skull. A Westerlands knight beside him caught another with a shield and sent it over the edge, only to vanish beneath two more that came crawling up after it. Northmen roared and stabbed down with dragonglass-tipped spears. The Battanian Oathkeepers pushed in from the side, Kator among them despite the frost still clinging to his armor, his left arm moving stiffly but his right still strong enough to split bone.

“Hold the edge,” Arthur shouted. “Not one step. If you fall back, fall forward and inconvenience something dead.”

There was no time to see whether the men appreciated the advice. The White Walker below lifted its head toward him, and for a moment their eyes met. Arthur felt the old cold there, empty and patient. Then a Champion of Ophena from two merlons away loosed an obsidian arrow. The shaft struck the Walker near the throat, not cleanly enough to kill at once, but enough to stagger it. Arthur seized the moment and hurled a dragonglass spear down. The point took the creature through the chest.

The Walker shattered.

A dozen wights beneath it collapsed, falling from the Wall like puppets whose strings had been cut. Men cheered, not because the danger was gone, but because men were generous fools and would cheer any proof that death could be made to look foolish for a heartbeat.

Above them, the sky cracked with dragonfire.

Drogon’s white-hot breath finally broke through Viserion’s freezing gale and struck the dead dragon’s head. The thick crust of ice over the skull vaporized in an instant. Blackened bone showed beneath, split with glowing blue fissures. The dead dragon gave a shriek so sharp that men ducked as if it were an arrow. At the same moment, Rhaegal’s flame burned through the damaged base of the left wing.

The bone snapped.

Viserion’s left wing tore free at the root and fell spinning toward the battlefield, trailing frost and blue sparks. The dead dragon lurched sideways, balance gone. His vast body rolled through the sky like a broken kite, turning toward the ground beyond the Wall.

Daenerys saw where he would fall. If Viserion struck near the ramparts, the blast of cold and broken magic might tear open what remained of the defense. More than that, the wild, impossible thought that had taken hold of her became suddenly clear. She could not awaken Viserion from above. She could not reach him through flame alone. She had to touch him. Blood to blood. Fire to fire. Mother to child.

“Drogon,” she commanded through tears and will. “Catch him. Take him away from the Wall.”

Drogon obeyed. Exhaustion dragged at him, and the wound at his wing burned with frost, but he drove himself downward. Rhaegal came with him. Together they caught the falling ice dragon before he struck the field, Drogon clamping his foreclaws into the frozen body, Rhaegal seizing the other side. Viserion writhed in their grasp, jaws snapping, broken wing trailing shards into the dark.

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The two living dragons struggled beneath the weight and cold of the dead one. Their wings beat hard, raggedly, carrying him away from the Wall and the main press of battle. They flew toward an open stretch of snow beyond the worst of the wight tide, far enough from the Night King to buy a moment, if moments could still be bought.

The Night King watched his stolen dragon being taken.

For the first time, true anger seemed to stir behind his blue eyes. He lifted his cracked ice sword toward the tangled shapes in the sky. Cold gathered along the blade, dark and deep, flowing through the cracks like winter through a broken door. He meant to strike himself now, to end the insult and perhaps claim the two living dragons with the dead.

Before he could loose that power, Stannis Baratheon moved.

He had been lying upon his stretcher near the rear of the line, his breath thin, his flesh grey, his body burned and broken from the fire he had already given. Most men would have died by then. Stannis had always been stubborn, and death, poor creature, had been forced to wait like everyone else. Now he pushed himself upright with a strength that did not belong to living muscle. A flush of red touched his withered face, bright and terrible.

The red priest beside him, Thoros, looked down in alarm. He was not the Thoros of Myr who had once drunk and laughed his way through half the realm, but a gaunt follower of the Lord of Light who had remained with Stannis after Melisandre’s fall from certainty. In his hands he carried a metal cylinder carved with runes of flame.

“Thoros,” Stannis rasped. His voice was nearly gone. “The last fire. Aim true. Guide it for me.”

Understanding crossed the priest’s face, and with it grief and fervor. He bit his finger, smeared blood along the runes, and raised the cylinder toward the Night King. His voice rose in prayer, thin at first, then stronger, calling upon R’hllor, the Lord of Light, the heart of fire, the god men had followed for salvation, ambition, terror, and every other human misuse available.

Stannis drew the sword at his side. It had once marked him as king. Now it looked dull and ordinary in his burned hands. Crowns and swords both became plain things at the end. He set the point against his own chest and looked toward the long dark, not with fear, but with the merciless resolve that had ruled him all his life.

“With my blood,” he whispered, “as guide. With my life as fuel. In the name of House Baratheon, in the name of the king I believed I must be, Lord of Light, take this last offering. Give this world one moment of dawn.”

He drove the blade into his heart.

There was no scream. Only the wet sound of steel finding its way home.

Blood poured from Stannis’s chest, but did not fall. It shone gold-red in the dark and streamed through the air into the runes upon Thoros’s cylinder. The metal flared. Thoros cried out the final words of the prayer, and his voice broke as the light took him.

A beam of red-gold fire shot across the field.

It was narrow, no thicker than a man’s arm, but so bright that men turned away weeping. It was not ordinary flame. It was light made judgment, heat made purity, a line drawn through darkness with no patience for argument. It crossed the distance in an instant and struck the Night King as he raised his sword toward the dragons.

The Night King turned and brought his blade across to block. Blue ice rose before him in layered shields. The red-gold beam touched them and began to eat through. There was no great explosion, only a terrible hiss of annihilation, as if darkness itself were being erased one breath at a time. The shields burned open. The cracked sword rang, fissures spreading along its blade.

The Night King screamed.

It was not loud in the way men screamed, but every living thing nearby felt it. Pain. Rage. Surprise. The last sacrifice of a dying king had reached something essential in him, and he was forced to pour his strength into holding it back. He could not strike the dragons. He could not turn to the Wall. For a little while, Stannis Baratheon held him where he stood.

Thoros collapsed beside the king’s body, his life burned away with the spell he had guided.

Stannis Baratheon, harsh, stubborn, unlovable, unbending Stannis, died upon the Wall he had chosen to defend. He had lost Blackwater, lost King’s Landing, lost men, pride, faith, and flesh. Yet in the end he bought what all kings promise and few deliver: a chance for the living.

In the distance, Drogon and Rhaegal carried Viserion down into the snow.