New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤 ✦ “So you brought back two broken swords to prove that you and Gared are not deserters, but heroes who killed an Other?” After hearing Aeg’s account of the ranging beyond the Wall, Lord Commander Mormont stared at him gravely, searching his face for some sign that he was lying.
Aeg drew a breath.
“I will not claim to be a hero.
Ten days ago, I did flee the fighting.
I did not save Ser Waymar Royce or bring back his body.
But returning to the Wall with a warning that the Others have returned matters more than dying in a hopeless fight against them.” “Dragonglass can indeed kill the Others.
Many old tales say as much.” Maester Aemon, blind and trembling with age, turned Aeg’s homemade dragonglass dagger in his hands.
He was clearly interested in the claim.
“If I remember correctly, you are a foreigner and only recently began learning to read and write in the Common Tongue.
How do you know these old tales so well?” “My homeland has similar legends,” Aeg said.
“I used to think they were only myths, until chance brought me here and I saw the Wall…” * * * The wight horse the Other had ridden still carried the oats packed as horse feed.
After killing the Other, Aeg found his own frightened horse a few hundred yards away.
He fed it all the oats, let it rest a while, and then led it back to the Wall with the badly wounded Gared across its back.
Now he sat in a fire-warmed council chamber that felt almost like spring, facing so many of the Watch’s leading men for the first time.
In the full year since he had been forced to join the Wall’s defenders, Aeg had tried every way he could think of to draw the attention of the Watch’s leadership.
Now he had finally succeeded.
As a suspected deserter under questioning.
“Maester Aemon, you know better than most that when tales from distant lands preserve similar accounts of an ancient event, there is a real chance they contain some truth.
The Others exist.
And now they have returned.” Maester Aemon nodded slowly, apparently willing to grant at least that much.
Ser Alliser Thorne, the master-at-arms of the Night’s Watch, stood to one side and snorted.
“As I see it, he wounded himself to escape punishment, broke a few swords with something heavy, and brought them back to make it look as if he had survived a hard fight.
He has been slippery since his first day in the yard, always looking for a way out of work.
And you expect me to believe he killed an Other—assuming the thing even exists?” Aeg did not immediately argue.
Thorne’s suspicion was not entirely baseless.
Before crossing over, Aeg had been an inspection engineer.
He was not helpless, but by Westerosi standards he had lived a sheltered life—more sheltered than many nobles, let alone the lowborn men who filled the Watch.
When he first reached the Wall, the training had been brutally hard on him, and he had shirked whenever he could.
He had passed in the end, but Ser Alliser had not forgotten.
Then again, Thorne was a bitter, harsh, compassionless man forced into the Night’s Watch after the Targaryen cause he had supported collapsed.
Almost no one in the Watch liked his tone or the contempt that filled his voice.
Even if Aeg had trained obediently, even desperately, he doubted he would ever have won the man’s approval.
“Ser Alliser, have you seen broken swords before?” “More than you have seen good ones.” “Then please look at the breaks in the two swords I brought back.” The master-at-arms outranked him, but Aeg was a ranger now, and his fate was not Alliser Thorne’s to decide.
He saw no need to be polite.
“The Watch’s swords are steel.
Steel bends and deforms under forces that would shatter glass or ice.
Even when a steel blade breaks, the fracture usually shows some distortion.
These blades do not.
I brought back every fragment I could find.
Fit them together and the pieces form two nearly complete swords; unless you look closely, the breaks are almost invisible.” Lord Commander Mormont raised an eyebrow and fitted the pieces together as Aeg had said.
Aside from a few tiny chips missing along the fractures, the reconstructed blades were still straight, their edges still sharp.
It was difficult to believe they had broken into large pieces and splinters.
“How is that possible?” the Lord Commander asked.
Cold could make many steels less ductile and less tough, leaving them more prone to brittle fracture.
Put simply, the colder the steel became, the less it could deform before breaking.
Aeg could hardly explain that to men who had never studied physics.
And in this damned magical world, he could not be certain ordinary physics told the whole story.
“The legends say the Others wield ice magic,” Aeg said, choosing an explanation that fit the world around him.
“Perhaps their magic froze the steel until it became brittle enough to shatter.
I cannot tell you the exact cause, but I can promise this: no ordinary blow will make a steel sword break this way.
You may take the blades to the First Builder, the Lord Steward, or Donal Noye, Castle Black’s armorer.
If any of them can reproduce these fractures in an ordinary steel sword, you may treat me as a deserter.” ✦ ✦ ✦ Want to keep going?
I hope this chapter gave you another reason to stay with the story.
There’s still plenty ahead, and things are only starting to unfold.