New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤 ✦ The ice sword struck the human.
But the expected clean sensation of cutting through flesh never came.
Instead, with a sharp, ringing crack, the blade shattered into glittering fragments.
At the same instant, warmth entered the Other’s lower torso.
A small, heated point punched through its icy armor and into the flesh beneath.
In the next heartbeat, the warmth flared into burning pain, as if scorching its very soul.
‘What is happening?’ The weapon was sustained by magic.
How could it simply break?
Even against the finest steel in the world, it should not have shown so much as a crack or nick.
As for the thing buried in its body, the Other had been born in the Lands of Always Winter and was steeped in immense cold magic.
Even molten rock should not have caused it pain.
Unless…
The magic sustaining its existence was disturbed, then dissolved.
The Other could no longer think.
It dropped the hilt that remained of its ice sword and clutched uselessly at its abdomen, as if it could hold the escaping magic inside.
Pale blue blood sprayed from the wound and hissed around the dagger.
The Other reached for it with two bone-white hands, but the moment its fingers touched the dragonglass, they began to smoke and crumble away.
In the end, unable to dislodge the thing in its body, the Other let out a shrill, defiant cry.
Then it sank to its knees and stopped moving.
* * * Aeg sat sprawled in the snow, staring blankly as the kneeling Other shrank before his eyes.
First, the strange armor covering its body cracked and fell away.
Then the pale flesh beneath softened into a blurred, viscous mass and melted like a snowman in sunlight.
Within seconds, only a skeleton like milky glass remained, translucent and delicate as carved jade, glowing with a clear inner light.
Even that last proof of the Other’s existence slowly melted away.
At last, only the dragonglass dagger remained.
Steam curled around it.
Something seemed to be changing.
The weapon’s surface had become unimaginably cold, and the moisture in the air froze over it in layer after layer of frost.
The short black blade soon turned snow-white, blending into the ground so completely that Aeg might not have found it without looking carefully.
Only after half a minute did Aeg realize, with stunned disbelief, that he was still alive.
The hand gripping his sword throbbed and tingled.
The web between his thumb and forefinger had split, and blood seeped from the wound.
The enemy’s strength had been terrifying.
Even if his steel sword had not broken, one exchange would have been enough to make him lose his grip.
With his other hand, he touched the place on his shoulder where the Other had struck him.
The fur cloak over his clothes had been sliced open, but the layers beneath were undamaged.
There was no gaping wound and no blood pouring out.
He thought for a moment, confused.
Then fierce relief flooded his chest.
He had survived because he had been lucky.
That was all.
In the instant he clashed with the Other, Aeg had committed to taking the creature with him.
By any reasonable measure, his dragonglass dagger and the Other’s ice sword should have landed almost simultaneously.
With enough force to drive a thrown blade deep into a tree, the creature might have cut his entire upper body apart.
But Aeg had won.
He had won because his dagger struck a tenth of a second, perhaps a hundredth, before the Other’s sword.
That tiny lead changed everything.
In the instant the ice sword sliced through his outer cloak and should have killed him, it lost the magic sustaining it.
It became an ordinary object—a sword made of nothing but ice.
When it struck him and met resistance, it shattered like a thin pane of ice and scattered across the snow.
If his hand had been half a beat slower, Aeg would now be lying in the snow, bleeding out.
If the Other had known the dagger in his hand was dragonglass and guarded against it, he might already have been cut into pieces.
But the past did not care about what-ifs.
He had won through a chain of accidents and his enemy’s carelessness.
The terror of what had almost happened arrived late.
His gut clenched so hard that, had he not relieved himself earlier, he might have pissed himself.
His legs shook with useless weakness, and for a while he could not stand.
* * * Not far away, Gared let out a low groan.
Aeg flinched and scrambled across the snow.
He snatched up the dragonglass dagger, now coated in a thin skin of frost, and gripped the half-broken steel sword as well.
If Gared had risen as a wight, the dagger and broken sword would have to be enough.
“Gared,” he said tentatively.
He almost asked whether the old ranger was dead.
At the last instant, he realized how stupid that sounded and changed the question.
“Are you still alive?” The man on the ground groaned again.
Aeg could not make out the words, but the sounds rose and fell like a short sentence.
He let out a breath and dropped back onto the snow.
With the threat to his life gone, his ability to think returned.
He remembered something.
In the story he knew, when Jon Snow killed an Other, every wight raised by that Other collapsed into rotten bones.
Since this Other was dead, the people it had killed should not be able to rise as wights either.
He turned his head, and another sight confirmed the guess.
The wight horse the Other had ridden had collapsed as well.
It was only a dead horse again.
Thinking back, that change had probably happened at the same instant the Other’s weapon lost its magic: the moment the dragonglass dagger pierced the Other.
Aeg had simply been too focused on surviving to notice it at the time.
✦ ✦ ✦ 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.