The wight wouldn't stop trying to bite.
Hela had taken its arms off at the shoulders and its legs off at the knees, and the stumps had frozen solid within minutes, sealed by whatever magic kept the thing moving, and now it lay on the flagstones of the First Fort's outer bailey and snapped its jaw at anything that came within two feet. Its teeth clacked together over and over, and between the snapping its head turned on its neck in slow searching arcs, tracking the nearest warmth. The blue light in its eyes was dim and steady, and the frozen stubs of its limbs scraped against the stone each time it tried to drag itself toward the Einherjar standing in a loose circle around it.
Soren watched the thing from four feet back with his necrosword drawn and his head tilted slightly, and he didn't look scared so much as curious. Thurn stood beside him, flexing his right hand. The frost damage from the Others' grip had faded to a mottled bruise across his knuckles, but the fingers still moved stiffly in the cold.
Hela crouched at the edge of the circle and studied the wight's face. It had been a man once, middle-aged, with the broad cheekbones and wind-burned skin of a nomad from the Grey Waste. Its clothing was hide and fur, crudely stitched, and beneath the frost that caked every surface the leather was soft and recently worked. This one hadn't been dead long; weeks, maybe, a month at most. The flesh was intact beneath the discoloration, and the joints still moved with something close to fluidity, and when its jaw snapped shut the teeth met cleanly.
She'd dragged it south for eleven days, bundled in chains that Grettir had fashioned from spare links in the Einherjar's repair kit. The thing had fought the chains the entire way, thrashing and twisting and working its stumps against the iron until the metal wore grooves in the frozen flesh. It never tired and it never stopped. Hela had carried it over one shoulder for the last three miles to the fort's gate, and the thing had gnawed at the back of her cloak until it chewed through three layers of wool and left tooth marks in the leather beneath.
The gate sentries had backed up six steps when she'd walked through the arch with the writhing bundle. One of them had lowered his halberd before Captain Shan Wei-Lin barked a command that put the weapon back up and the soldier's spine back straight.
Now the bailey was filling. Soldiers lined the walls and clustered in doorways and leaned from the barracks windows, watching the thing on the ground with wide eyes and tight mouths. The training yard had gone silent. Even the smith had come out, his hammer still in his hand, soot on his cheeks and his apron, and he stood near the stable block and stared.
The main building's door opened and Zhuo Bai-Feng walked out.
She crossed the bailey at her usual pace, brisk and unhesitating, her indigo armor catching the afternoon light and her white hair pulled tight behind her head. The two officers who followed her fell behind at the edge of the circle, and Zhuo Bai-Feng stepped through the gap between Soren and Thurn and stopped.
She looked at the wight on the ground.
The wight's head turned toward her and its jaw snapped twice, fast, and the blue light in its eyes pulsed brighter for a moment before dimming back. Zhuo Bai-Feng didn't flinch. She stood with her scarred hands at her sides and her weight balanced and she studied the thing.
"We have been trying to capture one of these for forty years," she said. Her voice was level, but the strain was there underneath.
"Every attempt has cost us men," Zhuo Bai-Feng continued. "Three soldiers, the last time. The wight killed two before they got chains on it, and the third died of the cold that came off it overnight. His heart just stopped in his sleep."
She paused. "The creature itself broke free of the chains before dawn and had to be destroyed."
Hela straightened from her crouch. "This one won't break free. It can thrash all it wants."
Zhuo Bai-Feng almost smiled. She turned to one of her officers and spoke in the fast military cadence, and the officer bowed and jogged toward the main building. Hela caught the gist through All-Speech: containment cell, reinforced chains, obsidian-tipped restraint bolts, and a guard detail of six men rotating in two-hour shifts.
"You understand," Zhuo Bai-Feng said, turning back, "that the ice demons are protective of their puppets. They track their dead. They have followed retrieval parties back to the walls before, and when they come, they come in numbers."
Hela grinned. "They're scared of me."
Zhuo Bai-Feng's eyebrows rose.
The grin faded and Hela looked north, past the bailey walls, past the battlements, toward the colorless horizon where the Grey Waste pressed against the sky.
"Unfortunately, I don't think I'm strong enough yet to kill them all," she said. "Which is a shame."
Zhuo Bai-Feng studied her for several seconds and then gestured toward the main building.
"Your quarters are prepared," she said. "Your men can use the eastern barracks. There is hot food in the mess hall and the healers will see to anyone who needs attention."
Her gaze found Drengar, who stood at the edge of the circle with his arm bound against his chest and his face gray with exhaustion. "That one, especially."
"Thank you, Commander," Hela said.
Zhuo Bai-Feng inclined her head. She looked at the wight one more time. The thing had stopped snapping and was pressing its face against the flagstones in a slow grinding motion. The blue glow of its eyes left faint traces on the stone that faded in seconds.
"I'll have my scholars study it," Zhuo Bai-Feng said. "With your permission."
"Study it all you like. Just don't take the chains off."
They stayed for three weeks.
The First Fort swallowed them whole and barely noticed. Ten thousand soldiers occupied the massive structure, and fourteen Einherjar and their captain barely registered. The garrison gave them space and respect and a cautious distance she recognized.
Drengar's arm healed slowly. The frost damage had gone deep, and the garrison's healers, who were experienced with cold injuries in a way that no Westerosi maester could match, packed the wound with poultices of mountain herbs and wrapped it in warmed felt and told him to move the fingers every hour whether it hurt or not. By the second week, Drengar could grip a sword hilt again. By the third, he was sparring left-handed in the training yard with Yi Tish soldiers who watched his necrosword with undisguised fascination.
Hela spent the first week in the archive.
She read everything. Four thousand years of garrison records, engagement reports, scouting logs, and weather observations. She read accounts of the ice demons' tactics and their patterns of advance and withdrawal. She read descriptions of the wights' behavior and their strengths and their weaknesses. She read theoretical treatises written by Yi Tish scholars who had spent decades studying the threat from behind the safety of the fused black walls, and she read the private journals of garrison commanders who had watched their men die on the battlements and written about it afterward with hands that shook.
The wight in its cell provided data of its own. Zhuo Bai-Feng's scholars prodded it with rods and observed its responses and recorded its behavior in meticulous detail. It reacted to heat and to sound. It did not react to pain in any recognizable way, and it never stopped trying to reach the nearest living body. When an obsidian-tipped rod was pressed against its skin, the flesh smoked and blackened and the creature thrashed with a violence that cracked two of the restraint bolts before the scholars pulled back. The blue light in its eyes flared and dimmed and flared again for hours afterward.
On the eighth day, Hela visited the cell alone. She placed her hand on the wight's forehead and closed her eyes and felt for the thread that connected the dead flesh to whatever power animated it. She found it, thin and cold and stretching north into a distance she couldn't measure, a line of frozen intent that ran from the wight's skull all the way back to B'gnu-Thun's domain. The thread pulsed with a slow rhythm, and each pulse carried a fragment of will that kept the jaw snapping and the stumps scraping and the blue light burning.
She could've cut it. A flick of her own power, a touch of green fire against the frost-thread, and the wight would've gone still and stayed still. She didn't. She wanted to understand the mechanism, and severing it would've destroyed the only working sample she had.
She withdrew her hand and left the cell and walked the battlements and thought.
The second week, she trained with Zhuo Bai-Feng's soldiers.
The commander had offered and Hela had accepted, and for six days she worked through the garrison's combat drills with a rotating cast of Yi Tish regulars who started each session terrified and finished each one bruised and visibly improved. She left the necroblades sheathed and used the same wooden halberds the garrison trained with, and she moved at a speed the soldiers could follow and learn from, and she corrected footwork and guard positions and striking angles with a patience that surprised the Einherjar watching from the sidelines.
Soren commented on it, the fifth evening, as they sat in the barracks cleaning their gear.
"You're teaching them," he said, and ran an oiled cloth along the flat of his necrosword and watched the black surface catch the lamplight. "Why? You could just kill everything north of here yourself."
"No, I couldn't."
Soren looked up from his blade.
"I could kill the Others," she said. "I proved that. I could grind through their wights with Draugr until there was nothing left standing. But B'gnu-Thun isn't its soldiers and it isn't its wights."
She said the name casually, the way she'd been saying it for weeks now, though Soren still handled it carefully whenever he said it. "B'gnu-Thun is a force that saturates the entire north of this world, and I can't fight something of that magnitude. Not as I am."
Soren was quiet for a moment. He finished with the cloth and sheathed the sword and set it across his knees.
"What do you need?" he asked.
Hela looked at the ceiling, and the lamplight played across the stone, and for a moment it reminded her of Asgard's armory, and that hurt.
"More," she said.
On the nineteenth day, Hela called them together.
The Einherjar gathered in the courtyard outside the eastern barracks at dusk; fourteen men, armored, their necroswords at their hips. Drengar stood with both hands at his sides, the right one flexing slowly, testing the grip. Soren stood at the front with his arms crossed and his face set. Grettir, Yoron, and Thurn formed the second row, and behind them the rest of the column arranged themselves the way they always did, by habit and by trust, in the positions they'd held since the City of the Winged Men and through the Grey Waste and across the killing field where the Others had turned and run.
Hela stood before them.
The sky behind her was iron gray, and the First Fort's towers rose into it, dark and massive. The air was cold and still and smelled of pine resin from the mountain forests to the south and of the oil the garrison used on their weapons. In the distance, the sound of boots on stone drifted from the battlements, the steady rhythm of the evening watch changing shifts.
Hela looked at their faces and she knew every one of them. She knew Soren's patience and Grettir's intensity and Yoron's wild joy in the killing and Thurn's quiet loyalty. She knew Drengar's stubbornness, the man who'd fought left-handed for a week and hadn't complained once. She knew the younger ones in the back rows, men who'd sailed with her since Pyke, who'd followed her across two continents and through lands that killed everything that walked through them.
"I'm going to tell you what comes next," she said. "And then I'm going to ask you a question, and I need the answer to be honest."
They waited.
"I am going to become a goddess," Hela said.
Nobody moved and nobody spoke. The Einherjar just took it in, the same way they took in everything she said.
She paused, and the evening wind shifted and brought the smell of cooking fires from the garrison mess, rice and pork and ginger, and somewhere on the wall a soldier laughed at something another soldier said, and the sound carried down to the courtyard and faded.
"Death is my domain," Hela said. "It always has been. But a domain without a Song is a god trapped in a corner, powerless beyond the reach of its own hands. My Song is conquest. War. The battlefield and the taking and the breaking of nations that thought they couldn't be broken. Every sword raised in violence, every army that marches, every general who kneels or dies. That is how I will spread myself across this world until my name is woven into the fabric of it, and no prayer spoken before a battle will be spoken without invoking me."
She let the silence stretch. The Einherjar were still, their eyes on her, and they didn't blink and they didn't shift.
"To become what I need to become, I need war," she said. "Real war. Not skirmishes along a wall and not raids against merchantmen and not assassins in back alleys. I need a war that reshapes maps and kills old powers and births new ones. The largest and the bloodiest war this world has ever seen."
Soren's jaw tightened. Grettir's hand found his sword hilt and rested there.
"Here is what that looks like," Hela said. "We leave the Five Forts. We cross the mountains west into the plains of the Jogos Nhai. I will conquer every band and every jhat and every screaming rider on those plains, and I will take the title of Jhattar, and they will ride for me or they will die."
She pointed west, past the fort's walls, toward the peaks that rose against the darkening sky.
"After the Jogos Nhai, we cross the Bone Mountains. On the other side, the Dothraki Sea. Every khalasar, every khal, every arakh-wielding horseman between the Bone Mountains and the Free Cities. I will break them and I will remake them and I will add their strength to mine, and when that is done, I will have an army that stretches from horizon to horizon and follows the sound of my voice."
She lowered her hand.
"My apotheosis will be heralded by the largest and bloodiest war this world has ever seen," she said. "I am not dressing that up in nice words for you. People will die in numbers that will make the histories flinch. Cities will burn and kingdoms will bend or be erased, and the ground will be red from the Bone Mountains to the shores of the Narrow Sea."
The courtyard was quiet and the wind had died, and even the sounds from the garrison had gone distant and thin.
Hela looked at them, all fourteen, every face.
"You have followed me into the Ash and through Stygai and past Carcosa and into the Grey Waste where the Others themselves turned and fled from us. You have killed demons and wights and monsters and men, and you have never faltered, and you have never asked me why."
She spread her hands.
"I'm asking now. What comes next is not another voyage and it is not an expedition. It is a war of annihilation that will not end until I have become something that this world has never seen. It will take years and some of you will die. Maybe all of you. There will be no going home until it is finished, and when it is finished, the world you left behind will not be the world you return to."
She let her hands fall to her sides.
"Do you still want to come with me?"
All of them drew their weapons and knelt before her.
“We fight and die for the Lady Reaper,” they said. “This is and always will be true.”
Fenrir broke through the cloud cover with his wings spread wide, a black shape against the iron gray, climbing and banking and catching the last of the evening light along the edges of his scales. His jaws were open and the green fire between his teeth threw a column of emerald light upward into the haze. He banked hard and passed over the courtyard so low that the wind from his wings pressed the Einherjar's cloaks flat against their bodies and sent loose grit skittering across the flagstones. The roar came again, louder, and it echoed off the fused black walls of the Five Forts and rolled across the plain and the mountains and out into the Grey Waste.
Fenrir climbed on a thermal that came off the mountains to the south, spiraling upward, his body dwindling against the sky and his wings beating in slow and powerful strokes. The green glow from his throat faded as he rose, and then flared bright, and then faded again, a heartbeat of emerald fire pulsing against the clouds.
Hela turned from the sky and faced west.
"We leave at dawn," she said.