Beyond the Wall. The Haunted Forest.
The air was a thick, freezing soup of rot and iron, a sensory assault that made the men of the scouting party shiver in their furs.
Huff... Huff...
Grenn, small and wiry, gripped his longsword until his knuckles turned white. The blade shimmered with a cold, reflected light from the snow. Before him, a Wight lurched forward, its movements jerky and unnatural, yet driven by an eternal, icy hatred for the living.
Grenn's heart hammered against his ribs like a war drum, a frantic rhythm that urged him to flee. Fear was a cold snake slithering down his spine, but he forced his lungs to take in the freezing air, steadying his mind. He knew that if he blinked now, he would never see the Wall again. He remembered the thousands of hours in the Castle Black training yard—the repetitions, the bruises, the barked orders of Ser Alliser.
The Wight lunged.
Grenn pivoted, his boots sliding through the slush. He swung his blade in a silver arc, catching the creature squarely across its withered throat.
SQUELCH.
The steel carved through the putrid flesh and brittle bone. Black, congealed blood sprayed across the snow as the head spun away. The body collapsed in a heap of rotted furs at his feet. Grenn slumped onto a fallen log, gasping for air, his lungs burning.
"Hahaha! Grenn, you're too slow!" Pyp's voice cut through the silence, lighthearted but with an underlying edge of steel. "Look at me—I've bagged three. Once you realize they're just puppets with their strings cut, they're nothing but walking garbage."
Grenn looked up to see Pyp and Todder wiping black gore from their blades. Nearby, the Mo Sha Hounds were tearing a final Wight into unrecognizable scraps. They had become a grimly efficient unit. Every mile through the forest brought another skirmish, another group of brothers turned into monsters. Jon had them collect tokens—scraps of cloaks, family rings, or sigil brooches—to prove their fates back at Castle Black. Jon even kept a heavy iron chain ready, hoping to capture a smaller Wight as undeniable evidence for the skeptics in the Seven Kingdoms.
But Jon's true goal lay elsewhere. He wasn't just here to scout; he was here to excise a tumor. The System had guided him to a specific "Altar of Winter," a site where the Others converted the living—or the dead—into their mindless thralls.
Jon turned away from the cleanup and walked toward a gargantuan, withered Weirwood. The tree was a corpse. The carved face had been violently split open, leaving a jagged, yawning maw that led into the dark earth.
CAW! CAW!
A murder of ravens perched on the bone-white branches, their black feathers looking like drops of ink against the snow. They watched Jon with an unnerving, silent curiosity. As he approached the opening, they took flight in a sudden explosion of wings, a black rain against the grey sky.
GRRR...
The lead Mo Sha Hound scratched at the frozen ground near the roots, indicating a passage below. Jon patted the beast's head, feeling the heat of the blood magic radiating from its fur.
"Sam! Is there something down there?" Edd asked, his voice echoing in the hollow silence.
"The truth," Jon replied. "Don't you want to know where these things come from?"
He drew Longclaw. A massive sheet of ice, three meters thick, blocked the entrance beneath the roots. With a grunt of magically-enhanced strength, Jon swung the Valyrian steel. The ice didn't just crack; it shattered into a thousand glittering shards.
The tunnel was a nightmare of mud and slime.
"This place smells worse than the sewers of Greyguard," Edd complained, sliding through the muck. "May the Seven protect me from slipping; I'd never get the stench off my soul."
They descended for ten minutes until the passage opened into a cavern of impossible proportions. The ceiling was lost in shadow, and a thick, viscous liquid dripped from the stalactites, soaking their cloaks in a foul-smelling slime.
Drip. Drop.
"I'm never eating porridge again," Edd gagged, sniffing the slime on his sleeve.
The Mo Sha Hounds fanned out, their hackles raised. Even their supernatural senses struggled in the heavy, stagnant air of the cave. Guided by a pulse in his mind, Jon walked toward the center of the chamber, where a series of jagged, spiral stones formed a ritual circle. The rocks were carved with ancient, incomprehensible symbols—spirals, strange "中" shapes, and runes that seemed to writhe when looked at directly.
"Let's see how fragile this is," Jon muttered.
He didn't know the proper ritual to de-consecrate an altar, so he chose the soldier's method: destruction. He raised Longclaw and brought it down on the central monolith with a roar.
CRACK. BOOM!
The stone shattered. As the monolith fell, a violent shockwave of energy erupted from the site, throwing the other rangers back against the walls. Jon stood at the center, engulfed in a swirling vortex of blue and white light.
[Powerful Soul Energy Source Detected... Absorbing...][Unknown Module Detected...][System Interference Detected...][Descent Module Activation Compromised...]
The Descent Module? Jon's thoughts raced. He had seen the term during the Dragonstone synthesis, but the interface had always been locked. Is this a hidden function? Or a trap?
As the light began to fade, the air in the cave grew colder—colder than the Wall, colder than the deepest winter. Something had noticed the destruction of its altar.