04 Night's Watch.pdf - Chaos Bleeds

CHAPTER 2: THE WALL & THE GIFTSeven hundred feet high, three hundred miles long, and wide enoughat the top for a dozen men on horseback to ride abreast... the Wall isthe largest manmade structure in all of Westeros. For 8,000 years it hasstood at the edge of the world, shielding civilization against lawlesswildings and horrific monsters of legend and nightmare.HistoryEight thousand years ago, in the Age of Heroes, when history and legendwere one and the same, there came a terrible winter that lasted ageneration. In those days, out of the bitter Far North, emerged a race ofhorrors known only as the Others.Born of that hellish winter, they were not living things but demonsof ice and darkness. They swept away the First Men, methodically andmercilessly killing all they met, and then raising the dead to swell theranks of their armies as undead wights.Thousands upon thousands fell to the Others until there came a greathero, known in the East as Azor Ahai who bore a sword of fire calledLightbringer. Armed with fire and dragonglass, and with Azor Ahaiin the van, the First Men drove the Others back north to the Land ofAlways Winter. Summer returned, and the Long Night was over.In the wake of that terrible war, another hero came forward. BrandonStark, more famously known as Bran the Builder, was the first Kingin the North and the founder of House Stark. It was Bran that raisedWinterfell with the aid of the giants, and he who raised the Wall at theend of the Long Night—but the stories say nothing of the giants givingaid in this second endeavor.Indeed, had the giants been around to protest, the raising of the Walllikely would have been considered dire betrayal. Some among the maestersof the Citadel who study such things think that perhaps the giants,faced with a winter of such depth as that seen in the Long Night, sankinto a torpid slumber as some animals do. They point to the tales ofJoramun, King-beyond-the-Wall, blowing the Horn of Winter to wakethe giants support of their claims. Why, when before the Others werethe giants who strode the land, would they need to be awakened by amagical horn? And what might cause a whole race to enter a sleep sodeep as that? The truth may never be known.“You could see it from miles off, a pale blue line across the northern horizon, stretchingaway to the east and west in the far distance, immense and unbroken. T his is the end ofthe world, it seemed to say.”- A Game of T hrones42