Chapter 55: The Last Untidiness
Chapter 55: The Last Untidiness
The Wall was a monument to the fears of a forgotten age. It was a barrier of ice and magic, eight thousand years old, built to hold back a darkness the south had long since dismissed as a nursery rhyme. As the Grand Army of the Great Order made camp in its shadow at Castle Black, the few hundred men of the Night's Watch stared in stunned disbelief at the sea of tents and banners that had materialized at their doorstep.
Their Lord Commander, a grim, grey-bearded man named Jonnel Snow—a descendant of some forgotten Northern line—met Prince Jacaerys and the High Priestess Ellyn in the castle's common hall. The air was thick with the smell of peat smoke and fear.
"We have seen them, Prince Jacaerys," the Lord Commander said, his voice a low, gravelly thing. "For the past year, the patrols that go out… fewer and fewer come back. We have seen the blue eyes in the dark of the Haunted Forest. We have felt a cold that freezes the very soul, a cold that has nothing to do with winter." He looked at the ancient, horn-carved map on the table. "This Wall has stood since the age of the First Men. I do not know if it can stand against what is coming."
Ellyn the Weaver placed a hand on the map, her own hand radiating a gentle, comforting warmth that seemed to push back the hall's chill. "The Wall is made of ice, Lord Commander," she said, her voice calm and certain. "It is a thing of the cold you fear. We are the fire of the Great Order. The Wall is no longer your shield. We are."
Three days later, the great gates of Castle Black swung open, and the Winter Crusade marched north. They were an army of summer marching into the heart of eternal winter, a river of life flowing into a dead land. The silence of the place was the first enemy they faced. It was a profound, oppressive quiet, broken only by the crunch of a hundred thousand pairs of boots on the frozen snow and the mournful sigh of the wind through the barren trees.
They were a week into their march when the enemy showed itself. From the grey, frozen hills surrounding them, a tide of the dead poured forth. It was an army of wights, the reanimated corpses of wildlings, bears, and giants, their eyes burning with a cold, blue light. They moved with an unnatural, jerky speed, their only sound the dry clatter of bone on ice.
"Shield wall!" Jacaerys's command rang out, the Westerosi lords instinctively forming their men into disciplined lines of steel.
But it was the Blessed who met the first charge. They moved to the front, forming a line of their own, a line of simple leather and glowing faith.
"For the Order! For the God!" Matthos, the old soldier, bellowed, his voice booming with divine power.
As the wights crashed into their line, the Blessed erupted in light. The divine energy that flowed through them, the energy of life and order, was anathema to the cold, chaotic magic of undeath. Where they stood, the air grew warm. Their hands, when they struck the wights, did not just break bone; they caused the dead flesh to dissolve into black smoke. A wight that so much as touched a Blessed warrior would crumble to dust, its blue-eyed fire extinguished by a greater, holier light.
The professional soldiers behind them watched in awe. They held the line, cutting down the few wights that broke through, but the battle was being won by the saints at the front. It was a war of fundamental forces, and faith was proving to be a stronger force than death.
As the last of the wights were cleansed, a new figure appeared on a high, snowy ridge overlooking the battlefield. It was not a creature of dead flesh, but one of sculpted, translucent ice, its armor seeming to shift and catch the pale light in impossible ways. It sat upon a skeletal horse that breathed clouds of frost. It was an Other. And it was not looking at the army below. It was looking south.
In his quiet, orderly world in King's Landing, Krosis-Krif felt the gaze of his rival. It was a sensation unlike any other, a telepathic touch of absolute cold, a consciousness of pure, silent, entropy.
<...You,> a thought echoed in his own mind, a voice made of grinding glaciers and the silence between stars.
Krosis-Krif focused his immense consciousness north, his mind's eye seeing the icy general on its dead steed. He had found him. The final boss. The ultimate untidiness. A flicker of something that his human soul would have called excitement sparked in the vastness of his being.
"I AM ORDER," Krosis-Krif projected back, his own mental voice a force of absolute, unyielding structure. "YOU ARE A FLAW IN THE DESIGN. A BROKEN COG IN THE MACHINE OF EXISTENCE. I HAVE COME TO CORRECT YOU."
The Great Other seemed to consider this, a being of pure chaos contemplating the idea of a flaw.
Krosis-Krif felt the profound, terrible truth in the creature's logic. The ultimate end of any system was entropy. The Great Other was not just an enemy; it was the embodiment of the universe's final, inevitable state. To fight it was to fight the future.
"YOUR SILENCE IS THE CHAOS OF UNMAKING," Krosis-Krif countered, his own philosophy now a weapon. "MY SILENCE IS THE PERFECTION OF A COMPLETED WORK. I WILL PROVE WHICH IS SUPERIOR."
And in that moment, in that cosmic debate between two gods at opposite ends of existence, Krosis-Krif finally understood what he had to do. He understood the true nature of the game he was playing. The Great Other was right. His own system, a world of life and change and choice (however limited), was inherently flawed. It was still… untidy. There would always be new variables, new ambitions, new loves like the one between Viserys and Jaehaera, new thoughts of rebellion in the heart of a Northern lord. His peace required constant, eternal vigilance. It was work.
The Great Other's peace… that was final. That was absolute. But Krosis-Krif could not allow a being of chaos to be the one to achieve it. He, the god of order, had to be the one to deliver the world to its final, perfect state. He had to out-silence the silence.
He had escaped a meaningless death only to achieve a meaningless eternity of boredom. Now, he saw the final move. The one that would end the game, declare him the ultimate winner, and free him from the prison of his own perfect creation. He would not just defeat the Great Other. He would become it, but in his own, orderly image.
He gathered himself. He drew upon the vast, placid ocean of faith from his billion followers. He drew upon the potent, stored energy from the Dragon's Tithe. He drew upon the memories of the Targaryen souls he had consumed. He drew upon the core of his own being, the cunning, psychopathic will that had started it all. He gathered every joule of power he possessed, a quantity of energy that could unmake suns.
And he released it.
It was not a beam of light aimed at the North. It was a wave. A silent, invisible, conceptual wave that expanded from his being on the Hill of Rhaenys, washing over the entire world in an instant. It was not a wave of force or fire or cold. It was a wave of pure, absolute, conceptual Order. It was a wave of Stasis.
Beyond the Wall, Prince Jacaerys saw the Great Other raise its crystal sword. He saw Ellyn raise her hands, glowing with the light of the Blessed. He saw the army of the dead begin to surge forward. And then, everything stopped.
The wight, its jaw open in a silent scream, froze mid-stride. The snowflake landing on Lord Stark's glove ceased its descent. The look of terror and faith on a soldier's face was locked in place for eternity. The Great Other itself, its arm raised, became a flawless, motionless statue of ice and malice. The entire world, from the highest bird in the sky to the deepest fish in the sea, was caught in a single, perfect, unchangeable moment.
In King's Landing, King Viserys, in the middle of raising a goblet to his lips, froze. Queen Jaehaera, her mouth open in a smile directed at her child, became a portrait of joy. In Oldtown, the High Septon, in the middle of his final, dying breath, was locked in the moment between life and death. The entire planet, every speck of dust, every drop of water, every living soul, was now a part of a single, perfect, frozen tableau.
Time itself had been commanded to halt. Change was now forbidden. Disorder was now impossible.
Krosis-Krif was the only consciousness left in a silent universe. He was the sole observer of his own masterpiece. The war was won. The final untidiness was corrected. The Great Other had been defeated, not by being destroyed, but by being made a permanent, orderly part of the final, perfect sculpture.
He had done it. He had achieved the ultimate victory. He had imposed a perfect, unchangeable, and eternal order upon all of reality. There would be no more untidiness. No more chaos. No more change. No more passion, no more love, no more fear, no more faith. The river of energy he had once coveted had run dry, but it no longer mattered. He no longer needed sustenance. He no longer needed anything.
He had finally, truly, won the game.
The human soul at the heart of the god looked out upon the silent, beautiful, perfect world he had created. It was a museum of a single moment, and he was its only visitor, doomed to walk its empty halls for an eternity of eternities. He had escaped a meaningless death by ending the very concept of meaning itself. He had created the perfect, empty room at the end of time, and locked himself inside.
His victory was absolute. And so was his solitude. The silence he had once craved was no longer a state; it was the very definition of his being.
His last thought was not one of pride or sorrow. It was a simple, final acknowledgment of a task completed. The ultimate tidiness, achieved at last.
"Order."
And then, there was only silence.