Post by voice on Aug 3, 2017 0:21:01 GMT
If you're familiar with my posts regarding the Wall, you know that I believe it blocks wargs, rather than Others and ice spiders. If anything, the Wall should feel as comfortable to the Others as your favorite chair feels to you. It's ice, they're ice, spiders climb walls and Others walk lightly upon the snow (aka, ice).
We might see the Wall stop an Other on some long night, but I won't be holding my frosty breath until my eyes turn blue. In the course of five novels, we've seen the Wall block one thing and one thing only: the warg-bond.
A Storm of Swords - Jon XII
I would need to steal her if I wanted her love, but she might give me children. I might someday hold a son of my own blood in my arms. A son was something Jon Snow had never dared dream of, since he decided to live his life on the Wall. I could name him Robb. Val would want to keep her sister's son, but we could foster him at Winterfell, and Gilly's boy as well. Sam would never need to tell his lie. We'd find a place for Gilly too, and Sam could come visit her once a year or so. Mance's son and Craster's would grow up brothers, as I once did with Robb.He wanted it, Jon knew then. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything. I have always wanted it, he thought, guiltily. May the gods forgive me. It was a hunger inside him, sharp as a dragonglass blade. A hunger . . . he could feel it. It was food he needed, prey, a red deer that stank of fear or a great elk proud and defiant. He needed to kill and fill his belly with fresh meat and hot dark blood. His mouth began to water with the thought.It was a long moment before he understood what was happening. When he did, he bolted to his feet. "Ghost?" He turned toward the wood, and there he came, padding silently out of the green dusk, the breath coming warm and white from his open jaws. "Ghost!" he shouted, and the direwolf broke into a run. He was leaner than he had been, but bigger as well, and the only sound he made was the soft crunch of dead leaves beneath his paws. When he reached Jon he leapt, and they wrestled amidst brown grass and long shadows as the stars came out above them. "Gods, wolf, where have you been?" Jon said when Ghost stopped worrying at his forearm. "I thought you'd died on me, like Robb and Ygritte and all the rest. I've had no sense of you, not since I climbed the Wall, not even in dreams." The direwolf had no answer, but he licked Jon's face with a tongue like a wet rasp, and his eyes caught the last light and shone like two great red suns.Red eyes, Jon realized, but not like Melisandre's. He had a weirwood's eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one. And he alone of all the direwolves was white. Six pups they'd found in the late summer snows, him and Robb; five that were grey and black and brown, for the five Starks, and one white, as white as Snow.He had his answer then.
With the Wall between, Jon could not sense Ghost. Just before their reunion, Jon had gone to the north side of the Wall to watch Mel's nightfire ritual. [The passage above, quite literally, explains in great detail how the Wall separated Jon from his intimate connection to the Old Gods, but I digress...]
If my interpretation is accurate, and the First Men have been duped into protecting an artifact of their own oppression for 8,000 years, the implications are many. I've thumped my BtB=NK bible enough so I won't do so again here (at least not yet LOL). This post will focus on a more practical implication of my hypothesis.
Ladies and Gents, it's time to revisit the mysterious combustion of
A Dance with Dragons - Prologue
Varamyr might have been amongst them if only he'd been stronger. The sea was grey and cold and far away, though, and he knew that he would never live to see it. He was nine times dead and dying, and this would be his true death. A squirrel-skin cloak, he remembered, he knifed me for a squirrel-skin cloak.Its owner had been dead, the back of her head smashed into red pulp flecked with bits of bone, but her cloak looked warm and thick. It was snowing, and Varamyr had lost his own cloaks at the Wall. His sleeping pelts and woolen smallclothes, his sheepskin boots and fur-lined gloves, his store of mead and hoarded food, the hanks of hair he took from the women he bedded, even the golden arm rings Mance had given him, all lost and left behind. I burned and I died and then I ran, half-mad with pain and terror. The memory still shamed him, but he had not been alone. Others had run as well, hundreds of them, thousands. The battle was lost. The knights had come, invincible in their steel, killing everyone who stayed to fight. It was run or die.
A Dance with Dragons - Prologue (a bit later)
His last death had been by fire. I burned. At first, in his confusion, he thought some archer on the Wall had pierced him with a flaming arrow … but the fire had been inside him, consuming him. And the pain …Varamyr had died nine times before. He had died once from a spear thrust, once with a bear's teeth in his throat, and once in a wash of blood as he brought forth a stillborn cub. He died his first death when he was only six, as his father's axe crashed through his skull. Even that had not been so agonizing as the fire in his guts, crackling along his wings, devouring him. When he tried to fly from it, his terror fanned the flames and made them burn hotter. One moment he had been soaring above the Wall, his eagle's eyes marking the movements of the men below. Then the flames had turned his heart into a blackened cinder and sent his spirit screaming back into his own skin, and for a little while he'd gone mad. Even the memory was enough to make him shudder.
Many readers assume Melisandre incinerated the eagle, and this association does make sense. Mel is Fire's #1 Fan, encourages kings adopt flaming-heart sigils, and she has hot steaming blood. And, Varamyr himself states that, "the flames had turned his heart into a blackened cinder," when he was pushed out from Orell's Eagle.
But when have we ever seen Mel torch something with her mind?
She's not Sparky Sparky Boom Man.
Don't get me wrong, I think Melisandre of Asshai is powerful. She alone has squeezed shadowbaby assassins from her hoo-ha. So she's a way-legit shadowbinder. But if I recall correctly, she also had to toss leeches into a brazier to impress Stannis.
Why didn't she just wink an eye and blow them up? Surely that would have gotten the Mannis' attention.
Eventually, we are able to see through Mel's own POV, and learn just how much she relies upon slight of hand for her magic tricks. And, nowhere in her chapter does she ever recall causing
So, we must needs look for another culprit.
A Storm of Swords - Bran IV
"Coldhands," said Bran impatiently. "The green men ride on elks, Old Nan used to say. Sometimes they have antlers too.""He wasn't a green man. He wore blacks, like a brother of the Watch, but he was pale as a wight, with hands so cold that at first I was afraid. The wights have blue eyes, though, and they don't have tongues, or they've forgotten how to use them." The fat man turned to Jojen. "He'll be waiting. We should go. Do you have anything warmer to wear? The Black Gate is cold, and the other side of the Wall is even colder. You—""Why didn't he come with you?" Meera gestured toward Gilly and her babe. "They came with you, why not him? Why didn't you bring him through this Black Gate too?""He ... he can't.""Why not?""The Wall. The Wall is more than just ice and stone, he said. There are spells woven into it . . . old ones, and strong. He cannot pass beyond the Wall."It grew very quiet in the castle kitchen then. Bran could hear the soft crackle of the flames, the wind stirring the leaves in the night, the creak of the skinny weirwood reaching for the moon. Beyond the gates the monsters live, and the giants and the ghouls, he remembered Old Nan saying, but they cannot pass so long as the Wall stands strong. So go to sleep, my little Brandon, my baby boy. You needn't fear. There are no monsters here.
Coldhands' origins aside, I think this is a very telling passage. The wall is more than just ice and stone. There are spells woven into it . . . old ones, and strong.
Of course, we are told that Brandon the Builder built the Wall, and thus, whatever old and strong spells it contains should come from him. Or, perhaps he, like Stannis, had a relationship with a sorceress. That is a topic for another day, however (or, at least another thread).
GRRM has told us that Samwell "broke the spell" that held the Other together, when he pierced it with the dragonglass dagger. I think the Wall would do the same for Coldhands, and I think it did the same for Orell's Eagle.
I'm a fan of equal and opposite forces, and I see "Frozen Fire" and Frozen Water as fitting that dichotomy. Frozen Fire breaks the spell that holds an Other together.
Specifically, Samwell's "frozen fire" melted the Other's body.
A Storm of Swords - Samwell I
Do it now. Stop crying and fight, you baby. Fight, craven. It was his father he heard, it was Alliser Thorne, it was his brother Dickon and the boy Rast. Craven, craven, craven. He giggled hysterically, wondering if they would make a wight of him, a huge fat white wight always tripping over its own dead feet. Do it, Sam. Was that Jon, now? Jon was dead. You can do it, you can, just do it. And then he was stumbling forward, falling more than running, really, closing his eyes and shoving the dagger blindly out before him with both hands. He heard a crack, like the sound ice makes when it breaks beneath a man's foot, and then a screech so shrill and sharp that he went staggering backward with his hands over his muffled ears, and fell hard on his arse.
When he opened his eyes the Other's armor was running down its legs in rivulets as pale blue blood hissed and steamed around the black dragonglass dagger in its throat. It reached down with two bone-white hands to pull out the knife, but where its fingers touched the obsidian they smoked.
Sam rolled onto his side, eyes wide as the Other shrank and puddled, dissolving away. In twenty heartbeats its flesh was gone, swirling away in a fine white mist. Beneath were bones like milkglass, pale and shiny, and they were melting too. Finally only the dragonglass dagger remained, wreathed in steam as if it were alive and sweating. Grenn bent to scoop it up and flung it down again at once. "Mother, that's cold."
"Obsidian." Sam struggled to his knees. "Dragonglass, they call it. Dragonglass. Dragon glass." He giggled, and cried, and doubled over to heave his courage out onto the snow.
When he opened his eyes the Other's armor was running down its legs in rivulets as pale blue blood hissed and steamed around the black dragonglass dagger in its throat. It reached down with two bone-white hands to pull out the knife, but where its fingers touched the obsidian they smoked.
Sam rolled onto his side, eyes wide as the Other shrank and puddled, dissolving away. In twenty heartbeats its flesh was gone, swirling away in a fine white mist. Beneath were bones like milkglass, pale and shiny, and they were melting too. Finally only the dragonglass dagger remained, wreathed in steam as if it were alive and sweating. Grenn bent to scoop it up and flung it down again at once. "Mother, that's cold."
"Obsidian." Sam struggled to his knees. "Dragonglass, they call it. Dragonglass. Dragon glass." He giggled, and cried, and doubled over to heave his courage out onto the snow.
Hmm. Almost seems as if Obsidian also contains spells that are old and strong.
Anyway, let us move on...
If an equal and opposite substance exists in ASOIAF, I'm thinking it's Frozen Water that's been woven together with strong old spells.
...Other-glass?
...Milk-glass?
...Ice?
...Snow?
Whatever we call it, I think it's pretty clear that the Wall (just like the Others) is made of it. So, we saw an Other melt pierced with a dagger made of frozen fire.
Imagine what a big black Wall made of Obsidian might do to those ice spiders if they tried to float their way over it . . .
I'm thinking they would feel filled with an intense burning sensation while spontaneously evaporating.
Do you see what I see?
Still not convinced? Consider the Wall's own words:
I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men.
Seems to me like
No wonder Jon couldn't sense Ghost when the Wall divided them. The Wall wakes the wargs, and pushes them out of the skins of their wolves.
Good thing there's that special Weirwood Gate beneath the Nightfort. Without that, there would be no way for wargs and skinchangers to travel north and south.
And whomever built and guarded such a mystical portal between realms might be seen as the man or woman in control of the very 'awakening' of Old Powers... the regulator of magic's circadian rhythms on a celestial scale... able to bring light or winter as if they were merely swords to wield.
TL;DR: