The Wall

Legend holds that after the Long Night, Brandon the Builder laid the Wall's first foundations upon the highest ground he could find, and that from that moment its defense fell to the Night's Watch. Some accounts add that spells now nearly forgotten helped hold the structure together.

The old tales suggest the Wall stood far lower in its earliest days, and that generations of Watch builders raised and strengthened it across the centuries that followed. By the time of this story, though, the order can barely muster the men for basic upkeep.

The Wall runs some three hundred miles and stands over seven hundred feet high, averaging close to two hundred meters, stretching from the Frostfangs in the west to the Bay of Seals in the east. Under clouds it looks grey; in sunlight, a bright blue-white; and in summer the heat melts its topmost layer, as though the ice were weeping.

Its course runs straight between Castle Black and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, but turns winding to the west, toward the Shadow Tower, because it follows the crests of rugged hills. To the north, between two of its castles, lies a stretch of caves and passages, and legend speaks of a tunnel, Gorne's Way, said to run beneath the ice itself.

It narrows from base to top, though the walk atop it is wide enough for a dozen riders abreast and room for siege engines besides. Each castle holds a tunnel cut through the base, barred with gates; at the abandoned strongholds those passages are sealed with rubble and frozen snow. Beneath the Nightfort lies an older tunnel still, closed by the Black Gate, which only a sworn brother can open.

Upkeep never stops: cracks must be filled and gravel spread across the top so men don't slip. Patrols of rangers and builders ride it on mules bred at Eastwatch to walk on ice, and one patrol in four checks the base for fissures or tunnels. Successive Lords Commander have also kept raising its height with ice blocks hauled from the frozen lakes of the north.

Now Lord Commander, Jon Snow sets out to resettle the Wall's abandoned strongholds, handing many of them over to the wildlings themselves: Oakenshield goes to Tormund and his people, others pass to leaders like White Mask Morna or Devyn Sealskinner, and the Long Barrow is taken by spearwives under Iron Emmett, earning it the name Whores' Barrow.

Other garrisons mix Watch brothers with men lent by Stannis Baratheon, and the Nightfort, the largest of all the Wall's castles, is set aside as a seat for Stannis himself, though making it fit to live in will take time.

Alysanne Targaryen recalled trying three times to fly Silverwing over Castle Black and on beyond the Wall, and three times the dragon turned south and would go no further. She said she laughed on landing so the black brothers wouldn't see how unsettled she was, though she admitted it troubled her then and troubled her still.