Chapter 192: Blue Fire [BONUS]

Encrid did not leave with the soldiers.

He climbed back up to the Fifth Bastion instead.

Harun followed him without a word, and so did Gus. Gareth had stayed at the Mouth to organize the rear of the column. There were only a few soldiers left on the central stretch now. Dael’s forty at the Western Gate. The old sergeant and the other volunteers along the sixth mile. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

And the Lampwrights.

They were everywhere.

Encrid had never seen them all at once before. There had always been a few of them along the Wall at dusk and dawn, tending the lamps, climbing their ladders, moving quietly from one post to the next. He had never realized how many of them there were.

Two hundred and twelve.

Men and women in leather aprons, standing along the parapet of the central stretch. One at every lamp. Some of them were very old. Some of them looked no older than Gus.

None of them were armed.

Iolan Vire stood at the edge of the Fifth Bastion, beside the lamp on its tall iron post.

He did not turn when Encrid came up the stairs.

"You should be on the road," he said.

"In a moment."

Vire did not argue.

Encrid went to the parapet and looked north.

The Elder was a hundred paces from the Wall.

It filled the killing ground. Its one remaining tusk rose higher than the parapet. Its one good eye was fixed on the stone. It walked slowly, steadily, the way it had walked for four days, and every step made the Wall shake beneath Encrid’s feet.

Around it and behind it, the horde was coming.

The pressure from the north had returned. It was not as strong as it had been at the Council table or on the eighth mile. But it was there. Pressing down. Driving the Roamers forward in a mad, surging mass.

Encrid could see the Talljacks already climbing the body ramps.

"Now," Vire said quietly.

He did not shout it. He did not need to.

All along the parapet, two hundred and twelve Lampwrights took knives from their aprons.

And cut their wrists.

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It happened very quickly.

Each Lampwright reached up and opened the small glass door of the lamp beside them. Each one held their bleeding wrist over the blue flame inside.

The blood fell into the fire.

And the fire came out.

Encrid saw it happen to Vire first. The blue flame in the lamp flared up and leaped out of its glass, and it did not rise into the air. It went into Vire’s wrist. Into the cut. Into his blood.

It ran up his arm under the skin like a river of light.

Vire’s head went back. His mouth opened. For a moment, Encrid thought he was screaming. But there was no sound.

Then his eyes opened.

They were blue.

Not the color of eyes. The color of the lamps. The same cold blue that had burned along the Wall every night for two hundred years. It filled his eyes from edge to edge, and it poured out of them in thin wisps like smoke.

And all along the parapet, the same thing was happening.

Two hundred and twelve blue flames went out of two hundred and twelve lamps.

And two hundred and twelve Lampwrights began to burn.

Gus had taken a step back. His hand was on his sword. Harun had gone very still.

Encrid could not look away.

Vire turned toward him. His face was different. It was the same face, thin and quiet and strange, but something behind it was different. Something very old. Something that looked out at Encrid through Vire’s burning eyes with an anger so deep and so cold that Encrid felt it in his bones.

"Go," Vire said.

His voice was not his voice anymore. It was deeper. It seemed to come from very far away.

"Go now."

Then he turned and stepped off the edge of the Fifth Bastion.

✧ ✧ ✧

He did not fall.

Or he did, but not the way a man falls. He dropped sixty feet to the killing ground below and landed on the back of a Talljack that had been climbing the body ramp, and the Talljack burst into blue fire.

Vire did not stop.

He ran along the base of the Wall toward the Elder, and everything he touched burned. Grinners. Reevers. Talljacks. They caught fire the moment his hands touched them, and the fire did not go out.

And all along the central stretch, the Lampwrights followed him.

They went over the parapet like a blue wave.

Encrid watched them. He could not have looked away if he had wanted to. Old men and young women, lamplighters who had never held a sword, threw themselves into the horde and tore it apart. They did not use weapons. They did not need weapons. They burned. Every Roamer they touched burned.

And the Roamers, which had been driven half mad by the pressure from the north, did something Encrid had never seen them do.

They tried to run.

They turned away from the blue fire and scrambled back across the killing ground, crashing into each other, trampling each other. The mass of the horde in front of the central stretch broke apart like a wave hitting rock.

Only the Elder kept coming.

Vire reached it.

Encrid watched through the glass. A single small figure, wrapped in blue fire, standing in front of a thing the size of a hill.

Vire did not attack its legs. He did not go for its tusk.

He went up.

He climbed. He climbed the Elder’s head like a man climbing a ladder, his burning hands leaving black scorch marks on its grey hide, until he reached its one good eye.

And he put both his hands into it.

The Elder screamed.

It was the same scream the Wall had heard three nights ago, when Ulrich Vance cut off its tusk. The same thin, tearing sound that did not seem possible from anything so large. It reared back. It shook its great head. Vire clung to it, burning.

And then the Elder stopped walking.

For the first time in four days, it stopped.

It stood in the middle of the killing ground, forty paces from the Wall, shaking its head from side to side, blind and screaming, while a single blue flame burned on its face.

"Young master."

Gus’s hand was on his arm.

"Young master, we have to go."

Encrid did not move.

"Young master. Please."

Encrid lowered the glass.

He looked at the Wall. At the blue fire spreading along the killing ground. At the Elder, standing still.

At the lamp on its iron post beside him, its glass door open, dark and empty for the first time in two hundred years.

He turned and went down the stairs.

He could not see it from this distance, but on the Elder’s face, Vire was smiling. He was glad that at least someone would remember the Last Fire that had stood to protect the Wall.

For Vire, that was enough.

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Thank you @Stingdragon for the dragon gift~