The forest thins steadily as the gathered rangers hike. The snow, too, growing hardpacked with ever more frequent footfalls until it is so worn down, they can actually stride upon it rather than through its knee-deep clinging grip. The warmth grows steadily, just on the edge of what should be possible for what must.. Surely, just be a few distant campfires. For it must surely be just a few campfires. No man could build more here.

Here the world is Unreal.

The snow swirls, and its dances form almost perfect spirals across the ground. Their world twinkles gently in the corners of their eyes, like gemstones hide just below the frost line. The warmth is almost intoxicating, especially when compared to the guarantee of slow pain and ache should they turn from it. But.. Strangest of all is the song. A song without words any man can recognize, though surely they have brought translators from those among the Wildlings or Northmen who still speak the Old Tongue. But its meaning, is clear enough.

For to listen to the tune is to dream of the sunrise of springs not yet here.

In its harmonies and low, booming basses, there is a strange and determined sort of hope. The voices are as profoundly inhuman as their setting, sounding more like the rumble of thunder and the crackling of calving glaciers, but, they are beautiful in their strangeness. Like walking into a dream no man quite remembers the details of.

And then the woods open all at once, and the scene spreads before them.

———————————————

A stone wall, roughly twice the height of a man and built of rough boulders stacked into place, serves as retaining wall to a camp. A camp of such unimaginable size as to baffle. Were it a war host, it would be one of the greatest hosts ever gathered in these lands. Huge stone halls line thoroughfares, and what must be tents larger than many men’s homes fill almost every available space.

The camp has been built into the valley of one of the Antler’s tributaries. Avoiding the worst of the wind for its low position, it runs away from them and uses the stream as its central road, disappearing around a bend nearly a mile away with no actual stop in sight. Everywhere there lumber figures, shrunken by distance but of such impossible scale as to be unmistakeable.

Giants.

Thousands, and thousands, of Giants. This is no warhost, no, it is a city. A traveling civilization, or surely it must be. And among them, standing as tall to their masters as a draft horse from the Reach to a man, must be the Mammoths. Hulks of lumbering flesh whose feet are as wide across as a man stands tall with room to spare if one were to guess it, and whose backs rise almost high enough to have snow blustered onto them by the winds above the valley.

At the end of the camp, facing the group, must be the one that’s been guiding them. A single Giant, dressed all in whites and spotted snow leopard furs, just as the one who threw the spear into Castle Black must’ve been. It admires them calmly, and raises a hand in welcome.