This was one of those delightful prompts where the image came to me almost as soon as I read it. So quickly that I had to write it down next to the prompt so I wouldn’t forget it.
Admittedly it took me a little while to get the specifics of the steps up the wall right, as well as the remaining bits of the Nightfort, but otherwise, it worked like clockwork.
She wasn’t really climbing, the way he used to climb. She was only walking up some steps that the Night’s Watch had hewn hundreds and thousands of years ago. He remembered Maester Luwin saying the Nightfort was the only castle where the steps had been cut from the ice of the Wall itself. Or maybe it had been Uncle Benjen. The newer castles had wooden steps, or stone ones, or long ramps of earth and gravel. Ice is too treacherous. It was his uncle who’d told him that. He said that the outer surface of the Wall wept icy tears sometimes, though the core inside stayed frozen hard as rock. The steps must have melted and refrozen a thousand times since the last black brothers left the castle, and every time they did they shrunk a little and got smoother and rounder and more treacherous. Bran pg 759
