He had changed completely. Though his face remained the same and his features had not twisted, every trace of human warmth had vanished from his eyes.
In its place was a frozen blaze of ice, devoid of any sign of life.
He looked at Robb, who had just called out to him, and spoke in a utterly flat voice. "Robb."
To Robb, that voice sounded as though it came from beneath an ice field frozen for centuries. Wrapped in the dense cold filling the Crypt, it scraped painfully against the bones of his ears.
Robb's grip on his longsword tightened until his hand turned white. His throat bobbed, but he could not force out a single word.
The familiar face of his uncle Benjen was still right before him, yet anyone could tell from the deathly aura seeping from his bones that this was no longer the Benjen Stark they had known.
Benjen ignored Robb's tense stance. His eyes, now entirely ice blue, slowly shifted toward Viserys, who had just warned him.
Then his rigid body moved toward Viserys. He could sense that Viserys was now his greatest threat.
With every step, his soles ground over the ice crystals that had just formed on the stone, producing a faint, grating crunch, and the temperature around him dropped another degree.
An ice-blue shape even began to appear in his hand: a longsword formed entirely of ice.
Watching Benjen's icy longsword slash toward them, Ygritte tightened her grip on her Valyrian steel dagger and quietly backed away, until her back brushed against Viserys's chest.
Every hair on the back of her neck stood on end. This was her first time facing an Other directly. Though he had only just been transformed, he was still far beyond anything she could handle.
Ygritte could