Then Viserys walked over to King Ghidorah, reached out to pat her warm neck, and swung himself up onto it. Daenerys climbed up right behind him, settled on King Ghidorah's back, and wrapped both arms around Viserys's waist from behind.
After a brief farewell, the four dragons spread their broad wings one after another, their wing membranes pulling taut in the morning breeze. With a succession of powerful wingbeats, they rose into the sky.
They swept over White Harbor, with King Ghidorah flying in the lead. Her three heads dipped slightly in the wind, and the rising sunlight struck her golden scales, giving them a hard, striking gleam.
The other three dragons followed close behind her, their wingbeats sending gusts of wind roaring over the buildings of varying heights below.
White Harbor grew smaller and smaller beneath them. Its walls, towers, harbor, and densely packed houses first shrank into a gray-white outline. Then even that outline gradually blurred, until the boundless wilderness of the North swallowed it entirely, leaving only an indistinct gray streak on the horizon.
They followed the White Knife River north. Beneath the dragons' wings, the wilderness, stained dark brown by autumn frost, swept steadily backward. Up close, its colors looked deep and brown, but in the distance they faded into a pale expanse.
The White Knife River wound below them like a long, slender streak of light, reaching deep into the North. At first, they could still occasionally see clumps of low-growing wild grass, but even those gradually disappeared. The farther north they went, the harsher the land became, until nothing remained but stretches of gray-brown frozen soil and exposed rock.
After passing the last few inhabited towns and villages, they truly entered the barren mountains of the North. The White Knife River cut straight through