The cave was far more spacious inside than they had imagined.
A smell of dust and ancient ice hit them in the face, stinging their noses.
Torchlight flickered in the narrow passage, stretching and twisting the mottled shadows on the walls until they seemed to come alive.
Murals covered the walls.
The style was crude, the lines simple.
Yet they carried a primal, deeply unsettling power.
After only a few glances, every soldier from the North felt a chill shoot from the soles of his feet to the back of his head.
The first mural depicted a group of humans draped in animal skins.
They knelt in the snow, bowing before a red eye burning with flames in the sky.
In the second mural, another eye, this one blue, descended upon the earth.
Wherever it passed, forests became ice sculptures, rivers froze solid, and snow and ice blanketed the land.
In the third mural, humans in animal skins felled sacred trees, and the Children of the Forest appeared. They fought those humans, leaving corpses strewn across the land.
The fourth mural looked as though someone had erased it, leaving only the image of one of the Children of the Forest driving a dagger into a human's chest.
The dagger glowed with a faint blue light. Above it, that enormous blue eye watched everything from the sky.
In the fifth mural, countless fallen corpses rose from the snow.
The same blue light as the dagger flickered in their hollow eye sockets as they gathered into an endless army of the dead.
In the final mural, the surviving First Men fled south in panic, pursued by the army of the dead.
Behind them lay a vast tide of bones and despair.
"The Long Night... this is the legendary Long Night."
An elderly