Act IV, Chapter 21: The Wall Breaks — Cael Faces What the South Refuses to Name

The cold came first.

Not the cold of winter, which Cael had learned to read like a second language in the months since his oath — the honest, declarative cold of the north that announced itself through wind and cloud and the gradual encroachment of ice along the Wall's outer face. This was something else. This was the cold of a door being opened between one world and the place that exists before warmth was invented, and it arrived without prelude, without the courtesy of gradation, dropping the temperature on the Wall's northern walkway by what the garrison maester would later estimate — if there were a later, if there were a maester — as forty degrees in the span of three heartbeats.

Cael had been on the Wall for six hours.