Some two thousand years after the Pact, the histories tell, there fell upon the world the winter men remember as the Long Night, a darkness that endured a generation and more, when the sun hid its face and the cold came down without end. Out of the frozen wastes beyond the Wall (though no Wall yet stood) came the Others, dead things with eyes of pale blue ice that made corpses walk and hunted men through the dark, and before them the realms of the First Men and the children of the forest alike were nearly undone. Crops failed and children starved and the dead rose against the living, and it seemed the end of all things had come. So it is written in the oldest tales, though these are the tales of a time before the runes of the First Men and beyond the reach of any true record, and the maesters caution that much of what the singers claim of the Long Night cannot be proven.
The songs of the north say that the war was turned by a hero, called by some the last hero, who set out with a sword, a horse, a dog, and twelve companions to seek the children of the forest in the deep of the haunted forest, and that all his companions and beasts died one by one until he alone remained. What passed at the last is told a hundred ways in a hundred lands, for the tale is known in Asshai and beyond as well as in Westeros; in the east they sing of Azor Ahai and the burning sword Lightbringer forged in the heart's blood of the hero's own love, while the maesters can only record that somehow the children and the men made common cause, and that in a final battle the War for the Dawn was won and the Others thrown back into the frozen north whence they came. When the dawn returned, so the northmen hold, Brandon the Builder raised the great Wall of ice with the aid of giants and the magic of the children, and the sworn brotherhood of the Night's Watch took up its endless vigil upon it, that the long dark should never fall upon the world again. Whether the hero of the last battle and the founder of House Stark were one man, the histories do not agree.