The Others are a race of cold and inhuman beings out of the uttermost north, dwelling beyond the Wall in the Lands of Always Winter. Tall and gaunt, with flesh pale as milk, eyes that burn like blue stars, and bones that shine like milkglass, they are said to be strange and terrible in their beauty—elegant, dangerous, and unlike any living thing. They wear shifting armor that takes on the colors of the world around it, and some bear thin crystal swords alive with moonlight, so keen they pass through ringmail as through silk and so cold they sheathe a man's steel in frost and shatter it. The killing chill walks with them, white mist rises at their coming, and they leave no print upon the snow; their speech is likened to the cracking of ice upon a winter lake, and their laughter to icicles.
In the legends of the Long Night, the Others descended upon Westeros in an age of unending winter, leading hosts of the slain against the living until they were at last driven back by the children of the forest and the First Men under the last hero in the Battle for the Dawn. For six to eight thousand years thereafter they were not seen, and the people of the Seven Kingdoms came to name them only monsters of Old Nan's tales. Yet ancient texts record their weaknesses—obsidian, the dragonglass called "frozen fire," and the "dragonsteel" that some maesters believe to be Valyrian steel—and tell how, through dark sorcery, the Others may raise the slain as wights, an unholy resurrection thwarted only by giving the dead to the flames. In the present day, beyond the haunted forest, the cold gods have begun to stir once more.