The Others are no noble house but the cold gods of the lands beyond the Wall, named in the histories of the realm and the songs of the free folk by many names — White Walkers in the camps of the Watch, white shadows and cold shadows in the older songs, the cold gods to Craster and his daughters, and to the red priests of R'hllor the cold children of the Great Other, the dark twin to the Lord of Light. Of the kind itself little can be said with certainty. Those who have seen them at close hand tell of tall, gaunt figures with flesh the colour of milk and eyes of pale ice that burn like blue stars; of pale blue blood and bones like milkglass; of reflective camouflaging armour that takes the colour of the snow around it so that a man's eye cannot fix the shape that bears it. Their thin crystal swords are alive with moonlight, ring with a high thin scream when they meet a brother's steel, and cover the metal they touch in frost. Their tongue is said to sound like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, their laughter to fall like icicles. They go lightly on the snow and leave no print to mark their passage, and where they walk a white mist rises and the cold goes before them.
In the long dawn ages of the world, when the kingdoms of the First Men were young, the Others came down out of the Lands of Always Winter at the head of an endless host of the slain, and the sun hid its face for a generation of men. So the singers tell of the Long Night, and of the last hero who sought the Children of the Forest in the heart of the wood with his sword broken at his hip; and of the dragonglass blades the Children gave him, that the cold could not break. In the Battle for the Dawn at the end of that long winter the Others were thrown back at last, by an alliance of the first sworn brothers of the Night's Watch and the singers of the wood that the last hero had brought together; in the songs of the Further East of Essos it is rather Azor Ahai, wielder of the burning sword Lightbringer, who ended the night. When the dawn was won, Brandon the Builder is said to have raised the Wall of ice and stone from sea to sea with the help of the children of the forest and the giants, and a brotherhood of sworn brothers was set upon it to watch through the centuries against any return. The Watch knows them still in its old vow — the sword in the darkness, the watcher on the walls, the shield that guards the realms of men. Six thousand years gone, eight thousand by some reckonings, the kind was last seen, and the archmaesters of the Citadel were quick to call them extinct and the tales of them children's fancies; the heretic Archmaester Fomas, in his Lies of the Ancients, even held that the Others had only ever been a tribe of First Men driven south by the winter and made monstrous in the telling by the Watch and the Starks. The free folk, who burn their dead, have never agreed.
In the dark years that followed the raising of the Wall the records of the Watch keep one stricken place set aside for them. The thirteenth man to be named Lord Commander, a fearless warrior whose name is forbidden to write, caught and loved a woman with skin white as the moon and blue stars for eyes at the top of the ice, gave her his seed and his soul both, and bore her down to the Nightfort, where he named her his corpse queen and himself her king. For thirteen years he bound the black brothers to his will with strange sorcery while atrocities the smallfolk still whisper of were worked beneath that ruin, until Brandon the Breaker, King in the North, and Joramun, King-Beyond-the-Wall, joined their swords and brought him down. When the cellars were searched and sacrifices to the Others were found among them, every record of him was destroyed and his very name forbidden; some say he had been a Bolton, an Umber, a Flint, a Norrey, a Magnar of Skagos, or a Woodfoot, but Old Nan would tell the children of Winterfell that he had been a Stark of that house, and brother to the very king who unkinged him.
By the events of A Game of Thrones the cold has come into the haunted forest again. In the first snows of the season a ranging out of Castle Black under Ser Waymar Royce, with the brothers Will and Gared at his side, comes upon a band of Others among the weirwoods; the young knight is cut down by a thin crystal blade and risen again to murder Will with blue stars for eyes, and only Gared lives to flee south, where he is taken for a deserter and beheaded by Lord Eddard Stark. In the moons that follow, the corpses of two more lost rangers — Othor and Jafer Flowers — are carried back to the Wall and rise in the night to come for Lord Commander Mormont in his own chambers; only the direwolf Ghost and a torch in the hand of the bastard Jon Snow put them down. The great ranging that follows is broken at the Fist of the First Men when three horn blasts ring out of the haunted forest and a horde of the slain breaks the brothers' shield wall in the dark; the survivors fall back through the trees and lose Small Paul to an Other on the road south, though the same fight makes Samwell Tarly a slayer with a dragonglass dagger that melts the cold thing to nothing. The remnant that survives the mutiny at Craster's Keep reaches the Wall at last with word that the dead are walking again, and that what the Watch was set on the ice to watch for is no longer a tale told to frighten boys at bedtime. Of the host that rides behind them the songs of the free folk speak of Others mounted on dead horses, on bears, on giant ice spiders out of the Frostfangs; the maesters at the Citadel hear and do not yet believe.