The Others

The Others are an ancient and malevolent race of cold, inhuman beings who dwell in the frozen lands far beyond the Wall, in the uttermost north. They are the great enemy against which the Night's Watch was first raised, and the doom that came upon the world during the legendary Long Night. Tall, gaunt, and pale, with flesh white as milk and eyes of a deep and burning blue, they move without sound over the snow and bring a killing cold with them wherever they pass.

The Others are not undead but living creatures of ice and death, beautiful and terrible. They carry thin crystalline swords so cold they shatter ordinary steel, and they fight with a chill, unhurried cruelty. The dead they slay rise again as wights -- corpses animated to serve them, with the same blue eyes, mindless and tireless soldiers in their host.

The Long Night

According to the oldest legends, thousands of years ago the world was plunged into the Long Night, a winter that lasted a generation, when the sun seemed not to rise and the Others swept down out of the north, slaughtering and raising the dead. In that darkest hour, the tales say, the heroes of the age -- aided by the Children of the Forest and armed with weapons of dragonglass -- drove the Others back into the frozen wastes. From that war came the building of the Wall and the founding of the Night's Watch to keep the watch against their return.

Vulnerabilities

The Others are not invulnerable. The legends and the lore of the Night's Watch hold that they can be destroyed by dragonglass, the volcanic obsidian once gifted by the children of the forest, and there are hints in old tales of another bane -- the rare and near-mythical Valyrian steel, and fire itself, which the wights at least cannot abide.

Significance

For eight thousand years the Others passed into legend, dismissed by the learned as a tale to frighten children. But as the long summer fails and winter draws near, they stir once more in the cold dark beyond the Wall. The squabbling kings of Westeros, consumed by the War of the Five Kings, remain blind to the truth that only the failing Night's Watch still faces: the true war is not for the Iron Throne, but for the survival of the living against the dead.