Stannis advances on Winterfell

Stannis Baratheon's march from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell was a campaign that died before it reached its target, consumed not by Bolton steel but by snow, hunger, and the slow unraveling of a king's authority. The host that set out in a golden dawn, uncoiling from behind the log palisades like a long steel serpent, was meant to cover one hundred leagues in fifteen days. Instead, the storm that began on the fourth day never stopped, and the army that finally staggered to a halt in a frozen crofter's village between two lakes had become a procession of snowmen, eating its own horses and, eventually, its own dead. The march exposed the fault lines between the southron knights who had followed Stannis from Dragonstone and the northern hill clans who had joined him after Deepwood, and it forced the king to confront the limits of his own iron will against a nature that would not bend. The campaign ended not in a battle but in a frozen stalemate, with Stannis snowbound and starving within sight of his goal, his army reduced to eating horsemeat and praying for a thaw that would not come.