Will of the Night's Watch
A poacher pardoned into the black, ranging beyond the Wall in the tale's first pages, who sees something in the haunted forest no living man has seen in an age.
The fuller tale
The entire saga opens through the eyes of a poacher. Will came to the Wall the usual way — caught red-handed skinning a buck in lands belonging to House Mallister, offered the choice between a hand and a cloak — and four years of ranging turned the woodsman’s stealth that damned him into the Watch’s asset. He can move through the haunted forest like smoke, and it is exactly that skill that puts him where the story begins: on point, in the trees, watching a camp of dead wildlings that will not stay dead.
Will is the tale’s first witness. He sees what the reader sees — the cold deepening, the shadows that move against the wind, the pale swords — and he understands it immediately, because unlike his lordly commander he has never had the luxury of doubting the dark. His warning goes unheeded; his prayer, made in a tree with a sword he has forgotten how to hold, goes unanswered. Everything the story will spend years teaching kings and councils, it teaches a poacher in its first pages, and then demonstrates the price of the lesson.
The page and the screen
The book and the show quietly swap the fates of the ranging’s two survivors. On the page, Will climbs a sentinel tree when the Others take Ser Waymar apart, and what comes up the trunk after him wears his commander’s face; it is Gared who flees south to be executed as a deserter. The show folds the two men together and hands the desertion, the flight, and Ned Stark’s sword to Will — making him the wide-eyed deserter whose garbled warning about white shadows opens the series proper and whose death introduces the Stark creed of the man who passes the sentence. Same prologue, same lesson; the tellings simply disagree about which broken man carried it to Winterfell.
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Killed beyond the Wall (S1·E1)
The books: Killed in the haunted forest (AGOT, ch. 1)
Fled south from the massacre at the ranging camp and was taken as a deserter near Winterfell. Lord Eddard Stark heard his last words about white shadows in the wood, and swung the sword himself, as the old way demands.
In the books Will dies in the haunted forest, minutes after the story begins. Hidden aloft, he watches the pale shadows shatter Waymar Royce’s sword and leave the boy dead in the snow — and then the corpse rises, and climbs. The last thing Will feels is cold fingers at his throat: killed by the wight of the commander he could not save, the saga’s first named death and its thesis statement in one.
In the show he lives a little longer and dies warmer. Fleeing the massacre, he makes it south of the Wall — the first deserter of the story — and is taken near Winterfell, where he tells Lord Eddard Stark, calmly and without hope, exactly what he saw. Ned hears him out, calls him deserter, and swings the greatsword himself while the Stark children watch. The realm’s first warning of the White Walkers dies as a criminal, believed by no one; the audience, who saw what he saw, spends the rest of the tale knowing he told the truth.