Work Text:
why should I have eyes
when there was nothing sweet for me to see?
– Oedipus, trans. Ian Johnson (2007)
The Wall had fallen. Winterfell, for which all the greatest living knights of the realm had risen to defend, had been razed and ruined until there was naught but snow. Night reigned long and eternal above, and you, its chosen herald, who rode fierce and free on the winter winds, thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world.
If a little lonely, sometimes.
Stars were pretty, but made for poor company and poorer sport. You had your undead legions and your sworn swords, of course. Sad little dead girls, mostly, that you’d found ditched and left to fester, that you’d raised and remade into your Foolish Florian, your Star-Eyed Symeon, your Brave Danny Flint – but they weren’t exactly skilled conversationalists. And since the North had been shattered, all the living had wisened up, squirrelled away into their hidey-holes where you couldn’t catch them – as easily, that is.
You suppose they had to catch on eventually, and realise four stone walls would never be enough to stop the likes of you. Still, it would just mean that you would have to hunt that much harder to find something worth feasting on.
You’d thought you had found such a feast after your long ride south. One last fat castle, as enormous as it was old and storied, with walls once blackened by a dragon and towers haunted by the ghouls of weeping women – myths that tickled you, for reasons you couldn’t place. You’d expected to find a stalwart vanguard, the last legion of sunshine knights from which you could pluck the shining plating as you tore out chunks of their spines, turning them into shrieking jellies as your starting course. Something to cut your teeth on before you supped on the castle’s innards.
Instead, you faced women. Wide-eyed maidens and wide-eyed whores and brave little kitchen girls underfoot who had all armed themselves with knives and platters like swords and shields, who stood there trembling against you, ready for the cut. You’d make a big song and dance of it, of course. Ignore that crawling feeling beneath your skin and chase them around the castle walls, make them howl, make the sweat, make them squeal, smear their bloody entrails all over the floors as you so delighted in doing with the anointed knights – but it all left you feeling oddly empty, for all the fresh meat and slaughter. As the carnage ensued, you found yourself pondering what was missing. Was it more blood that you hungered for? A willing opponent? A proper fight? Or was it a grown man, reduced to a bawling baby as you rent his flesh off his bones, perhaps, that your heart ached for? It was in the midst of considering the cause of your emptiness that the mystery knight lunged at your throat.
An exceptionally stupid choice, really. You’d gouged people’s eyes out for less.
He – you imagined, probably, ’he’, maybe, though it struck you that he could be a ’she’, but that thought made something shiver sharp beneath your skin again – almost gashed you thrice before you sent his garish little longsword flying, and pinned him to the floor. He was quick, sharp, and most annoyingly, barely a man (or woman).
Or at least, you thought so. You found it impossible to place these days, when a boy turned to a man or when a girl became grown, yet another thing that you found aggravating for reasons you could not name or place, an aggravation that seemed to prickle and twist and claw at you beneath your skin. In any case, this particular boy-man (girl-woman?) was clearly stunted or too young, for he was too small to carry his sword at his hip and stood at the exact same height as your - admittedly slight - stature. It had not stopped him throwing himself at you with a wild, reckless abandon that reminded you of one of your brothers, in that it bordered stupidity — if he hadn’t almost gotten a hit on you. You’d thought to plunge your hands into his chest and eat his heart out then and there. But then you thought better of it, and wrenched the helmet of this ’mystery knight’ off his head instead.
Only to find he had the exact same face as yours.
You grabbed him by the hair and slammed him against the nearest wall. He’d cried out in pain — good, you’d thought, that he was still alive, then, this scheming little boy-man-thief who had stolen your face.
Or so it seemed.
It was like looking into a horrible, fleshy mirror. Except the closer you looked, the more mistakes you found in his countenance. His dark hair, his furrowed brows, his mouth that was now open in shock — those were much the same as yours, but his nose was more pronounced, from a more pompous line of profiles, and the cut of his jaw was finer and more delicate, like someone had taken a little file and shorn off anything too uncouth from it. The more you looked, the more differences you could count, the more you could count, the more you could feel that something again, that hot and shivering thing wanting to prickle and pop beneath your skin, like the blood was moving under there again.
It struck you most with the eyes — shaped like yours, near as still and grey and solemn as yours had once been before the cold took you in, the sort of colour the living would mistake for Winter.
But the shade was wrong. Darker and deeper and more maudlin. It reminded you of a wordless song.
And suddenly, you were quite aware that your chest was empty, your lungs airless sacks, that your blood ran still, and you wanted, you wanted, more than anything, to pluck those pretty, shining eyes from their sockets and tear his head clean from his shoulders and—
’… Arya?’
— his question had stopped you from tearing his heart out from his chest.
’That’s not my name,’ you said, flatly.
Never mind that you could not recall your own name. Nor could you recall your father’s face nor your brothers’ names nor their birthdays nor what they called their horses, nor whether they preferred to chase skirts or swing swords or pick flowers or whether they most like the crisp summer apples you picked from the Wolfswood or fresh honey-cakes you snatched from the warmth of the kitchens as gifts. You could not recall which of your brothers was the worst braggart and nor which sent you sweet and silly letters full of Southern songs and which taught you how to clamber onto a pony and which liked to get lost in the tangles of a weirwood tree for you to find them. You could not recall your mother and you do not know if you have lost this memory in that rotted, half-dead head of yours or whether she never existed at all.
You’d nearly forgotten that you’d even forgotten, until he’d opened his cursed little mouth that looked exactly like yours and shown you what you didn’t know.
(A bit like you, then.)
You stopped then, and briefly considered whether this creature, this thing with your face could be made from the same stuff as you were. The thought was ridiculous. Yet you couldn’t quite shake the itch that perhaps you were its ’Arya’ — and ’Arya’ was you, or had been you, before — before all the things you did not remember or like to think about. You did have far too many brothers, once upon a time. A brotherly relation would also explain the uncontrollable urge you had to tear this boy-man’s face off. But you had always imagined yourself as an unfathomably ancient being, as old and wise as the earth itself, and that all your brothers were little more than gravedust, as much as everything else you ever had loved.
Really, this face-stealing boy was far too young.
Like you had been, once.
’You look just like her,’ mumbled the boy, bitterly, perhaps thinking you did not have ears to hear with. ’It’s like the world wants to mock me.’
You contemplated crunching up his windpipe so that he would stop trying to speak to you. But it would not stop those awful eyes of his, that looked at you with such a disgusting longing, like the ugliest of suns.
’There is no such Arya,’ you informed him. ’There is only me.’
’And who are you, exactly?’
You would not answer such a question from such an insipid creature. ’I look like myself,’ you continued. ’And it is you who looks like me. Why is this?’
’How would I know?’
You grabbed his face then. His skin was too hot, near scalding. ’I could seize your tongue out from your throat and swallow it in front of you,’ you told him, ignoring how hot and wrong it was to touch him, how it made your hands want to shrivel and burn. ’I could pin you down, pull out your insides, and make you watch me eat them. I could bleed you out like a pig, nice and slow, and string you up outside the window of the tallest tower so that you can watch me tear your pretty castle apart. Maybe I could find a girl who looks like your Arya and gobble her up too.’
’You won’t be able to catch her,’ he managed, and even managed to drum up the audacity to glower at you. ’She’s quick.’
’I’m quicker. Would you like to test me?’ The heat under your fingertips was unbearable. ’I could round up all the girls in the castle, just for you. I’ll even make you watch. Would you like that?’
He gave you a pointed look that he probably thought was chilling. Instead, it felt like his eyes could burn holes right through you.
’You look like a Stark. Like I do,’ he said, a bitterness seeping into his voice — perhaps the notion that they shared anything, despite his nauseatingly identical countenance, was simply revolting to him. ’Perhaps your kind sought to mock us through appearing as those we have lost. Perhaps they sought to unnerve me.’
’Perhaps,’ you say, smiling prettily. ’But you don’t seem terribly important, do you? That seems awfully self-involved of you.’
’Or perhaps,’ he continued, ignoring you, ’you were truly a Stark, once, laid to rest in our halls. You don’t happen to recall dying, do you?’
As it happened, you did not.
But you did remember telling someone in the crook of a weirwood tree — probably one of your many brothers that you had far too many of — exactly how you wanted to die. You wanted something big and bloody and bombastic, a writhing twist of agony, accompanied with the sort of spine-tingling scream you’d find lurking in the worst of Old Nan’s stories, the sorts from those rattling girl-ghouls who roamed the Neck after dark. At least, that was in the scenario where you absolutely had to die. Because you also remember wanting to live forever, wanting to sail to every continent and cross every sea. You’d wanted to hear the morning chorus atop mountains you could not name and ride across open steppes, loud and free. You’d wanted to get lost in cities full of thousands of smells and sounds, in markets and bazaars and tea houses and taverns thick with travellers who’d your quaint stories of your sunset lands with travellers for a better song. You wanted to fall in love with them, foolishly, hopelessly, ruinously, over and over again. You wanted to live a thousand lives, a thousand times, boundless and brilliant as the sun you could no longer stand.
But that had not happened. You had died instead.
’What a stupid question,’ you told him outright, this time. ’Who even asks that?’
’Perhaps they took you from your tomb,’ he continued on. ‘Twisted you into one of them. As if our dead have not been desecrated enough by your kind – they decided to take you as their spoil of war. Perhaps you even remember this castle from before.’
Did you remember this castle? You remembered hooves beating like your heart once stammered. You remembered a hundred bright and brazen banners, the clash of swords, the laughter of lords, and dancers swirling from every kingdom, as his fingers plucked the beginning of that last, lonely song. You remembered that the frost on the grounds in the morning had not yet thinned, how the flowers he had picked had budded but not bloomed, for it still wasn’t spring — not yet, not truly, they wouldn’t be ready yet, it was still too early —
’I was not a spoil of war,’ you snapped at the boy. ’I am not like one of your flesh women — a prize to be taken, a rose to be plucked. I am far more than they will ever be.’
’So, you died, then,’ he surmised. He looked sad then, sadder than you thought was possible, and so painfully familiar it almost made you wish you could kill him twice. ‘They took you.’
‘Yes,’ you hissed. That you remembered almost nothing of your death, that it had all blotched and smudged and stained, like an old painted storybook fumbled too many times by too many grasping hands, left out in the sun to fade, that didn’t seem to matter. ’Are you going to tell me how much you’re sorry about it, now?’
’It would not change anything. You’re already dead.’
You dropped him on the floor like a sack of meat. Then, you kicked him into the wall. Repeatedly.
Perhaps you wouldn’t have minded, so much, if they’d left you to rot in the wild woods you so loved, to be pickings for the birds and beasts near your home, to roam amongst your favourite places in their bellies. Instead, you’d been wrapped gently in stone and stillness and buried deep in your brother’s grief, as was the way of your House. You’d wanted to protest, to scream and shout and howl as you festered and rotted inside your tomb, as your insides writhed and wriggled while you were eaten from the inside, eaten slowly, eaten carefully — but your body would not move, it would not answer, it stayed still and solemn like a sad painting you wished you could burn. You could not unhinge your half-eaten jaw nor take air into your stiff, empty lungs, and your tongue, the one you’d loved to laugh and jape and sing with, that had almost wasted away. You were just a wretched little dead girl, who clawed onto the last threads of life with a desperate wanting for something you had long forgotten.
(Though that did not stop remnants of something hot and loud and desperate in your once-rotten, worm-eaten brain from coming back to haunt you.)
’You know nothing of death,’ you told the boy with his burning eyes, the boy who looked too much like you to still be alive. ’Not even the slightest thing.’
’So you believe,’ he muttered. ‘Do you remember much of anything at all?’
You pushed him flat on his back and slammed your foot on his chest – though you did it gently, so that it might only bruise, and did not stake its way through his quivering heart. You realised then exactly how miserable he looked. His lip split, his cheek swollen, his body purpled from where you had so beautifully bruised him before. You lowered yourself down to one knee, as a knight might to a princess – but you placed that knee firmly on his ribcage, lest he get any stupid ideas about wriggling free from your grasp. He looked a little less like you, a little wilder and uneven now he was bloodied and beaten, but somehow that did not quiet the rising tide of anger in your chest.
Without thinking, your hand reached out to touch his cheek.
‘Who are you, exactly,’ you asked him, as your fingertips brushed the edge of his bruised skin, admiring your handiwork, ‘to have the terrible self-importance to think you can ask such awful things of me?’
’I suppose you’re family, of sorts,’ he said. ‘You were a Stark once, weren’t you?’
You scoffed at him. His cheek was still scalding. ‘You really do think that means something.’
‘Does it?’
You thought about that word. Stark. But nothing rang through your ears. ‘No. You’re wrong,’ you decided, ignoring that terrible heat from his skin, the fire wanted to eat through your fingertips. ‘You’re nothing to me.’
‘Then I’m surely no one terribly important,’ he said. ‘Just an ill-mannered, disobedient son.’
‘You really sell yourself short,' you told him. 'For instance, you’re also going to be a rather delicious meal.’
And to make sure he truly understood, you bit him for his insolence. Hard on the shoulder, tearing through the furs and the leather and the iron until he bled and cried out. You ripped the rest of the iron of his armour with your bare hands, and tossed it aside with a clang. Not that such trimmings stopped you, really, from devouring anyone – and sometimes you enjoyed the crunch of metal and bone together – but you wanted to relish this little thief for what he was. He even smelled and tasted familiar.
‘I could have put you under a spell,’ you reminded him. ‘I’ve done that to men before.’ To show him this, you reached behind your head to pull out a long, silver pin from your hair. It was as thin as a needle but far sharper, and placed the pointed tip to the shoulder you’d just gored. ‘I once bewitched a knight as tall as a mountain. He gouged his own eyes out with this hairpin. It was rather amusing.’
‘Will you do the same to me?’
‘I think not.’ You tapped the pin once against his cheek, bloodying it a little more. ‘I like it more when they struggle. I’ll give you a fighting chance, I think.’
‘How kind,’ he remarked. ‘Did the Others give you a fighting chance as well?’
You let the hairpin dangle over his throat, before stabbing it through a wandering sword hand, piercing it straight to the floor. He let out a soft gasp of pain, his whole body shuddered, and that ugly burn scar that marred his palm began to fill with red.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ you told him, gently. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’
Then for good measure, pulled out a second pin, and stabbed his other hand.
After all, there was no choice. There had not even been a fight. You did not remember dying, but you did remember the cold. How it took you. How it touched you, how it spread through you. How it tasted like the first breath of winter and smelt like the winds you once knew. It slipped in without your knowing, filled you up with ice and spite until you were not a dead girl made of buried dreams but a creature of frost and stardust who could shatter the lid of her own tomb. It made you swift enough to outrun the fastest of stallions, strong enough to snap off the limbs of the steel-cloaked men atop them, like they were part of a game you might have once played with sticks and twigs with one of your many forgotten brothers. There was the hunger, the emptiness, that ever-gnawing feeling that gripped you from the inside, yes – but what was a little appetite? Once upon a time, you were a sad little corpse who could do nothing. Better to fend for yourself, and feed that wanting deep in your belly, than to starve as you waited for honourable men to offer you something other than dead flowers.
(Though perhaps you loved flowers once)
Could there have been a choice? You didn’t think so. Not when you were so empty.
You lowered yourself onto his chest as his heart thrummed and hammered beneath you. You’d decided you’d save that part for near the end – swallow it hot and wet and whole and quivering. The trick would be killing him softly enough that he’d survive that long.
‘I wonder if I did anything to deserve this,’ he muttered, quite miserable, more to himself than you. You had to stop yourself laughing at him. He was so young.
‘Stupid boy,’ you told him. ‘No one ever gets what they deserve.’
‘Even you?’
You stroked his hair. It was a sweet, foolish question. His body was battered and gored, his hands pierced into the floor with your own pins, but it still felt like something was missing. You thought to kiss him then – once on each bruised, searing cheek, and once more on the crown of his head. Then, on a whim, you plucked the crown of rotten roses you always wore in your hair, the ones you had encased in ice to keep them from fading, and placed it atop his head. You would reward him in the only way a knight knew how.
He looked simply horrified, of course.
You considered this boy, this maddening boy, who glared at you with the intensity of the long lost sun, whose eyes brought back the barest glimpses of your dying. Of something as brilliant and fleeting as your last glimpses of the dawn, which no stars would ever replace, no matter how much you might have tried. Of something hot and something loud and something desperate to claw its way out. You considered this boy, this broken mirror who reminded you of your life and your death and your end and your beginning, who reminded you of everything you did not know, all the things forgotten on the winter winds, and unshackled your jaw.
You began not with the eyes. The eyes shone too brightly.
Instead, you tore off his ear. That was where knights liked to pour their poison, the sweet nothings, the wordless songs, the whispers behind the godswood. He’d tried to jerk his head away – but it only led to a flutter of rotten petals flying around his head as you pinned him down, pulling his hair to keep him in place as you gobbled right up the spongy cartilage and little bones. His blood was hot, too hot, almost sizzling as it slithered down your throat, but you cared little for that – you lapped at it as it poured out of him, let it fill and spill from your mouth as your teeth raked across his cheeks and began to tear into his soft, burning flesh.
He still tried to put up a fuss. To wrest you off, to kick and scream and lash back at you, even biting you back – which truly, was a delight, to have a wolf in your arms – but you were stronger and faster and would hold this summer knight down by the throat. The roses atop his head were melting, the blue petals almost coming to a crisp, which you should have noticed. But you were too taken with him. He was being just so marvellously stupid, even trying to wrench one of his hands out of the ground, flailing at you with enough force that he pricked you in the eye with your own hairpin.
For that act of disobedience, you’d shattered all the bones in his arm and listened to him scream. His flesh was beginning to singe beneath your fingers now. It would not matter. You’d make him behave in the only way a knight knew how.
You briefly wondered whether you’d ever been held in such a fashion.
He had fought for far longer than the living should, but you were not paying attention to that. You were far too preoccupied trying to savour every last moment with him, every thrash and every cry and every piece of hot, weeping flesh. It was only when he’d almost lost the fight in him, that his pulse had faded and his skin had paled and his legs had stopped their incessant flailing, that you kissed open his eyelids and tore out what was inside. He’d gasped out in pain – one last raucous cry, one last breath, as the world around you came crashing down in a torrent of blood and burning.
Blood and burning, like the worst of curses. Blood and burning, like the most familiar of scents. Blood and burning, it was what the walls of this castle were once made with, it was what your jaw was dripping with now, it swallowed your body and wanted to eat you from the inside.
Blood and burning, like your legs were stained with, as you lay dying.
It was your fault, you supposed, for wanting to be more than you were supposed to be. His eyes had burned like the sun and stars themselves, and you had put them straight into your belly, wasn’t that silly? His flesh, now your flesh, was a blaze that wanted to tear you open from the inside, wanted to make what lay still in your veins move again, wanted to turn you into ashes.
He had killed you. You really hated that.
But you, at least, would outlast him.
‘Lyanna,’ he said, dying.
It was the last word out of his mouth. You didn’t know what it meant. You didn’t know a great many things, to tell the truth. But by the end of it all, just before your belly burst in a blaze of fire, you had remembered something new.
The first time you died, you recalled, it was sunrise. You held something in your arms then, too.