Don't Match Length! - Blog Posts

dacey's palm was flat against the stone, long, thin fingers red from the cold and where the skin had been picked and peeled around the beds of her nails. the starks were of the old gods; they believed that their nameless deities watched them through the trees, spoke to them through the whisper of the winds and rustle of the leaves and rush of the streams, but in the stones lay the history of man, of the ancestors whose blood persisted in their veins.

these walls had stood for thousands of years, raised by brandon the builder, seen the celebrations when the barrow kings and red kings and marsh kings had fallen to the kings of winter. they had seen the andals beaten back to the south and the wildlings back to the north, had seen the king who knelt and the end of the kings of the north, and had seen them rise once more from the dragon's ashes. they had seen starks born and die and born and die, over and over, and would go on doing so for as long as the sun continued to rise and set.

in between those moments, the ones preserved in the pages of history books, the walls had seen other things, the day to day living that had been lost to time. it was there that dacey's mind turned now, to a girl and a girl and a boy and the three wolves that shadowed them, long enough ago to become memory, not yet long enough to be lost.

"you fell from there, once," her voice was gentle and fond, her breath escaping her lips in small puffs that lingered in the air in a misty cloud. "and you landed on my snowman." it had been one of the first snows of the year. the snow was fresh, soft and powdery, which had been cyrene's good fortune. it had not yet compacted and turned to ice, and so, she had popped out of the pile that had once been dacey's work of art without a scratch.

she withdrew her hand from the wall, brushing it daintily against her furs to rid it of any dirt. "i wasn't going to climb it." it was a reversal from how things had been when cyrene had left for the riverlands, a wild and wilful girl who had balked at nothing, so much so that dacey had wondered if her sister had been born without fear. then, it had been dacey who had called words of caution. that cyrene would be halfway up the wall by now, responding to dacey's warnings with nothing but a laugh.

but things changed. the world changed, and they changed with it. in cyrene, the change was more pronounced than dacey could have ever imagined. but then, the years had not been kind to their kin. distance had not saved cyrene from grief and heartache. dacey did not know how to be with this new sister, who wore the face of the old. not yet.

"there isn't enough snow at the moment. to catch me if i fell."

who: @daceystvrk where: at winterfell when cyrene arrives home for the first time in years

There were notches in the outer walls. Always had been, always would be. Cyrene found at least some comfort that things in Winterfell would never change. The people who lived within the walls would. Death haunted the halls, but the years did as well. She'd already seen many who had survived the wars that lay in the past, but they had not come out of it unchanged.

Neither had she.

"Don't climb that," she spoke, voice pragmatic and clipped, "That cannot end well."