[sub][color=fee34c]Lady Lorelai Lannister[/color][/sub]

[color=gray]

The sun seemed dim up in the grey-blue sky, robbed of its brightness and its very shine chilled from its typical warmth. Her eyes dared closed for the first time all day. When they re-opened, she couldn’t tell whether five moments had passed, or far longer. Her body felt as if moving would take double a normal effort. It was stunned, sapped, salted with the choppy Sunset Sea below the trade galley. 

The captain and its crew had been kind, but that was because to them she was Lady Lorelai Lannister. Some of them even referred to her as Princess. The stubbornness of some people never failed to amaze her. She didn’t feel like a Princess. She felt like a criminal, and one of the kind crew would betray her—that she knew for fact. She didn’t blame them, not really: as soon as they returned to Lannisport the news would hit them that Lorelai Lannister was dead. 

Except they would know better, and one of them would be paid quite a lot to tell that story to someone in Lannisport or the Rock. That kind of coin could change a sailor’s life. Lorelai’s weary body let out a pathetic little sigh, unsettled with the knowledge she would be changing yet another life, especially given she kept thinking about a life she had no way of knowing if she had ruined or not.

Did he get out? Her uncle was dead; she believed that with the same level of belief she had in the sun rising again. She had never seen his face quite like that, the darkness in his eyes, the emptiness. It wasn’t Keano in front of her days ago telling her to get out, now, it was the Stranger itself. She was certain there were better killers in the world, but in that moment of time and in that place, there couldn’t have been a more perfect assassin for the moment. 

Her uncle was dead, her brother now thrust into the very worst of it. The web of informants and eyes she left partially behind. One sailed with the crew on the very galley she now used as an escape. Two were at her destination of Bear Island. Somehow, there was no comfort in the information. The very thing she had spent the vast majority of her adult life working on, inherited from someone she had loved so much, something possible only because she was the daughter a King…it was all nothing more than a golden noose around her neck and tightening fast. 

They told her to stare at the horizon if she felt sick. She spent the first staring at the horizon. The sickness she felt had nothing to do with the sea. The rest of the day faded in and out as her body as the pale sun and the rocking of the waves below induced her in and out of sleep. She had tried to resist it, not wanting to fall asleep. Not trusting anything or anyone enough to fall asleep. But the Gods would have her in the dream kingdom. 

They just weren’t the Gods she had expected. These were Old Gods, nameless and faceless, more of a feeling that rose in the back of her mind than a Stranger taken the form of Keano that had stood in front of her that night. 

[i]Run[/i], she heard his voice tell her, as his eyes warned her what she was really running from. 

When her eyes opened, she still slept, the grey cloud dimly lit excuse for daylight obfuscated by a black cloud that swirled overhead. There were several, slow, blinks of her Lannister emerald eyes before her mind realized that it wasn’t a cloud—it was the largest murder of ink black ravens she could have ever even imagined. Each caw came like a thunder strike, shuddering her and leaving her green eyes desperate upon the galley deck. There was no one there, now, there was no one to turn to…but she was too terrified to look up again. 

She heard the shout of sailors going about their daily work, she heard the chatter of deckhands, she heard the sea, felt them roll the deck beneath her. It was better, now, she felt. Opening her eyes with a sigh, looking up, she stopped and stared at it. The black raven, that heart-dropping third eye. 

Lorelai was wrong. It wasn’t better now, it wasn’t over. 

[i]Never will, never will, never will.[/i]

Quick word, said with it’s beady little three eyes trained intensely upon her. Without so much as considering what came next, Lorelai scrunched her nose and made a petty, adol, horrible face at the creature. Spooked, the bird took flight, and immediately Lorelai regretted it. Not because of the bird, but because of the freeze in the air. The cold was there before she even felt it creep, the vessel shuddering to its very keel as impact rocked the wooden frame.

Standing to look and see only made it worse: ice. The very realization made her skin crawl, and burn. Burn from the sheer cold of the wind now. The corner of her eye caught the blur of a shape just beyond her full sight, a quick pivot and it only, somehow, got worse. Yet, this time, it wasn’t cold she felt as she shivered. It was him, the man she’d seen stabbed, the man from the past, the threat of him all rushing back around to the more rational parts of her mind.

Caution didn’t win the day, though. It was the desire to talk that did that.

“You again?”

Though his face was slate blank, the anger still lined the edges of his eyes and the set of his jaw. The anger and hatred made the shiver cascading through her limbs still itself, if only for the clarity his anger provided her. 

“…what do you want?”

At first, the question just seemed to bounce off him like a half-drawn arrow against full plate. But then, just when she might have moved on something stirred and his dark ice-colored eyes sharpened their focus on her, looking into her eyes, “It shouldn’t be you. Butt doesn’t matter what games the Children play now, whatever they hoped to achieve with you.”

“You know children and their games, “her voice trailed off, frozen shoulders shrugging at him, like she barely knew or cared what he meant. The clever response didn’t impress him. Behind the defense of the clever, Lorelai Lannister had only truth left to her: “I don’t know what you are. I don’t know what the bird wants. I don’t know…”

He looked like he might laugh, before his skin began to grow gaunt, losing what little color was left to it, the still black wound in his chest still seeming to stir within him, “You will.” It sounded to her ears like the worst kind of promise before her body was given the shock of the ship below her once again colliding with such a force that this time it nearly threw her from the deck. When she looked up, he was gone, again. Her long, deep, breath at the sight of an empty deck clouded in the cold air before her, her eyes closing heavy. 

When they opened again, a broad shouldered sailor with a heavy belly and skin bronzed under life under the Sunset Sea’s sun stood before her, staring down at her in a curious awe that alerted her immediately.

“What?” Curt, short, demanding, the tone of a High Born lady awakening to such a sight. 

“Your breath, M’Lady.”

“It’s cold, what else would my breath do?” She demanded to know, pulling the cloak about her even tighter to her. 

He just stared at her. She nearly barked at him, but something wasn’t right, and she felt doubt creep across her mind. Was she even awake? She was now as focused on her breath and the steam from it as the sailor was.

The sailor that was…sweating. The deck full of sailors…sweating. 

“BEAR ISLAND!”

Lorelai and the sailor stared at each other until, finally, the sailor began to back away from her, keeping his stare long after his body began to react to the other sailors around the deck, preparing for arrival to Bear Island. “M’Lady,” he allowed her in a tone that betrayed him, sounding more like a haunted whisper. [/color]