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

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It felt like an ocean around her as she rode to the top of Bear Island, even the road up to it rough, its edges appearing as if the natural world around it was just biding it’s time for the moment the men and women of the island might slip away as quickly as they’d come, so that it could reclaim it. She wanted to talk. She wanted to ask the Mormonts of their family, their home, their history. She wanted to ask Lord Stark about so much.  

She, simply, was not physically able. It felt as if she was beset by fever, the air of the world trembled at her, the sky dared its currents of air at speeds maddeningly slow, fast, furious, frozen, and every single variation between. She was ill, she told herself. She was drunk, she even tried to pretend…but somewhere far below her surface, in some great below where her very soul had been buried in by the bird and the tree and the angry, frozen, beast…she knew what it really was. 

The North had been overwhelming; what were murmurs below the Neck were tremors above it. The very land, the very history, every unseen primordial facet of being screamed at her from every direction she could sense, and some she was still too blind to track. She almost missed the approach of Mormont Keep, such as it were: it was an imposition of earthen palisades and timber, perhaps a stone here or there, but barely even that. 

Time was different in the North. At the entrance to Mormont Keep was its great gate; on the gate there is a carving of a woman in a bearskin with a babe suckling at her breast in one arm and a battleaxe in the other. She felt as if there was a time when she knew the woman, not in the impossible and uncrossable distance of ancient tales, but in the way of knowing someone and having their name on the tip of your tongue, and just not being able to grasp it in the moment. 

The lines began to blur around her as she saw banks of snow taller than the Mormont Keep where the Keep now stood, facing and people frozen and lost barely peeking out at her, [i]watching[/i] her, she saw bears and maidens, she smelled the smoke and meat of the Mormont Hall, she heard the sound of a crowd several turns before you actually saw the gathering, she felt sadness and pride and fear and joy. It began to fade as her emerald eyes blinked, and she realized she was standing in the same timber hall of the Mormonts she had stood inside, beside time, what felt like moments before. 

“Is it true?” The Lord of House Mormont demanded, in boiled leather and fur, his chest a barrel and his arms big enough she would believe the man could slap a bear and make it flee, his very voice a deep, earthen, sound, like the cracking of the ground below, or the rumbling drone of a storm far away. 

She blinked, lost as her mind teetered between then and now, here and there, “…my Lord?”

“Is it—blessed dammit, girl,” he shifted uncomfortably in his wooden great chair at the head of the hall, exchanges looks with his children, before irritation led him back to her, his giant paw holding up the tiny scroll that had come from the raven, “is it TRUE girl? Are you Lady Lannister of Lannisport?...or are you Lady Lannister of Casterly Rock?”

Lorelai didn’t know how to say it. She tried, parting her red lips, but nothing came. 

There was real anger in his tone, now, “Have you brought Westerland intrigue to my home and hearth, child?”

He grunted at her prolonged silence, and was halfway through a command to his son and heir, before she found her voice, and it all poured out of her in the same way the sun came at a man’s eyes: “I am Lorelai of House Lannister, daughter of the last King of the Rock, and I come not to flee from daggers in the dark, but towards the lifeless eyes of the brightest blue, like the deepest ice…I have seen you, Lord Mormont…”

She trailed off, as they cawed the same caw the crows and ravens cawed from dark trees in black of night, some of them already within the smoke blackened rafters of the hall, others from outside the hall, perched with their claws upon the roof of the hall, a thunderclap of birdcall, as the green eyes of Lorelai of House Lannister had turned snow-white. As white as the Lord of Mormont suddenly appeared as he stared at her while the guards and maester and others assembled in the hall gasped, or whispered uneasy, darting their heads and eyes to follow the queer strangeness of the cacophony of cawing. 

“I have seen the snows, my Lord, and that is why I have come.”

Though it took several long, measured, beats of the heart within his great, strong, barrel chest, finally the Lord of House Mormont nodded, grave and slow, as if he conversed with the ancient, nameless, old god of death itself, his eyes looking as if they were suddenly steeled for battle.

“...nevermind sending the ravens, Maester. Call the captains, we need to get her to Winterfell.”
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