Casterly Rock was still and dark in the silvery moonlight of the Sunset Sea. Lorelai felt uneasy as she watched the sea rumble and roll far below the balcony of her private bedchamber, wrapped in a crimson silk robe, and little else. Sleeplessness had clutched her mind and body, the echo of a cawing raven haunting her nearly as bad as the face of the dead, or the screams of the burnt. Loren was wrong. She knew it in her soul, she felt it in her heart. Everything she had told him had missed its mark with her brother. There was so much work to be done if she was going to have any chance at keeping the Westerlands from blood and fire. The grief of a Princess, the loss faith in both the Faith, by some, and the Rock, by others. It should have consumed her. It should have ignited her to action…it didn’t. Instead she saw only the endless blue of the man’s burning gaze, his icy, crystalline armor and the crown of horns upon him as he said it again and again in a cold rage that she knew would never die: [i]They started this. I will end it, all of it.[/i] Had he said those words? Had she just…understood his mind from the very manner of his gaze? She couldn’t, in the darkness and shadows of the silent, far too early hours of Casterly Rock, even remember. There was too much to parse, there was too much she had seen, too much she’d been told. What hope did she have of understanding what any of it really meant? The raven with it’s three eyes made little sense. The flight of her mind from Rock to Lands of Always Winter, far past the Wall, made even less sense. And the sight of the little, forest, people stabbing the man with the burning blue eyes? Fever dream, maybe? She nearly chuckled but for the sound. Her head snapped behind her, and in the shadow a figure emerged. Another trick? Another vision? Another damnable bird? It was too late that she realized none of that. Worse; a man. She stepped further away from the doors that led to the balcony, until the small of her back hit the stone ledge. In the pale moonlight she saw a face she didn’t know, but a look she had seen before: murder. “Your Lord Uncle sends his regards, Lady Lorelai. He knows the secrets you keep. He wants to silence your whispers.” The steel all but glowed in the moonlight as he drew the long dagger that looked impossibly sharp to her emerald eyes. She didn’t gasp, her lungs seemed to refuse the notion on principle. It wasn’t the fearless pride of a lion, but the sheer shock of a young woman with a mind dizzy from everything that happened and was suddenly happening with a finality that had a hard time, for some reason she couldn’t explain, accepting. “…you’re a pretty thing, shame it has to be like this.” Emerald eyes stopped watching him. Instead, they fixated on the dagger, and the way the moonlight played off it, dappling and shadowing as he rose it high and stepped out onto the balcony. Neither of them heard the sound until it was too late. The sound was light enough, but the very pattern of it grew into a cacophony of inevitability: footsteps of a dead sprint coming from within the private bedchamber. By the time the assassin heard it and his heard turned, it was far too late as Keano’s body flew in the air and landed a devasting kick straight into the midsection of the would-be assassin. The hired killer screamed as his body flew, flipped over the stone ledge of the balcony, and went flying to his doom in the blackwater of the early morning Sunset Sea waves below Casterly Rock. Lorelai Lannister was still blinking when Keano moved into the room, retrieved a wooden chair, and hurled it over the ledge of the balcony, sending it, too, flying down to the blackwaters of the Sunset Sea. First the splash of the surely dead would-be assassin, then shortly after, the second splash. He stood there, watching, his brown eyes flickering this direction and that—getting a full picture of every other balcony and window he could see upon the Sunset Sea facing side of Casterly Rock. When he seemed satisfied, he let out a deep breath, and finally looked at her. "You need to go.” “…I’m oka…wait, what?” Confusion hit her like a freezing ocean wave. He simply, calmly, repeated himself, “Two splashes. You can stay dead for a while if you disappear now, but it has to be NOW.” “Stay dead? You saved me, Keano, I don’t—” His right hand suddenly had her by the left arm, his brown eyes staring deep into her emerald eyes, his voice slowing, tone dropping, “Lorelai, we’ve practiced this. Get to the drainage room. Change. Make your way to the servant’s stables. The boat is always ready at the tollhouse dock. Go.” “But—” “—GO!...I’ll deal with your Uncle, and meet you where we always planned, or else we’re both dead.” --- Shouting began as Lannister men began the chain-reaction of reporting the splashes. They feared someone falling from a balcony, but it was far more than that. Tytos was awake, quill and cup and tankard upon the small desk tucked away into the corner of his private chamber within the Rock as he began to hear the shouting. He seemed certain the vile dead was done. A heavy sigh fell from his lips, and his eyelids fluttered closed for a moment, as if in some small prayer of regret, or final farewell. It didn’t matter. His eyes were barely opened, his mind already back on the quill and the cup of wine, simply moving on, waiting for the guards to reach his chamber and alert him to the certain tragedy that had befallen his niece, Lady Lorelai Lannister, in the overly late hour. Then the hand was over his mouth, and the grip upon him was more than he could struggle against in the short time allowed before the low voice hit his ears so quiet it was no more than a whisper, the cold edge of vengeance upon the tone that would be among the very last things Lord Tytos Lannister, Castellan of Casterly Rock, would ever hear. “She loved you, so much,” Keano, the once Sorrowful Man finished, as the blade wrote the bloody end on this night, instead of the assassin and quill of Tytos Lannister. The grip was gone, but there was no calling out from Tytos Lannister, there was barely a sound at all as the blood began to rush a crimson pool around the golden wine cup of the Castellan of Casterly Rock.