She had given up on the world before Eddard Stark came to her shores, half dead from the very waves that gave her her name and purer of heart than any other man she'd crossed before. She is so very old and almost completely forgotten by the people who used to worship the very earth she stood upon. Her partner, the Lord of the Skies, is gone as all those who believed in him disappeared years before, and she is little more than a mortal now, a translucent deity that has all but forgotten mercy.
Still, she helps him. Holds him. Cradles his sodden body, because she is still strong enough, just about, almost, and carries him up the hill, past all her brothers and sisters trapped inside their trees. Somedays, she thinks she should have joined them when she had the chance. They need not fear one day disappearing for a lack of faith, for they have the weirwoods to anchor them to earth. But if she poured her soul into the keeping of a heart tree, she would never see the sea again.
The Lady of the Waves can imagine no worse fate.
Eddard Stark takes three days to wake, but the Lady knows him by that time. Knows his mind and soul and the way his breaths always echo the moving of the tides. "You saved me," he says to her in a cracked voice as his eyes foggily focus on her opaque face, one she recognises from her childhood when she had wandered through the room of all the human souls that were-not-yet-born and she smiles. He had looked like ice, if she remembers right, ice and iron and oak.
"I did."
"How can I ever- I must-"
"Rest now, Eddard." She hushes him, touching the softness of his lips with a single finger that miraculously makes contact with the mortal instead of being just an illusion. He does, wearily, and the Lady stares at her hands with rapture. She is getting stronger.
It begins like that.
.
She tells him she is a fisherman's daughter, and her father is away in the Narrow Sea. The Lady chooses her name without care and decisively calls herself Sarra as she dances at his side as they take a walk down the beach, even as the rain slaps at their faces, perhaps a final part of her Storm Lord rebelling that she might have found another love, even when he is no longer around to satisfy her. "Sarra," Eddard echoes, "pretty name."
"Pretty girl?" she teases and he flushes bright pink. She giggles gaily and wraps seaweed around her forehead and head like a circlet. Eddard stares at her, Sarra the fisherman's daughter with her skin as white as sea foam, and eyes as blue as the ocean, hair as black as the night, and can't make himself look away.
.
They kiss for the first time in the dark. He tastes of wood and steel and sorrow, and Lady can't get enough of him. She rips off his clothes with a single minded efficency before crawling on top of him, pressing her ear to his chest. He flinches at the coolness of his touch but doesn't move away.
His heart is thumping, thumping, thumping, so hard that Lady wonders it doesn't jump out of his chest.
"I shouldn't," he says in a daze, even as he does. "I am married."
"Think of it as worship," Sarra whispers in Lord Eddard's ear, Lord Eddard who keeps on asking her to call him Ned but never asks if she has another name other than the one she shows the world. If he did, she'd tell him. But he doesn't. So she remains Sarra and he remains Eddard.
And they come together in the dark. If it were light, he'd have seen her become something so much more than a woman.
.
He leaves the next day, shaken and guilty and half in love with her. She waves him off as a ship comes to ferry him back to the mainland – back to his war and his wife and his worries.
The Lady of the Waves knows when he leaves her dominion, and only then does she cry, when he is safely back in Westeros and well away. Her tears are sea salt and sand, and she considers giving in, finally, as her Storm Lord did before her. She could just breathe out and begone, give in to the apathy of the people in this large, terrible new world that she doesn't understand.
But she won't. She isn't done yet.
A hand creeps to her almost-empty stomach, and she smiles.
.
The child grows as slow as a mortal would, and she becomes anchored to the world in another way as her belly swells. She spends most of her pregnancy in seclusion, beneath the waves in what remains of her realm or in the godswoods on the Isle, where her brothers and sisters call her foolish but with no bite.
She is old, so very old, but so very young too. She is immortal, and unchanging, and as she always was. Reckless and vicious and reverent over her growing stomach. "Be brave, sweetfish," she says as she rubs her middle, round and round, "be strong."
When she is nine months round and the water all around her becomes choppy and restless, she knows it is time. With what is left of her energy, she swims faster than light and ends up in the warm waters of Dorne where her good friend Mother Rhoyne greets her with her voice that sounds like a brook.
He went to where the stars fell, Mother Rhoyne whispers, he did not go alone.
Lady becomes Sarra again in a blink, becomes a love-lorn maiden abandoned by her cruel lover who left her with child. The people of Dorne are wild and vicious on her behalf, and take her to him without even realizing they've done so with their whispers and curses.
Sarra curls herself up on Eddard's bed and waits until he comes up from dinner to start at the round shape on his bed. "Who- what- Sarra! Gods, you gave me..." he stops suddenly, staring.
"I will be going into labour soon," she tells him dreamily, and knows her skin is shining like pearls found on the sea floor, her hair is whipping around her head in an invisible wind and her eyes are as raging as the sea. He is scared of her, she sees it in the widening of his irises, and he should be.
"Sarra-" he says as he begins to back out the door.
"You can't bring anyone else." She tells him, "Just me and you. Like it began."
"Like it began." He repeats, dumbly, and closes the door behind him.
.
"His name is Jon." she tells Eddard, as she holds their son to the dying light of day for the very first time. He came out in a rush of blood and salt water, and his eyes are as grey as the sea on a stormy day.
"Jon." Eddard echoed, "God given."
"Very good." Lady tells him, and passes their child over to him, his soul raging and tumulteous around him like the sea at it's most beautiful. The babe wails, and reaches one tiny hand toward the ocean.
"He... he is so light." Eddard says after a pause, unable to take his eyes away from his son's tiny face.
"He is full of the sea winds and waves." Lady tells him, "He is half of me too, and I am no mortal woman. No fisherman's daughter. And he is not just a lord's bastard." She turns to leave, already feeling the fatigue of the birth catching at her, and knows that this is one of her very last days. She is not strong anymore. Not like she once was.
Wave-breaker, the voice her son will one day speak with whispers in her ear like a conch shell's call, bearer. Stay. It is so dry here.
Little one, she calls back in her seagull voice, high and low and cawing, you will grow to love the earth as you loved the sea.
I am the sea, the little baby insisted, stopping his crys to look at her with his large, serious eyes.
Just so.
"Please- Sarra-" Eddard says with a stumbling voice, "whoever you are. Please, don't leave me. I have so many questions, I need to know-"
"I am the Lady of the Waves," she tells him measuredly, "and my son is my final gift to you. Pray to me, sometime. I'll listen, if I can."
And then, she is sea mist, then, she is foam, then she is sand and coral and the crash of waves, then she is the comforting embrace of death to a young woman who flings herself off a cliff, then she is the sea, she is the sea, (she is a mother who ignores her son crying after her in his not-yet voice, before forgetting her completely in a heartbeat) and she is old, and young, and unchanging and immortal and she is gone.
The only proof she was ever there at all a small, squirming boy who could breathe water as well as he could air, if only he had the mind to try.