Allison was picking grime from under her fingernails with a pocket knife while she listened to the clinking of clay dishes. Her mother was elbow deep in scalding water, trying to scour the remainder of that night's meal from the surface of the plates.
"Allison, dear," her mother, Kathryn began, "Please don't do that at the dinner table. It's unladylike."
"So?" Allison replied defiantly. She had grown up on their small family farm and was taught the value of hard work from a young age. And what with her father and brothers away, learning to hunt and gut animals herself had become a necessity. So a little dirt under her fingernails was the least of her worries.
Kathryn sighed. There was no use trying to reason with the girl. She was as stubborn and pig-headed as her father. She'd never been much of a lady growing up, forever playing in the mud or roughhousing with the boys. But the boys were gone now, conscripted by the nobles to some pointless civil war. And Allison had done more than her fair share of picking up the slack left by their absence.
Kathryn glanced out the window at the glittering moonlit snow as she dried the dinner plates with an old cloth. It mattered not who sat on the throne while she and her daughter struggled to put food on the table, or to stay warm on the cold nights in the North. Petty politics were of little importance when there were more pressing concerns at hand. After all, winter was coming.
Her mother's lack of response to Allison's insolence gave her great sadness, and a little relief. Not six months ago her defiance would have met with a clip around the ears and a well practised lecture about the values of her feminine wiles when securing a decent husband, not that Allison cared overly much about procuring said husband. Lately however, the only words on Kathryn's mind seemed to be 'winter is coming.' Allison was growing weary of hearing it. It was always freezing here in the North anyway, so she couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. But there was something ominous about the way her mother said the words that made Allison's skin prickle.
Allison's thoughts were shattered with the sound of pottery smashing to pieces against the cold, stone floor. As she got up to help her mother clean up the shards of the plate she had dropped, Allison noticed the expression of dread in her mother's face as she stared out the window, into the darkness beyond the snow.
"Mother?" Allison asked, concerned.
"It's the Others. They are here," whispered Kathryn in a voice so laced with terror that Allison's insides turned to liquid.
The Others? But surely they did not exist. They were nothing more than a horror story, a bedtime tale designed to make little children too frightened to leave their own beds at night. The Others were not real. But that voice, her mother's voice. It was real, and so too was the terror and anguish contained within it as it repeated in a harsh whisper,
"It's the Others."
Kathryn had moved to the small fire that was now dying in the kitchen fireplace. Her breaths were becoming shallow and painful like icicles in her chest as the coldness took over and panic began to set in. Through that little window in her little kitchen in her little life, she had seen the face of Death. And Death had stared back. Katelyn had seen those ice blue stare back at her through that little window and she knew she would not live to tell the tale.
"Hide!" shrieked Allison's mother, pulling a red hot poker from the quickly dying fire and wielding it like a madman with a sword.
Allison instinctively scrambled for her hunting knife when a tremendous crack resounded through the room as the door was thrown open with such a force that it shattered against the adjacent wall.
Three misshapen humanoid forms began to emerge from the snow, their long, gangly limbs clothed in the bloodstained remains of Stark livery. The larger of the three wore a cleaven set of chainmail and carried with him a curved blade, rusted with the oxidation of dried blood. Its dark, rotting hair was thick with freshly fallen snow and its gaunt, frostbitten face stared at Kathryn with piercing eyes of icy blue.
Kathryn dropped the fire poker to the ground and began to whimper as terror welled up inside her. She tried to run but stood frozen to the spot, her legs laden with fear. The monster opened its dread maw and made an horrific noise that resembled laughter, its many pointed teeth glittering maliciously in the dying firelight.
The creature gleefully stabbed its rusted blade at Kathryn, tearing her cotton dress and slicing slowly through the pale skin at her ribs. Allison watched as it played with her mother, teasing out her terror and feeding from it.
Allison saw the fire poker rolling on the floor at her mother's feet, and stifling her fear, snatched up the rod and jabbed the burning end towards the monster's face. Its skin began to sizzle and it emitted a high pitched, hissing shriek as it tossed Kathryn aside and rounded on Allison.
The blackened hole in the creature's face smoked as Allison tried to beat the being off with the poker. But the fire had fizzled out and the iron rod bounced ineffectively against the creature's skin as it advanced, its two comrades hissing what Allison could only assume was encouragement.
Throwing the ineffectual iron poker to one side, Allison ran to the other side of the room, picking up her hunting knife. Tears streamed down her face as she charged towards the monster, slashing at random in her panic.
Again and again the knife sliced through the pale, dead flesh of the being. Suddenly, it stopped in its advance and seemingly amused by the actions of the young girl, it gestured to its comrades and once more the three of them emitted the strange hissing sound Allison had associated with laughter.
Allison withdrew her flurry of attacks, searching for something, anything that showed that the creature had been hindered by her attack. But no blood flowed from the cold dead veins of the beast, and it moved on in her pursuit.
Kathryn began to pick herself up from the heap she had been flung in and shrieked, trying to run to her daughter's aid only to be picked up by one of the Other's companions. Quickly and efficiently, the creature snapped both of Kathryn's legs and once more tossed her to the side.
Kathryn watched on in horror as the leader of the group reached his ghastly fingers towards the throat of her exhausted daughter. Slowly, the beast began to squeeze the life out of her daughter and she could do nothing more than sob with anguish as the icy grip of Death crushed Allison's heart and the lights went out in her pale brown eyes. The beasts left Kathryn bleeding on the hard stone floor as they dragged the lifeless body of her daughter out into the snow and condemned her to an icy tomb in the glistening snow.
Allison's eyelids flickered open to whiteness. Raising her tortured limbs she discovered a strength she'd never known before and tossed aside the snow that buried her. She could sense the world around her with a clarity that she had never before experienced. The night was brighter, the air was sweeter. The coppery, metallic scent of blood permeated the air and she could hear the blood rushing from the arteries of the still gasping meat sac that lay bleeding on the kitchen floor nearby. She turned her icy gaze to her new brethren and grinned, baring the same horror fangs that had terrified her so only hours before. She turned back to the pitiful dying creature that had once been her mother. Tonight they would feast. Winter was coming.