The door opened. Amory Lorch tumbled into the solar, quite literally. He dropped on the floor right before Tywin's feet, dead.

'Guards!' Lord Lannister shouted.

There were footsteps in the corridor. A guard entered the room. He was young, his eyes sharp, his face handsome, his hair red with one white streak in it.


The girl has no honour, no caution, no brains to speak of. The girl never thinks ahead. The girl lives in the moment and acts on a whim, smiling, fighting and talking too much.
She drops dangerous words at random, causing an unstoppable avalanche of accidents and deaths, and she doesn't even see it, she has already moved ahead.

But when life makes her watch, she doesn't avert her eyes.

Her thin sword belongs the the guardsman now. The man ponders whether he should return the blade to its rightful owner. The man has no reason to do so. Three deaths he owes the girl - no more, no less. But the man wants to see her smile. Her real smile, the one the girl gives to the blacksmith and the baker boy. The smile that makes one's heart melt and burns one's soul down to embers.

Deadlier than a knife, a smile like this.

The girl dances on the verge of the abyss, stumbling, losing her balance and then miraculously regaining it times and times again. She should have been dead. The boy king could have beheaded her. The gold cloak could have beaten her to death. She could have starved in the forest. The Mountain That Rides could have tortured her until she was a bloody piece of flesh. But the girl is still dancing, her hand crimson in the rays of the setting sun.

Him of Many Faces favors dancers.

The man wants to pay his debt and be done with it. The man wants three names, to send the Red God the three souls that are long overdue. But this other soul, the girl's soul, makes him linger, so precious and luscious it is. It doesn't know boundaries. It never stops halfway. It looks through the girl's eyes, making them cold and sharp and black like an obsidian dagger.

The man is invulnerable to the desires of flesh. The man doesn't care about the girl's pretty face or her firm teats which even her oversized jacket cannot hide. The pull that entangled him is quite different. He is enthralled by her blind ardor, captivated by the merciless drive of her longings, mesmerized by the white and black and crimson of her shadow.

He wants this soul.