Author's note:

This is an illustrated novella and is meant to be read in the manner of a real book with two pages side by side. As such, I've had to publish it as an emagazine/pdf flipbook rather than on the ffnet platform. To read the illustrated novella, please visit my tumblr.

It is the first post on my tumblr which you can find by going to

kimberlite8 dot tumblr dot com

or directly at

kimberlite8 dot tumblr dot com/post/75345496281

(Please remove spaces above and replace dot with ".")

I've also uploaded the text only to ffnet which is what you find below.

If you would like to leave reviews on ffnet, I'd certainly appreciate it!

YELLOW EYES OPENING ...

Evening

you gather back

all that dazzling dawn has put asunder:

you gather a lamb

gather a kid

gather a child to its mother

Sappho, Fragment 104A

Alayne's eyes lit upon the image reflected in the pool of water. She leaned forward, peering closer, the image so startlingly new she was able to look upon it as she would a stranger. A narrow waist curving upward to ample breasts, auburn hair styled in the Northern fashion, haloing a face as perfect as a porcelain doll's. She parted a plait of hair between her fingertips. In the dappled sunlight of the forest, the strands seemed to prism, separations of saturated color—copper, garnet, rosewood and vermilion—as glossy as lute string silk.

The stranger would have been ornamentally pretty, save for one contradicting feature: her eyes. Set against her doll's face, those large blue eyes seemed to burn with the intensity of a dying consumptive, giving her visage—whether she deserved it or not—the look of character and depth.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the impossible scent of hawthorn and ash and soldier pines. A dream, nothing but a pleasant dream for as long as it lasts. Turning her face up to the sky, she made her appeal to the trees, "I'm the Princess of Winterfell."

As if in answer, summer snow began to earthward drift, crystalline bits of nothing as soft as goose down. Her palms grew warm as her memory rolled over the impression of smooth granite walls, heated by the spring waters that rushed through them as blood rushes through a man's body. Other memories intruded, sharp, unstoppable: the smell of the peat cooking fires, the taste of honey-sweetened hippocras, the comfort of another body alongside hers under a mountain of down blankets. The other body had only ever been Arya but it was as if her senses possessed the luxury of their own fantasies. They fed her memories of things that had never happened. A man's body, his thick arms holding her tightly. His raspy laughter pooling into the narrow space between her nape and the collar of her bedgown as he pressed his bulk to hers in secret paths and curves.

She kicked up a mound of snow that lay at her feet and began to laugh in a wholehearted way that she had not laughed for years. Her summer wool skirts became a white churn as pretty patched-together fantasies fluttered in the dark recesses of her brain. Let me dream of a gentle, brave champion to come rescue me. He'll slay my enemies and win my love. He'll take me back to Winterfell and we'll be ever so happy for ever and ever …

A hulking black shape cast its long shadow across the pool.

All the blood in her veins lit. Her body stilled, suspended in the posed position of a Lysene dancer, arms raised as if the music had stopped for a count of three. She felt grey eyes on her, feeding off her form, leaching the density from her bones until they felt as light and as airy as a —

"Little bird."

She turned just in time to see the last word cut through the cold air, condensing into a warm puff before his mouth. She was so dumbstruck that she couldn't seem to even begin to form words—I don't know what to say—for a few moments.

She watched the snowflakes fall, their delicate sixfold symmetry latching onto his heavy brows, giving the black hairs a spiky appearance. Marked how the cold wind was turning his large hooked nose pink. His very breath fascinated her: the movement of his broad chest underneath a soft woolen tunic, the rise, the hitch, the letting-go of air in little clouds from his chapped lips. Oh, that face. The right side gaunt, angular planes as sharp-edged as a longsword. The left side—a maiden's fantasy—she strangled a hysterical laugh, balling a hand into a fist. It trembled with the ghost-sensations of twisted flesh as hard as leather.

She batted away the snow that gathered on her eyelashes, feeling like a blinking deer staring into a deep pool of something unknown and unthinkable—herself—the stranger of whom she felt she was just beginning to make acquaintance.

"Lady Sansa … look at you. Aren't you every inch the woman?" He smacked his lips— "Damn. Blood red rose with each petal bent back,"—and he smirked at her. But she had caught the quiet and humble gruffness in his voice when he mouthed the word woman. As if she was the eternal woman—spun sugar femininity—boiled down to every aspect of that word's ineffable charm.

"My lord." Sansa had meant it to be a greeting though it came out sounding like an interjection: of surprise, of pleasure, of dismay. She had not seen him for two whole years. He had come to her in the darkness, stinking of wine and blood as green fire filled the sky. He took a song and a kiss and left me nothing but a bloody cloak.

He had seen more blood since—it dawned on her that his left ear, once a stub, was now completely missing. "I was injured in a dogfight. They're dead but I'm not as pretty as I used to be…" he muttered, while combing his hair with his fingers over the left side of his head. How baffling it was that she should imagine herself as beautiful as a lady in a song while imagining him an even uglier monstrosity. He stopped his fussing suddenly, his voice taking on a menacing edge as he shifted forward an inch. "Do I still frighten you, girl? That ice-rimmed arse leaking from the sight of my ugly face?"

There was a time when his face could make her cry, his words make her feel stupid and baited. There were no tears now. They were all alone in the wilderness of her imagination.

Inside her brain, a sleeping wolf sprang awake, its yellow eyes opening in the dark.