She rides into the night leading what is left of their people. Her people. The once proud people of the North, now in shambles and trembling of exhaustion, cold and terror, all at once. If someone had told her as a child - that innocent, sweet Summer girl she had been - that one day she would be fleeing from the last of her kin, with nothing but what she was wearing and desolation that has no name, she wouldn't have believed it. Ironically, she was closer now to being Nymeria, the Warrior Queen, than she had ever been, all her life. But it tasted like ashes in her mouth.
She would give up everything she now was and everything she had (which wasn't much, mind you) for another night in the company of her remaining siblings, huddling inside the Lord`s chambers. With the warm fire beside them, and their silence as the witness of their love. She could almost see it when she closed her eyes. Jon, brooding (like always), pensive, his brow furrowed. Bran, looking towards the beyond (out her reach, of everyone but him) seeing time coalesce and vanish behind his eyelids. Sansa, her hair shining like a flame, her face impassive, both calm and constantly planning. And herself, observing them all and thinking a thousand more things all the same.
Thinking about them felt like dying, coming back to life, and dying again. Bran, her little brother, who had perished while fighting in an unreachable battlefield that dead dragon and the White Walkers. The only evidence of his struggle his milky, gray eyes, and the blood flowing from his ears, eyes, and then mouth, opened in a silent scream.
Jon, dear, beloved Jon, who had died like the King he was, flying atop Rhaegal, in a desperate bid to give them more time and avenge his Queen. Seeing him fall from the skies into the crimson snow had been the most painful moment of her life. How safe she had felt in his arms, when they saw each other after so long, beside the Weirwood tree. How much the chasm inside of her opened, by the sole thought that she would never see him again.
And Sansa. Gods, she was still alive, alive amongst the dead. "You abandoned her!" A voice inside her mind whispered the same one that wanted, with unique desperation, to turn back and make her stubborn sister ride with her towards the unknown. But even if she yearned for it, she knew she could not do it.
She remembered her words, so very clearly in her mind: "You will lead whatever's left of our people and you will keep them safe, for as long as you can. You will LIVE, and carry with you the legacy of the Starks, of our family, head held high and always proud, as proud as I am of the woman you have become."
She didn't dare betray her.
And so she rode on.
Arya never thought that people freezing and starving could ride so fast. But fear is a great fuel, and sheer terror an even better one, she thought, as she glanced back and saw how far they had gotten already from the camp. She couldn't see the radiant tresses of her sister. Any moment now.
The night was the darkest she had ever seen. Not one star in the sky. Good, she thought, for there was nothing bright about this. When had the world gone so shitty that she, she of all people, would be the heir to that stupid, ugly chair of swords?
Suddenly, the darkness transforms into a blinding light of pure green. For a moment, all she could see was the world submerged into fluorescence, mere shapes amidst a light more radiant than the Sun. It was so bright, it burned.
The air became charged with something she could not describe. Death, perhaps. The ground rumbles then, and the horses jump, spooked by an overload of senses.
The sound comes right after. Deafening. Never in all her years had anything rebounded so loud inside her skull. Boom, just like Hot Pie had said, millennia ago. The startled and terrified screams of her people are drowned by the explosion.
Even miles beyond, her ears are left zumbing for hours. And in her skin she can feel, acutely, the heat that must have burned to crisp what remained - hopefully - of the Army of the Dead. But those thoughts come after.
At the moment though, she is as blinded by the explosion as by the tears gathering in her eyes. How can the end of one's world be like this? A thundering storm of emerald?
The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. She is the only one. A lonely wolf in a field of ice.
The wish to scream until her voice is gone is so strong that she trembles with it. Everything around her is chaos, but she doesn't see a thing. The only thing she can see is her family, one after the other, being taken from her grasp. The God of Death silencing the lives, the lives of all the Starks, except her own. How is that fair? That one goes on while the others vanish without a trace? For there weren't even graves left of them. Ash and air. Nothing.
Father. Mother. Robb. Rickon. Bran. Jon. Dearest Jon. And Sansa. My only sister. Did she feel it? As she burned and became dust? Was she afraid when she faced the army of wights and set all aflame? The questions inside her mind were endless. Arya doubted she would like the answers.
An eon passed. And then some more. The seasons could have changed before her eyes, and she wouldn't have known. She wished for the God to come and take her home. To her parents and her siblings, to all that she had loved and lost. To Winterfell and its safety, to the Weirwood and the Sun.
But she had a duty to do, and a promise to uphold.
So she turned to her people, frightened and lost, to the handful of guards left in her command. And with her shoulders straight and stance proud - as the Queen she had never wanted to be - she directed them towards safety.
The night is dark and full of terrors. But after it comes the dawn.