300 AC


o0o

The Winter Nymeria

by Odeveca


The winter dream is always the same, but she must escape it.

Even if she can't.

For many years, she had a flaming will to survive the lands South of the Wall, and now it is burning with frozen fire as she returns to the place where it all began.

The woman's heart felt like a raging beast as she pushed her legs to move through the knee-high snow. She could feel it moving inside her, and getting ready to burst out of her breast as she picked up the pace, using her burning thighs to push through the thick evil water. She is running now. Running till everything around her was a white blur. If she would run any faster her soles would melt to ice sludge.

"I am fucking freezing," she mutters violently.

The woman races up an immaculately white hill near the southern side of the Wall and she feels the last of her strength leave her as she spots her destination in the distance.

The dream is always the same. She is in a blizzard of ice and snow, her fingers and toes are ready to fall off, but she doesn't stop running. She doesn't stop running until she sees the Wall of ice that she must get to. The determined woman keeps on running now that she has a destination. The mountain of ice expands for miles and miles left to right, but the panting woman doesn't have time to stand in awe. She has no time at all.

All the woman knows is she must get there fast because something horrible is about to happen.

She blows fire into her palms, this weakens her, and the worst part is that her flames come out as wispy skinny things. Just pathetic.

Winter winds bash both of her sides tossing her around like a frozen rag. A dreadful drumming is her heart, and it marches her forward. It leads her somewhere she hopes she won't regret. Her lethargic legs plow against the knee deep snow. Her eyes get dizzy with the exertion.

She tells herself, I can't stop running, and even if I don't know why, I can't stop running, I can't stop running, I won't stop running.

She slips and falls face forward into the snowy ground.

Why did she always have to fall?

She looks down at her furred arms and sees red spreading through the white fur. She must have scraped her arms and hands against the boulder, and drawn blood. A dangerous thing in the snow.

In frustration she watches her hands shake and the angry frostbite blisters give small explosions of volcano red liquid to gush in between her fingers. She clenches them tight, but doesn't stop in her war march. The blizzard picks up and now she can see nothing in this white other-world. Everywhere there is falling snow, only a trail of her blood sits stark against the purity of the evil water.

She shivers in fear imagining the cold swallowing her whole.

She must not believe her imagination.

The air howls around her, she hears heavy snow falling, but not just heavy snow, but the rumbling of a great avalanche of ice-and then the ominous blowing of what could be a horn. The Horn of Winter...

The woman quakes in fear. They are done for now.

She is in the belly of the beast, and the low bellows of the magical horn is the herald of eternal bloody Winter. That is when the very earth shakes, ear-splitting cracking fills the air, and Minisa knows the Great Wall isn't weeping, it is falling, down, down, down, into nothing but rubble of a once mighty shield against the North. The one true protector, guarding the Realms of Men against the Night King...oh no.

Minisa starts sprinting in the opposite direction. She wasn't going to find out what was coming over the Wall.

Her world was already fucked bloody if the Mountain had fallen, and she wasn't going to go down with it.

She resumes her sprinting in the opposite direction, until she spots a figure coming closer in the blizzard.

"Hey!"

All reason leaves her as she sprints to the person, "You're going the wrong way!"

But the person keeps disappearing in the blizzard. She catches her breath and breathes in snow which brings on a fit of coughing. Maybe this person was lost as well. Maybe a Crow from the Wall, a free-folk scavenger, any person would be good right now. Gasping into her furred arm, she strains her eyes to look up again.

It is a man, but her rational mind tells her, this far close to the Wall, it can be something far worse.

"Oh no."

He is running to her now. The man is a knight or at least a soldier of sorts. The clinking of the blackened metal can be heard in the backdrop of the blowing horn, he has no helmet, and his head is open to the elements. So unnatural for there to be soldiers this far North.

The black armor of the man shines like flowing obsidian, and the woman stares enraptured by it like a moth to the flame. As he comes closer and closer the woman's heart constricts, because she recognizes the man.

The soldier has a full head of white blonde hair, a handsome face, clean shaven, and she knows he is the bearer of the most haunting purple eyes known to man. Eyes that she had woken up mornings to, that made her feel more than just a frozen peasant, and the eyes that would warm even the coldest of blizzards. It was silly how much she loved his warm purple eyes.

The silly memory he could burn her with one satisfying look gave the woman the energy to reach him.

I would gladly burn from his gaze, and get some reprieve in this frozen wasteland, she thought. Her body shivers.

She is stops in her tracks.

When he close enough, he lifts his face from the downpour of snow, his eyes are no longer a familiar purple.

"Oh Gods, No!"

They are not alive, and she let out a scream of fear, "NO! This cannot be!"

His once warm gaze, has...changed to bright blue, bright icy blue from another world. That came from an old primordial fear. Dead, cold, and the color of a frozen death.

"Minisa," he gives a throaty mutter. The woman is terrified. She is frozen in fear, unable to answer him. A lamb quaking in the presence of a wolf. It is too late. The Night King have already began taking souls of the living… their world is doomed.

He trudges toward her.

"Stay away from me," Minisa squeaks like a small child.

His re-animated dead corpse, better known as a Wight, reaches out blindly, a foreigner in her husband's body, "stop, don't touch me," she falls backwards, and crawls on her back looking up at a man that she no longer feels safe with. "Don't get near me."

"Minisa," he repeats her name, no life left in him, but the Night King's will to kill all that is not snow and ice. It will snuff her fire out.

Tears come to Minisa's eyes and they freeze on her cheeks as he rises once more, his bones cracking as he flops up. I failed. She gets on her own two feet before he can reach her. I failed him.

"I'm warning you," fire erupts from her hand and she brings it over her head in warning. This usually scares others out of their skin, it had scared him once. "Do not dare get any closer, or I will be forced to crisp you," she wants him to leave. She...doesn't want to burn him.

But it doesn't work. He doesn't say a word as he lumbers forward. All sense of self-preservation and humanity is long gone. Along his brows there is a curtain of icicles, his chest is cracked in, and his insides are just as black as his armor. It seems the cold has no effect on him. He hated the cold, and the woman is sobbing now, "You wouldn't hurt me," but Minisa feels as if she is trying to assure herself, "please don't hurt me."

She was losing all her fighting strength, "Please, just go away."

"Minnisssa," he says only a few steps away.

She extinguishes the fire, her shoulders slumping in defeat.

Without so much as a warning, both of his fists encircle her neck, and... and... Minisa can't breathe.

The black metal of his armored wrists bites and rips into her neck, and she screams loudly, and he squeezes harder. She can't breathe. She can't breathe. She can't breathe. It is impossible to breath from the clamping pressure of his fleshy cold palms, and fingers on the front and back of her windpipe. It is heightened at the surprise of him ever laying hands on her. He was not this man. He would never hurt her. Maybe there was nothing of him left.

"St-o-p!" Minisa can't even say the word, and she bashes against his hands trying to burn them off.

The suffocating woman leaves the ground entirely. The Wight of her husband extends her over his head, bringing her closer to death. His impressive strength only increasing as hers leaves her. Minisa's furry body and legs flap crazily like a dying fish, and all the while her vision darkens.

She doesn't have much time. Minisa tries to reach him. Her pleading eyes call out to him, but he constricts even tighter choking her with his cold hands, and burning blue eyes.

The world has gone quiet, but not peaceful, not when there is still fight within her. He doesn't say anything while she gives soundless screams to make him stop. How could he do this? This was not him. They might as well be strangers with the indifference he gives to her pleading eyes.

"Do-nt- Rh-gar!" He doesn't even recognize his own name anymore.

As she dangles there, losing oxygen and consciousness she can't help but remember him.

A man finally worthy of sitting on the Iron Throne, and then feeling the absence as he gave it all up in the name of something she found idiotic at the time...but his sincerity to those below him, patience for a partially mad-father, strength for a fading Mother, and tremendous love for his people.

Oh Rhaegar, my gentle dragon, even the cold has a way to make the gentlest souls into frozen beast. A beast shackled to the North. The North does not feel, does not love, and will burn you with frozen fire. It burned Minisa, and she was fire itself.

Minisa should have the power to fight this off. She cannot give up fighting against the Ice Kings, not when she is so close to saving the souls of millions. Instead her vision blackens, and she no longer feel Rhaegar's hands.

Then

She wakes up.

"Mini?"