AN: So i changed a few things in c1, since some people pointed out some stuff, so you may want to go back and re read it. Thanks to all the reviewers and readers. So glad you all enjoy and see potential in this story.

Chapter 2

Arya made it back to the House of Black and White just as it had begun to rain.

The waif helped her strip out of the wet disguise as she told the kindly man the three secrets she'd learned today, keeping to herself the one about the lying boy.

She was becoming a better liar. The waif told her so. But she still could not lie to the kindly man. She could keep things from him though, if she was fast enough about it. Keeping things to yourself and lying was not the same thing. She had learned to tell those apart too, as well as when someone stretched the truth or exaggerated. Her sight was gone from her, but her other senses were alive, and lapped at the atmosphere for details. She could tell people apart from their scent, and the sound of their footsteps, and she could tell apart lies from truths. The boy she met today had been a liar.

It was not that he was the first liar she had met. Everyone lied. Some people more than others. Some, the same lie over and over again. Every day she would walk down the streets and beg for money and she heard lies being told everywhere.

What intrigued Arya so much about this boy in particular, was that he told the same lie Arya had spent so long telling herself. The same lie the kindly man would not have of her when she first arrived to the House of Black and White. His name.

She remembered what the kindly man had said to her when she tried to lie about her name.

"No. Tell me your name."

The same words almost escaped her mouth when the boy first told her his name was Edric. But she bit her tongue and kept her words to herself, and listened. Listened for more lies.

He was not much of a talker, and he was only talking to her because it had been him who had approached her in the first place, and he did not know how to walk away politely. Arya could tell all of that from his voice.

Another thing his voice told her, was that he was from Westeros. His accent was just as bad as hers had been when she'd first learned the Braavos tongue. Possibly worse. He had not been here long.

He had finally pressed a copper on her open palm and walked away.

It was nine days before she came across him again. It amazed Arya how quickly she had found his footsteps among all the other ones in the busy street, and that she had been right to assume they were his. He whispered something briefly, but Arya was too far away to hear it, or to hear the short reply from the woman he was speaking to.

Arya turned and walked in the direction he had come for a few steps before she found a wall she could lean against to wait. What ever business brought him here didn't take him long and he was out on the streets before long. Arya sunk to the floor, her had extended out as people walked by.

He could miss her. The street was too crowded, and she was but a small figure against a wall, and he walked awfully fast.

But then she felt the coin drop into her palm as he rushed by her.

"Edric?" she called out.

He stopped walking. "How did you know?" he asked curtly.

Arya pressed her hand against the stone wall to help herself to her feet. "The way you walk." she crossed to him. And your scent.

He smells like fir needles.

"Everybody walks the same." he snapped.

"No. No one does. You have very heavy footsteps."

"I'm not fat, if that's what you're implying."

Arya shook her head. "Your footfall is heavy." she explained. "Heavy and haste."

"Perhaps because I have somewhere to be." she heard his steps as he began to leave.

"...as if you're weighed down by something."

He stopped, once again, but she did not hear him turn to face her. "Well that's strange."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It just is. It's strange to have heavy footsteps, when you feel empty inside."

He began to leave again, and this time Arya did not try to stop him with any more conversation.

That night, when she told the kindly man the three new things she had learned, she began to tell him about Edric.

"I met a boy today who said he felt empty inside," she began, but the kindly man interrupted her.

"That is a lie."

"It is not." Arya was angry, but the kindly man insisted.

Later, as she made her way down to the vaults, she chewed on her lip to consider what about her last story was a lie. That was when she felt the slap across her face, and heard the waif's voice in her mind, "It is Arya of House Stark who chews on her lip whenever she is thinking."

"I am no one." Arya spoke out, rubbing at her burning cheek.

She could not find sleep that night trying to find the untruth in her unfinished story. She could not get the boy's words out of her head.

There were many men and women Arya had come across who had sounded as sad as that boy sounded. But none of them where empty. Rage, revenge, anger, bitterness, and many other emotions had consumed them. None of them were empty.

Not like Edric.

She tried to picture his face. Tried to imagine what empty eyes looked like. His possible features warped in her head. He could have yellow hair, like the Lannisters. Or dark hair, like her and her father, or even darker, like her brother Jon. It could be red, like the hair of her mother and the rest of her siblings.

He could be tall. He could be short. He could have freckles, and a hooked nose. He could be disfigured, or very handsome.

Arya yawned. Trying to give Edric a face was making her sleepy.

In the end she settled for red hair, but when she tried to give his eyes a color, she found that all she could picture, was hollow irises.

Hollow like him.

She yawned again and turned on her side. "Ser Gregor." her lips mouthed silently. "Dunsen. Raff the Sweetling. Ser Ilyn. Ser Meryn. Queen Cersei. Valar morghulis."

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