All men must die.

That was the bloody truth of it. Sandor told the brother this and more.

He spoke of the only home he had known, a place where he had learned the art of an uneasy, guarded sleep. A house resonating with a hungry silence, and vast emptiness that loomed larger than anything contained within the walls of the manse. Indeed, the only part of the household that had ever felt truly alive was the towerhouse itself, and perhaps Gregor was the manifestation of its cruelty. Sandor watched as the corners of the brother's mouth tucked into a frown at the revelation of such superstition.

The Stranger had been anything but a stranger. Death was a familiar, curling a merciless hand to claim so many with the misfortune of being sheltered within the stone walls of the Keep. Common folk whispered their hearth tales, telling of blood curses, shifting shadows and lingering darkness falling from the mountains and grasping for the Keep evermore, relics from a time long past and nearly forgotten. Some claimed the long winter, though others countered, claiming older to the time of the First Men. His family's own misfortunes fanned the flames of idle talk and chatterings.

The Keep stood almost affront to the nature that surrounded, made ominous by it's faded majesty. It overlooked a leaden colored tarn split by a narrow causeway of schist and timber smelling sweetly of rot. A rubblestone bawn circled from behind the tower house touch the muddied and tangled shoreline, rife with driftwood and cattails. After a long spell of rain lakeflies would choke the air with a reverberating and deafening drone. These were his father's lands and his father's before him, given as a bone to a loyal dog.

The towerhouse swelled up from the earth like the trunk of some great tree, though with bark of stone, sitting on a basebatter of limestone. Fissures webbed the walls as though carved by some masterful and macabre hand, quoined by slabs of pebbling granite. The trellised windows of crimson glass had a peculiar way of reminding one of a wierwood tree with red sap seeping through an etched face. It was an opulence that somehow stood the test of time, yet never quite pleased him to look up and find the queerest sensation of discomfort in the suspicion that it seemed to gaze right back at him.

Thinking on it made the hairs on Sandor's neck prickle, the manse seemed to thrive through the tragedies somehow, though he could not explain. His lips twisted dwelling on thoughts he had long cast aside. Slivers of fragmented memory shone back broken in the looking glass of his mind's eye. Terrible enough to draw tears and sharp enough to draw blood. He was shaken to remember the startling scarlet of his father's blood against the dank murk of mud. Sandor had been certain it was black.

What other color could it have ever been?

Sandor let his head hang, and played with a blade of grass between his fingers. The proprieties of confession were lost upon him, but he knew the prayers. And so he prayed and swatted at a drab moth that had settled on his blanket, facing the fire that his companion had everlastingly tended to. A flurry of dark feathers against darker air swept down and made a feast of the insect.

You wanted him dead too. Sandor heard a challenging voice in the depth of his memories.

Yes, he thought. But all men must die.

And die they had. All but himself, and perhaps living was the crueler fate.

Sandor spoke of the family he once had. Family, he scoffed inwardly, another bitter word on his rough tongue. But yes, he had family and what a travesty it all had been. All puppets on strings for the Gods to play with. Once there had even been a mother, though meek under her husband's word and rule, now dead many years of child birth, taking the babe along with her. The Stanger took them, he did. Sandor thought of the dark horse he had spied wandering the grounds at dusk so long ago. The very night mother had passed the midwife joined her, tumbling down the uneven steps of the Keep's rear staircase, skin blistered from the fat of an overturned rushlight.

There was talk of looming shadows and Sandor knew who they whispered of. For years afterwards gossip spread of the drafty room where mother had been confined, claiming it echoed with whispers on the wind, scrabbling the oiled leather through wooden shutters, and the faint meowlings of a new born babe. Father had given him a cold, pinched look when he had asked, and curtly told him, "Nonsense."

Sandor unearthed more beneath the oppressive strata. He remained silent for a moment, shifting through the ragged memories of her. The small child his sister had been. Would always be.

Together they played, wandering into the woods where he would climb high above, clinging from branches. He trusted that they would not fail him, confident that he would find footing in a groove or notch in the bark. He would keep watch over her, as she sang lullabies, hiccuping with laughter at jokes and stories he would lob down from the tree tops. When she was lucky he would make off with sunflower seeds in a kerchief and she sat on the ground, snapping sunflower seeds between her teeth, complaining loudly when a shell bit back, snagging on her tongue. What remained of the cache would later be flung for the birds and little forest creatures.

Once he brought down a bird's nest from a gnarled tree he had climbed and together they inspected three freckled little eggs before laying them back gingerly on to the twigs. Sandor had climbed back up but somehow fumbled, and one little egg tumbled back down to the unforgiving forest floor. She had been inconsolable and wept at the sight of the broken pieces of shell and wood. Together they tread through the brush towards home, reeling from their guilt and shared sin. They both glimpsed finality and fled, thinking with heavy hearts on the mother bird. They were ashamed, and later in the nursery she had whispered in a child's lisp, "Are we going to be punished?" Sandor felt his voice break, and found that suddenly it was hard to breath.

That was a question for the fucking Gods. For his father and mother, now riddled with ghastly conqueror worms.

The worst pain was how he remembered his sister in the most general of terms, dark hair...but had it been black or brown? Her eyes...had they been just grey? All that swam before his mind's eye was a small bloated face mottled orange and black. Clouded eyes stared through him, past him into the sky that had shone brightest blue as a dense fog settled over his heart. Dead and gone, found floating face down in stagnant water. A torn ankle, savaged to the bone, meat replaced by maggots, flies, and water beetles. Father could look away, but Sandor could not. He looked straight into the dark void of Gregor's eyes, never any good at keeping secrets even with his mouth shut.

Nonsense, father had said.

The burns had already been carved deep. His foolishness, his fault, they said. Never Gregor's, father did not even have to speak for Sandor to know. He would not even look at him.

My punishment. My fault.

Sandor stared hard into the fire, unable to break the connection, fascination, and fear. It all washed over him, raw as ever. Once he had been a boy stumbling through the bush when he happened witnessed Gregor set a hound on father. He stood terrified as Gregor strode towards him and stepped over their father and pressed a dagger into Sandor hands. A hateful hand forced him down by the scruff of his neck, until his forehead grazed broken flesh. His eyes followed the path of red into the black earth as it drank deeply.

"Mercy," his father had pled, a gut wrenching garble of blood in his torn throat.

Sandor leaned in close, and looked into his father's suddenly frantic grey eyes and whispered, "Look, can you now see which one is the monster?"

"Nonsen-"

Sandor did not wait for father to finish. The hilt of the dagger burned hot in his hands. And they shook, as he sheathed the blade in his father's heart, feeling the metal grind against bone. He swore to himself and dissolved into a hysteria as his ears rang and rang, and his sight was clouded bright red.

A guardsman strode forth from the sedge, slack jawed as Gregor brutally thrust his sword into the man's belly. Through it all he laughed, his face twisting cruel, hateful and strange as he gesturing at the carnage. "What have you done, brother?"

Sandor sputtered, his words came out unintelligible. Run!, his instinct urged, screaming at him. So Sandor willed his legs to move and he ran, covered in his fathers blood and gore. He stumbled over the brambles and crags in the earth, and swore he could hear his father's... no, now Gregor's hounds, barking after him. Chasing him. Hunting him.

It had been out of desperation that he sought help from the same Gods who had abandoned him when he needed a saviour the most. These very same Gods holy men trumpeted and professed to have a plan and a greater purpose for each mortal. Sandor had fled to the Sept, where incense swirled hypnotically and heavy in the air. He begged the thin balding man in immaculate robes to tell him what purpose the Gods had for him. He begged for the sanctuary he had read of in the books his maester once provided. There had been no answer from the Septon, only a look of revulsion and fear as Sandor lowered his stained and bloodied hood, showing the man his face. That had been enough of a reply and Sandor fled like a scorned animal.

But now he sat with a man so unlike the Septon who had scorned him. A brute of a man who looked him in the face and did not flinch away, even if the truth was ugly. And stranger yet, this same man looked him in the eye and extended an offer of sanctuary.

Sandor gazed up as the sound of dull thunder rolled off in the distance. The sky rippled with light far off in the horizon over the tree tops. He bowed his head, though wound at his neck throbbed in protest and nodded.

He laid awake long after the brother turned in for the night. The rain came and went, and left him with clearer thoughts. He realized that nature had too taken in her fill of secrets though there were still so many, foreign to even him.

And he wanted to lay the beast to rest and regain his humanity, if it was even possible for a man with hands so stained to find redemption.