Author's Notes: A warning; reading this chapter may cause some distress, and for that I apologise. Yet you knew it was coming…

Summary: Her voice breaks and she struggles to continue. He knows it is hard for her but he wants to hear the words one more time just the same. After a while she continues in a low and constrained voice.

Sandor

Sandor hears sounds of feet shuffling around his bed and knows them to be either Fira's or Santina's. He is half awake but doesn't want to alert them to the fact, knowing it to only make them fuss over him, force foul-tasting liquids down his throat and throw more blankets over him. He knows he is dying and that nobody can do anything about it – and why should they? The fatigue that racked him for a long time has gradually become worse and worse. When blood appeared in his urine he didn't take it as a good sign, nor the increased pain in his bones and especially in his loins and lower back. His weight loss only increased until by now he feels he is nothing but skin and bone. He hates feeling so weak. Luckily all the worst symptoms only appeared a few months ago, and the way he is going it will not be long before he can leave the body that has so cruelly betrayed him. Yet that is the way of the world; when their time is done the old die and the young move on.

Sandor had always imagined himself dying in a battlefield, his mortal body pierced with cold steel; a sword or an arrow or mayhap a warhammer doing the deed. Certainly not like this, in a warm featherbed surrounded by flesh of his flesh; his sons and daughters, his grandsons and granddaughters. Despite the lingering pain that has transformed his once powerful body to the shadow of its former self, he manages a weak smile when a flash of auburn hair flickers in front of his eye.

After a hard-fought battle of words in which Sansa stubbornly resisted the notion of him leaving her in such a cruel way, she finally accepted the truth that he was not going to get any better. She sent ravens to all their children to call them back home to see their father one last time.

Norr of course is already there, the powerful lord in his own right. Three sons he has, all strong and strapping lads, curiously resembling their grandsire more than their own father. They all are powerfully built, unbeatable in arms and all three have grey eyes and black hair.

Fira is a true queen as promised so long ago; Queen Fira of the Six Kingdoms. Aegor followed Stannis as the client king to High Queen Daenerys, and together they have five sons and daughter. She travelled home as fast as she could, taking only her youngest with her, a daughter much like her mother , grandmother and grand-grandmother; a beautiful auburn-haired blue-eyed maid.

By luck Orm is in Westeros, back from one of his extensive travels in the Far-East. He hasn't married but he has at least three children in his name, all in different countries by a different woman. He takes good care of them all, he assures, and Sandor has no reason to doubt his word. A few years back when he last visited they had a long talk and Orm admitted that soon, after a few more trips he too might be ready to come back home for good. Mayhap take his favourite woman and child with him, mayhap all three of them – or if none of them is willing, mayhap start anew in the land of his father and mother.

Santina has to everybody's surprise married, a wildling wise-man from the same family of seers whose words guided so much the life of her parents. The couple lives half the year in Hardhome, half in Clegane's Burrow, and only a short time ago Santina gave birth to their firstborn son. When Sandor first lays his half-lidded eyes on her as she sits by the fire in his sickroom and suckles the babe on her breasts, the sight reminds him of Sansa doing that with their babes all those years ago so much that once again he feels tears filling his eyes. Damned old fool, quit bawling already!

Although Westerosi women usually don't have their own sigil, only that of their father and later their husband, Santina has broken the traditions there as well by choosing her own sigil. It is a diminutive bird on a field of grass, its tail jutting upwards. Undoubtedly she chose it after hearing her father calling her mother just that all her life, but before she did it, she asked first Sansa and then Sandor if they would mind. Of course they didn't, and once again they were reminded of the words of the prophecy and how all of them became reality even without active influence on their part.

And so here they are, all children and many grand-children, spending their days sitting by his bed telling him events from their lives and that of their children. Sandor listens patiently, grunting a few words here and there. He truly enjoys those times, but the best time for him is the one spent with his wife, his Sansa, his little bird.

"Sansa," he rasps one evening when everyone else has retired for the night and only Sansa rests on his bed, wrapped under his blankets. She usually sleeps in their marital bed across the room in order not to disturb him – or more likely, not to be disturbed by his intermittent coughing. Yet before Sandor falls into a milk of the poppy-induced sleep, she always comes and lies by his side, as she has done for decades.

"Yes, love?" She raises her head and Sandor can feel her eyes on him.

"What did the prophecy say again? The one I heard from the old hag?" Sansa shifts to a better position and recites him the words they both have learned by heart.

There is fire in your soul, and in the soul of the one who will heal you, and a fire in her hair. You will find a great love; a love so strong it will change the fate of the realm. Yet your journey will not be easy; you have to fight for your love, as your love will fight for you. Three times you step up and rescue her, and she steps up three times to save you.

Sansa stops for a moment to brush a sweaty strand of hair away from his face.

The lord of vast lands you shall be, the lands so great that it takes a rider three days to travel from one end to another. Two sons and two daughters will come from your seed. One son the new lord to your people, the other an explorer of faraway lands, He will discover new and mysterious worlds and his sigil is that of a wolfhound. One daughter the queen of many kingdoms, loved by her subjects, another a fierce warrior and a wise-woman. Her sigil is a pretty bird.

Her voice breaks and she struggles to continue. He knows it is hard for her but he wants to hear the words one more time just the same. After a while Sansa continues in a low and constrained voice.

You will amass riches of the land; crops from fields, furs from forests, fish from rivers – you and your family will not go wanting. This story will be told for thousands of years to come, about the Hound that came to the North. About he, who was kind to folk beyond the Wall and was true to them, as they were true to him.

Sandor sighs. All of it became true. The best part was about the woman with a fire in her hair, and the part about the great love he found.

"How big, bloody fool I was when I first heard it," he murmurs, his voice too weak for loud words. "I cursed her, I threw some measly coins on her table and walked away to drown myself in wine. Hah!" He is interrupted by a racking cough and it takes a while before he can continue. Sansa sobs silently next to him.

"Yet it all came true. All of it. But I wouldn't have cared about any of it except you. It was all about you, little bird, you know that, don't you?" He hardly recognises his own voice, so croaking it is.

"No, love, it was not about me. It was about us." She cries openly now, not even bothering to hide it. Sandor moves his hand feebly on his chest and she knows what he means – as she always does – and clutches it into her own. He squeezes it weakly.

"You always have to have the last word, don't you? Aye, I'll admit, it was about us." With that he feels tiredness sweeping over him and he succumbs to it, her little birds firm hold on his hand the last sensation he feels before he gives in to the darkness.