ARYA
Of course, few in Westeros had yet learned that King's Landing was engulfed in psychedelic tomfoolery. From an outsider's perspective, the city and the castle appeared to still be mostly okay. A few fires were burning in Flea Bottom, but that was about par for the course, and the drawbridge guards had mopped up all the blood Wendi Shasta Leary had tracked around when she came back from the cosmos.
Arya Stark, for instance, currently residing in the North, was completely oblivious to the mushroom drama, and wouldn't have much cared even if she'd known.
Arya had gone feral. That was the only way to describe it. She still had Needle, and Sandor Clegane's copper knife and his cloak, but she'd left most of the rest of herself behind. Her hair was growing long again, needing to be tucked behind ears so she could see the prey she hunted from the branches of low trees with her throwing knives. She fashioned new blades from the femurs of defeated beasts, and sewed deerskin clothing for herself with splinters and sinews. She had achieved total self-sufficiency at nine years old; a wildwoman with no goal but to kill and to survive.
Most unfortunate for poor Ramsay Snow, who was yet another another young Westerosi man who had recently undergone a dramatic shift in spirit. The task of flaying Queen Cersei had broken him, and now he was determined never to see blood, knives, or naked women, ever again. He, like Arya, had simply gone wandering, and on this bright, temperate morning in the North, he was strolling through the woods, humming and plucking at his lute, thinking how fine it was to be a free man with no future designs on flaying people. Ramsay was dressed in a combination of styles derived from what he'd been able to pinch from the Dreadfort before he left: a wool beret with a long, fluffy feather cascading down one side, lobstered steel gauntlets, a stained pair of checked bellbottom trousers, a tiny leather vest that he could barely button over his stomach and chest, knee high socks, wooden dancing clogs, a towel for a cloak, his lute, and a white rag tied to a stick which could be used to surrender from across great distances.
"Ho," Ramsay cried cheerfully, cleared his throat, and then broke into song:
"Oooooh, I—am—
A man, a man, a man with a plan (a plan!)
A man with a plan I am
I wander the North with only my lute
Stop at each town for a lil' hoot
I'll never again be given the boot,
For I am a man with a plan (a plan!)
My demeanor was fair,
And washed was my hair,
Before I set out on my quest (my quest!)
But now I grow weary (and just a bit leery)
And perhaps it is time that I rest."
Red-faced and breathless with the exertion of his performance, Ramsay plucked one final chord from the strings of his lute and sat upon a large, flat rock. He smiled at the bright air, the humming trees, at the life and liberty he had found for himself after so many years of darkness. He was still smiling when he heard a loud thwock and looked down to see a dagger sticking out of his thigh. He leapt to his feet and screeched, swatted at himself like a man fighting a cloud of bees, and fell to the forest floor. Arya watched the clownish man roll screaming and cursing in the dirt. After a long while, he stilled and lay face down. But Arya had seen this behavior before, in other cowardly animals, and so she fired a second knife out of the trees and into Ramsay's other leg.
"Oh piss," Ramsay squealed comically, and leapt once again to his feet. But his balance was off, and he immediately toppled against the lute where he'd leaned it on the rock. Wood splintered and strings whined as they let go, but Ramsay was still loudest as he began to unleash another song:
"Oooooh, I—
Don't like this at all (ah-tall!)
I hate to be violent and brawl!
Why did you stick me, you demon thing,
And why make me crash and fall?
I'm a simple man, a man with a plan!
A peaceful plan, to flay no man,
Nor woman, nor child, nor fool
Now leave me be, you brutish curr
For I was just on my way to school!"
And then, screaming, Ramsay began to flee.
Arya swung from tree to tree like an ape, quickly assessing momentum, angles of attack, paths of escape. She saw a low branch pull the feather from Ramsay's cap, and as she swung past it, she snatched it from the air with unthinking grace. My feather now, she thought. The chase lasted only about a mile, for Ramsay was fat, slow, and had a knife sticking out of each thigh. He was afraid to pull them out because he'd once seen a soldier try it and end up bleeding to death. He toddled onward through the trees, sobbing and stumbling, until at last Arya landed on his back like a hawk and quickly opened his throat with Needle. Ramsay gagged and thrashed, so she climbed off and let him get to dying. As he did so, he sang:
"Little bitch, tiny witch, I hate thee with my soul
I hope you trip and break your ass
And get nothing for Christmas but coal!
I curse your name, young Arya Stark!
For I know it is you under there!
Wolfish and dark, with nary a spark
Of love in your heart
For a man with a plan and a care."
"Shut up," Arya said. Ramsay rolled his bloodshot eyes up to her and gasped,
"Nay! I shan't! For this is my life's last day
And if I must live it under your rule
Then I will never be made to—"
"Oh my god," Arya cried in exasperation, and stabbed him in the chest. Ramsay yelped and sucked in a breath, perhaps for another song, so she quickly stabbed his lung, too. Seven take me, she thought to herself as the ugly man died. What an annoying guy. She stripped and looted the flabby corpse and then rolled it into a stream, which was immediately dammed up by Ramsay's bulk. Rivulets of pink water trailed past his glazed, staring eyes. Arya ate a bit of corn and dried pepper from the small leather pouch Ramsay had been carrying, and then moved on.