True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of

disjointed memories.

~Florence King

LORD Baelish lied. This is not home, not even close. He told her she'd be home and he lied. Home meant warmth. Home meant peace and laughter and lemon cakes. Home meant Robb and lord father sparring on the courtyard. Home meant arguing with Arya who doesn't want to brush her nest of a hair. Arya who wasn't at all pretty. Arya Horseface, they used to call her, her and her best friend Jeyne. Home meant playing tag with Bran and baby Rickon, where the unfortunate loser will have to steal a sweet or two from the kitchens (she used to wish Bran was the girl instead of Arya). Home was where mother used to brush, oil, and braid her hair in front of the fireplace. Home was where Maester Luwin walks slowly on the staircases with his puffy sleeves which seemed to her like a magic pouch. He used to pull out everything from those sleeves: parchment, medicine, feather pen. Home is where Old Nan was sitting on the edge of her bed when she was fevered, telling her the stories she loved most: knights and ladies, prince and princesses, and being swept off her feet. Home is where Hodor breaks the ground as he stamps. And Home is also Jon Snow, kin to half her blood. Pretty ebony hair. Always sulking during meals. Always an outsider, poor thing.

All of those. Nothing. Nothing here resembles home. Not even the bricks on the walls, once grey and glittering, now varnished in soot and dried piss and horse shit. Home smelled of incense and lamb chops, not the violent stink of vomit and disgusting men.

Sansa wiped the edge of her eye, sniffled, and lowered her head. There is no point in lingering in what home once was, she had to wax and seal that on her mind. No more sewing pretty dresses. No more lemon cakes. No more braiding and babbling excitement on marrying a prince or a knight of a great house.

She moved on, slow and sure, along the narrowing path that led to the godswood. Or maybe not anymore. Nevertheless she wanted to move away from the nauseatic stares the men were pinning on her, all strangers, all distasteful. Men whose chapped lips and yellowed teeth were shown in smiles at the sight of her, making her insides revolt, her mind floating back to the riot in King's Landing where the people tore the High Septon's limbs to pieces, and she was nearly—

She cursed herself of the obscurity and tightened her dark robe. The snow ceased descending and luck had made minute sunshine across the clouds. She had to relish this part of the day, when it was warm, for this was rare and lasted for only about a meal's time. Almost there. Her heart started thrumming with the nearing edge of the path.

Finally she stepped out in the open. The forest where their gloomy castle grew around set her chest to overwhelming flutters. It probably was the part of Winterfell least ruined.

Once upon a time she resented this place for resembling the forsaken kingdoms in Old Nan's stories. But that was before she lived in a hell named King's Landing and met the monsters in the form of Joffrey (Seven bless his soul not), and Cersei and those rapists she often nightmares about. Now it felt like haven, despite the smell of moist earth and decay. She never went here unless she was with father or Robb and Jon, or Hodor and her little brothers.

Few of the sentinel trees still stood with branches intact, the leaves that abandoned them carpeted the ground, making crisp dry noises at the touch of the wind. From the naked branches to the thick black trunks that crowded close together, down to the misshappen roots wrestling on the soil, Sansa has never seen something beautiful since the dress she wore on their ride to King's Landing. This was a place of deafening silence. Where the world seemed to have befallen under the Stranger's clasp. Where lord father usually tucks himself in meditation.

"It's a pretty sight, isn't it?"

Sansa turned her head, finding a thin, pale girl, about her age or younger, leaning on the wall near the entrance to the forest. She had chocolate hair that rippled down to the waist, had a small childish face, lovely in some sort of way, but spying. She wore dark leather, giving the impression she wasn't in any way a Lady.

Sansa made no reply, trying to gauge who this she-stranger is. She first thought this was Jeyne, but lacked manners.

"Must've been more beautiful some time ago," the girl spoke again.

"It wasn't." Sansa heard herself, and didn't stop. She looked at the forest twice, "for me, at least. But things change when you see worse. And you go back to what you once thought was ugly, and find them the most beautiful thing after all."

The girl breathed out what was supposed to be laughter, and Sansa wasn't impressed. She finds it unpleasing for someone to discover her in her solitude, at least before her wedding night.

"Or maybe it still is ugly," said the girl, "only now you think it's beautiful because you still haven't seen the worst."

Sansa faced her, head inclined, fingers clasped. "I—I'm sorry. I must have missed your name..."

The girl's face flushed, with a quick smile, she looked down, "I'm Myranda. I'm...the kennel master's daughter."

Sansa does not remember their kennel master having children, much less a daughter. Myranda seemed to sense her query.

"I came with..." Myranda waved her arms slowly with a twist of her body. Sansa, finally hitting her point, opened her mouth in enlightenment but kept her voice to herself. She nodded instead.

Silence fell but Sansa can feel the thick tension in how this Myranda sees her. And she does not like it. Her eyes, cold emerald, were masked with a smile but something inside chilled her. Sansa swore she saw the tightening in Myranda's jaw. Hatred. Loathing. Jealousy? The Stark girl found herself swallowing.

Myranda clicked her tongue, breaking the pause. "Well then I should...get going." She slowly turned her back towards the red head and stopped, her hand on the surface of the bricks near her exit. "Oh I almost forgot."

Sansa waited. She perceived the hesitations, as if Myranda never actually meant to say the final message. Instead, they locked eyes the last time, with Myranda's coy and suppressed smile. "You're so beautiful...my Lady."

Sansa has nothing to do but watch as Myranda paraded her back which continually diminished as she left the place, but she heard how the kennel girl's fingernails scraped the brick her hand rested on.

Without second thoughts, she pushed this Myranda aside. She had no interest in making friends anymore, not especially with this girl taking side with the aliens in her home. The same aliens she was about to call her family in this political wedding.

Gaining back her solitude felt like victory. She paced forward to the tree everyone in Winterfell was familiar to. And there it was, still fat and short and dominating. Its trunk was still white, striped with grey or blue, its leaves a canopy of fire, and its facade carved with the all-knowing (and sad) face of a god she didn't even know the name. Its leaves were still enough to make a shade, the red in its leaves almost the only color screaming in the place. A few yards from the godswood she stopped and conceived the figure of father, his back on her, wiping his Valyrian sword Ice. This image sent her lips trembling, an excess of her sadness spilled on the edges of her eyes again. She closed them to let the tears streak on. Tears were no longer a stranger to her, she should be well familiar with them.

She opened her eyes to see no more of father's back, his broad shoulders, and Ice.

Sansa moved to the tree, to the spot where father used to tuck himself. The pond loomed in front of her in an almost dark and daring crystal. Ripples played on its surface and it smelled of moss. Beside the pond was the huge rock almost as high as the godswood itself. They made sport of this pond, she acknowledged, she and Arya and her two little brothers. Robb and Jon once swam with them, usually jumping from the rock to land heavier towards the bottom of the pond. They would race to dive and grab a handful of mud from the pond bottom to prove they've reached its limit. But both withdrew when they started growing their facial hairs, when father started taking them to hunts or beheadings. She could almost see Bran's wondering eye whenever she and Arya stripped, probably looking for the thing which was supposed to hang between their legs. She could almost hear baby Rickon's cry when chased with splashes.

Her fingers touched the water and made more ripples that continued to nowhere. Perhaps ripples were like fame, or beauty, or power. The moment it grows, then it's gone.

The touch of it, though, was delish. Like the old days, she started stripping herself off the black cape that was supposed to protect her from hungry eyes. The cape crumpled on the hard fat roots of the wood. Her bare and slightly freckled arms kissed the cold and tolerated it too. She pulled her boots off and fed her feet on the water, her toes wiping the moss off the stones. It almost made her gasp, and slowly she reached the hem of her dark dress and dipped her feet further and deeper. When the water reached up to her upper thighs she pulled her dress off her body, her breasts making a soft bounce as the cloth freed them. She threw the garments, smallclothes and dress together, to rest beside the cape.

The water was exhilarating. Being engulfed in it made Sansa Stark invincible of the memories that have been haunting her since she entered the gates. Her body, pearly white against the water, absorbed a strength that she has never tasted since her first breath. She slowly stretched her arms, as if giving herself in surrender, and looked up to the sky, eyes half-opened, lips slightly parted, her hair a halo around her head. She was an eagle above clouds. She was a dragon casting shadow on the plains.

If this lake were a man, she was glad to have made love with it. The thought plastered a quiet vibration under her skin. Was she ready for this?

They said it was pleasurable. Too pleasurable that men would pay for it, for the lumps of flesh on a woman's chest and the "pit" between her thighs. She has never explored her own body. She has begun to curse it when Joffrey Baratheon kicked her aside for Margaery. People said she was beautiful and bright; she was like her aunt Lyanna. But if she were beautiful, she wouldn't have been casted aside. And how in seven hells would she know about a dead aunt her father would not talk even about.

Her face began to immerse underwater. Her consciousness started to falter when the water felt like hands on her skin, swaying her into a lullaby. Getting married in a few days has become familiar to her. On the first night after Lord Baelish told her the pact, she wept quietly. She wept for her family and for Winterfell. Mother used to tell her that a Lady's duty is to her house. And she is about to betray her house. And no matter how Lord Baelish convinces her that her marriage will not be betrayal, but rather, a plot to overpower the usurpers, she still has made a whore of herself.

She recalled the man, Ramsay Bolton, aged perhaps one and twenty, or more. His face is not princely, she observed, but he has the built of a man she once imagined to embrace, back when she was a stupid girl with stupid dreams about loving and being loved in return. This man has bluish eyes as if they reflected hers, and his furtive look was suspicious, like fire trying to be extinguished but hardly. At first she thought he was a plain chap, the bastard of Bolton. He looked innocent and gentle, but she wasn't about to be fooled again with a parallelism of gold to virtue. And she remembered how, the moment his hand touched hers, her demons screamed. She shivered. But not with the cold.

Her eyes remained steady, the view rippled by water and a few strands of floating red hair.

Ramsay Bolton. Ramsay.

The name irked her, sending her spine weak. She could almost see him looming above her, his silhouette standing on the edge of the rock where her brothers used to dive from. It looked like a shadow against the white of cloudy sky, steady as her deepening slumber: his curly mess of hair, the leather straps on his body, his drunkening gaze. It seemed too concrete. Her brows started to furrow in awe of how she could imagine him to be so real.

And then his head slowly inclined. Antagonizing. Eyes boring through her.

RAMSAY!

Sansa spewed out of the water like lightning, creating a noise of a giant fish being pulled out its home. Her head quickly searched in panic, turning to every corner of the forsaken place, and realized she was near the edge of the pond. Nothing. There was nothing and no one. The rock was empty. The girl was as alone as she was when she came, yet there was a sudden blaze of chill on her nerves.

She can hear herself breathing and see the steam crawling out of her skin. The ice in the air stung and she covered her chest as she walked to her clothes. The security she felt when she came and stripped has melted. She felt eyes boring from unseen portals in the place. And then she sighted the face carved on the godswood. Its steady, lifeless eyes seemed to live, seemed to follow her where she goes. But the eyes didn't feel as if it came from the godswood, it was from something else. Quickly she put on her covers, not even minding if her ribbons were loose or have been tied to the right pairs.

Sansa Stark fled the place, her hair dripping, leaving a dark round map on the back of her cape. Horror has clung to her heels and when she left, she never looked back, for perhaps Myranda was right: this place was still ugly. It was never beautiful.

She started to fear for the worst.

Gratitude to your reviews.

I am truly pleased to have read your encouragements.

~Athenares