Disclaimer: I do not own A Game of Thrones or any of its associated properties. ASoIaF belongs to George R.R. Martain and HBO.

She hadn't expected that. The Night King exploded into chunks of ice and hail that evaporated moments after it all fell to the ground like snowflakes floating over a roaring fire. She heard the white walkers shatter behind her, and she had a feeling if she looked, there'd be nothing left of them the same as it was with the Night King.

Arya, still gasping, her throat tender from where the Night King clasped her, looked up at Bran. Her brother's lips frowned. At least it looked like he was scowling. Surprise at seeing any expression on her brother's face made Arya's breath catch.

Arya pushed herself up off the ground.

"Are you hurt?" she asked Bran and despite her harsh, extensive training to reveal nothing of what she was feeling, Arya could not hide the worry in her voice.

Bran didn't seem to hear Arya, but his frown deepened before he looked to his left, behind Arya's shoulder. She followed his gaze and saw Theon laying on the ground on his side, still. Arya looked back at Bran.

"He's dead—"

Arya nearly let slip, 'Who cares?' but held back her words of indifference. The Greyjoy wasn't worth even that much. Arya sheathed her knife before she strode over to her brother and knelt in front of him.

"Are you hurt?" she asked again, more firmly this time.

The frown on Bran's lips straightened and his face returned to the blank mask he'd worn ever since he returned from beyond the Wall. He looked at Arya, and she could almost think he was truly seeing her. That she saw in her little brother, life once more.

"Sansa is dead."

Arya was used to death. She held its hand and pushed it away every day. She was not a child, she expected many would meet the Stranger before the night was done, but Bran's declaration said so dully, with cold, cold eyes, sent Arya staggering back.

"Arya! Bran!"

Arya still stared at Bran as Jon rushed up to them, his Valyrian sword held at the ready.

"Thank the Gods you both live!"

Arya swung about and dashed out of the godswood and ignored Jon calling out her name. Whatever Bran had become had not lied. Arya knew it was the truth—but she ran anyway. Past the groaning survivors and sprawling hills of corpses. Through burning wreckage and piles of stone that had once been the inner walls of Winterfell. When she came to the Lichyard Arya saw holes where graves had once been and understood at once why her sister was dead. She wanted to scream. Instead, she only whispered:

"Fools."

The heavy doors to the Crypts were barred from within to keep out the dead. Arya drew Needle and bashed the pommel against the doors with the agreed-upon code so those hiding inside knew it was someone living who'd come. It took so long for someone inside to open the doors that Arya began screaming furiously to be let inside. When the doors opened, it was a pale, disheveled Varys who finally unblocked the entrance. The bald, portly man's simple brown robes were torn, and his face and hands were covered in cuts that still bled. The Spider also held a dragon glass knife in his hand, its edges chipped from use. Arya saw Varys's relief for an instant before she ran past him and down into the crypt.

"I'm sorry—" Arya heard him say but was soon too far away to hear the rest.

Arya smelled death, real death before she entered the antechamber where the women and children had taken shelter within the crypts. The coppery scent of blood, the sulfurous odor of fear, and the stink of emptied bowels only grew stronger the closer she came.

Upon reaching the antechamber, Arya scanned the crypt, and her worst fears were confirmed. Dozens of mummified and skeletal remains covered the stone floor. Almost every tomb she saw within view had been breached from the inside.

"Fools," Arya whispered.

Women and children were huddled in clusters and sobbed mutedly as if frightened the dead would rise again and notice them. The old men too frail to wield weapons in battle had done battle down here, ebony knives chipped or broken still clutched in trembling, tired hands and dead loose fingers. The Dragon Queen's woman with her wild hair and brown skin, now ashen from terror tended to a Northern boy who lie on the ground. His tiny pale hand clung desperately to the skirt of a woman whose face had been torn from her skull. One woman let out a panicked yelp when she noticed Arya, but no others reacted to her sudden appearance. They were too haunted, too shocked to feel alarmed anymore.

As she hurried deeper into the crypt Arya heard more weeping. A wheezy, broken sound that was only possible when one is crying with their whole body and had long ago lost the breath and the strength to keep going but still could not stop their weeping. Arya followed the sound until she came upon Tyrion Lannister sitting on the floor, his back to the stone statue of a long-dead Stark king.

Arya focused on his mangled arm because she did not want to acknowledge what the dwarf cradled in the other. Tyrion's right arm, shorn of its shirtsleeve, was torn from shoulder to forearm, nearly to his wrist. The skin and flesh of his bicep were split apart to the bone. The slaughtered arm hung limp at his side while his chest heaved violently, and made the limb look independent to the rest of his torso as it slumped still and dead.

Tyrion's mouth was buried in Sansa's vibrant red hair. It was odd how Sansa's hair and her face were unblemished. Not one drop of blood stained her pale skin. Below her chin… Below her chin was nothing but blood and gore. Sansa no longer had a neck. It was just shredded meat and vertebrae. Distantly, Arya wondered what kept her sister's head attached to the rest of her body. Perhaps only threads of tendons and skin and Tyrion Lannister's chest.

Sansa's dark gray dress had also been ripped away and what was underneath, revealed no bosom, no belly, just an apron of ragged skin, fat, a crushed rib cage, and further below an afterbirth of congealing entrails poured between spread thighs.

Tyrion's working hand was smeared in blood. It was uninjured, Arya could tell from the way his fingers clutched Sansa's shoulder. It wasn't his blood.

Her gaze took in the thick red glove of blood on the Imp's hand. That's why there's so little of her on the floor around them, Arya thought with cool rationale. With that hand, Tyrion tried to push Sansa's insides back into her lifeless body.

Arya was still watching Tyrion hold her dead sister in his arm when she heard Jon and others—from the sound of the footfalls, Brienne of Tarth, and the kingslayer—approach.

"No."

It was only because she learned to hear the pad of a cat's steps on a stone floor that Arya heard Jon's whispered denial. How she heard the soul-rending pain in his soft voice—the same agony Arya would not allow herself to feel. Not now, not ever.

Arya listened for a time as Brienne cried in the king slayer's arms and Jon whispered his 'noes' again and again, all of it blending with Tyrion's endless sobbing until it was all just mewling noise. She left them to their sorrow and climbed out of the crypts.

Arya found Gendry in the Courtyard, where he and a dozen other men had begun gathering the bodies of the men and women who fell in the battle. Cleaning up the wights would come afterward. Gendry only nodded at her when she leaned down and grabbed her first body. Arya dragged the man, an Unsullied, over to one of a dozen piles of corpses in the Courtyard.

No one spoke as they worked and to Arya the quiet was perfect. She could pretend she was alone with the dead. The dead who did not cry. The dead wouldn't care that she could not cry. Because the dead expect nothing from no one.

It began to snow as she dragged her twentieth, or thirtieth corpse—Arya had lost count. Her hands clawed around old leather, tattered cloth, and broken armor over and over and over until her fingers throbbed and became inflexible. Numb as her heart. Snowflakes melted on her skin until she couldn't tell it from the sweat dripping from her brow and her nose.

When dawn came, the Courtyard was entirely cleared. More people had come to help while Arya lost herself in mindless work. Northmen, Dothraki, and Unsullied all began loading bodies onto carts that would take the dead outside the castle to be burned. With no more bodies to put onto the piles, Arya moved to other parts of the castle and lent stiff hands.

Arya knew her body was aching, that her arms and legs were screaming for relief from the punishing pace she forced herself to maintain. There would be a price to pay once the numbness that allowed her to push her muscles so far finally abated. Arya didn't care. It was impossible for Arya to give concern to anything other than hauling the next dead thing to an ever-growing pile of cold, decaying flesh.

The heat from so many working in the area melted the newly fallen snow, as did the army of trampling boots. The melted snow turned the ground into slush, mud, and puddles of dirty stagnant water. Arya was covered in the muck by the time the last corpse was cleared from around the Great Hall, and the sky was beginning to turn purple then black as night slowly crept across the cloudy, gray sky.

Several lines of other muddy and tired people filled the Courtyard where they waited to fill bowls with thin, runny soup and thick porridge from enormous black cauldrons. The sight turned Arya's stomach and she tasted bile on her tongue. She went to find more dead.

Anger was the first emotion Arya felt cleanly since the Long Night ended. She should have been at whatever council was held when they decided what to do with the dead, but the Dothraki horsemen who'd fallen to the wight vanguard lay frozen in the snow outside the castle's walls, and Arya joined the group that went to retrieve the horsemen's bodies. If she hadn't gone out, then she could have protested this obscenity. This mockery of Theon Greyjoy's rotten corpse laying whole in pretty Ironborn armor beside her sister who had to be wrapped in a black shroud from the neck down because there was too little of her left to put in a dress. It made Arya boil with rage.

"She would have wanted it this way," Jon had said when he told her how they planned to deal with all the bodies, including their sister's body.

Jon's pale face had bruises that frames the many scraps and cuts he'd collected throughout the Long Night. His eyes were bloodshot, more red than Stark gray. And he spoke with a voice course as gravel.

Before Arya could snarl, she didn't give a fuck what Sansa would have wanted, Jon grabbed her so suddenly her hand instinctually went for Needle. Needle which Jon gave her so long ago.

Arya's hand dropped away from the sword's hilt, and she endured Jon's too-warm, too-tight embrace.

"I love you, Arya," Jon rasped as if his throat was filled with sand.

Slowly, she raised her arms and returned Jon's embrace. She would not cry, and she couldn't find it in herself to say she loved Jon back, but she let him hold her until he was satisfied.

She wished she could be like Bran. Sat in his wheeled chair, strong and unfeeling as Jon lit Sansa's funeral pyre of sticks and straw and they watched their sister burn. She'd learn to control every muscle and every nerve in her body and could match Bran's stony façade as easily as she wielded Needle. But within she had to recite the only true words in all the world to remind herself what had come for her sister down in the crypts came for everyone. It would come for her too, someday. All so she would not weep.

It hurt. It hurt! Arya wished not to feel this pain!

She wanted to pull Sansa out of the flames and scream at her sister to come back, stop playing this silly game, and open her eyes!

A thousand pyres burned through the day and into the night. Arya and Jon waited until Sansa, and Theon's, pyre burned to smoldering gray ash. Jon then carefully gathered the ashes into a leather pouch scarcely larger than a saddle bag.

Others had waited for the fires to die down, as well. The Hound—Sandor—had watched Sansa burn with another enviable unfeeling mask. Then later gathered Lord Dondarrion's ashes. Where Sandor buried the last of the Brotherhood Without Banners, Arya knew not.

Ser Brienne and the kingslayer stood side by side in the snow. Brienne's clear blue eyes were glassy as tears pooled in them. The knight's gaze never looked away from Sansa's blazing pyre.

Even the Dragon Queen waited for the flames to end, donned in white velvets and furs, and then waved off all offers of aid so she could gather Jorah Mormont's remains with her own hands once his pyre became ashes.

Arya followed Jon to the Crypts. No statue could be made for Sansa's tomb, and never would there be, for no stone carvers survived in the final battle. Any sculptors they found later would not know Sansa's likeness.

Rob won't have a statue before his empty grave, either. Grey Wind will never stand as guardian beside his master. Nor will Mother ever be laid to rest in Winterfell.

Will any of us ever truly find rest in Winterfell again?

As Jon placed the sealed ewer holding Sansa's ashes in the alcove between Rickon's tomb and the empty slab meant for Robb, Arya swore she would never again come here. Never.