A/N: This story keeps getting longer the more I work on it, I swear. Anyway, hope you enjoy! Thank you to everyone who continues to read and review.
Longsister
Tasha sticks to the mountains for the first few weeks of travel. To someone with her training and ability, wights are only truly dangerous in large groups. The mountain paths are narrow and steep, and will force the reanimated corpses to come at her one or two at a time, giving her plenty of warning as few of them can move quickly on a sharp incline. Mostly she is able to dispatch them at a distance with flaming arrows, and counts herself lucky that she hasn't come across any White Walkers who might prove more challenging. But then why should she? They are far more interested in attacking keeps and towns, places with large concentrations of people.
She is just a lone woman on a mountain side.
Eventually she runs out of mountain, and wends her way down to the shore of the Bite. In the distance, just smudges on the horizon, she can see the Three Sisters: Longsister, Sweetsister, and Littlesister, the barrier islands between the Vale and the North.
What she is about to do is a bit mad. But Tasha well remembers traveling through the Neck on that long ago trip to Winterfell, and she knows the swamplands are treacherous even with a guide at the height of summer. Now, in the Everlasting Night, it would be even more so. Passages closed by snow, thin black ice films that hide sucking pools of sand beneath, lizard lions, all the dead who have drowned in the swamps clawing their way up from the muck to wage war on the living… No, Tasha knows she will die if she tries to cross the Neck. And as she is not willing to turn back nor wait around for Jon to find her, her only option is to continue forward.
So she is going to swim the Bite.
She knows her mother did something similar in the past, though she doesn't know the whole tale. Mother always hushed Father Jaime before he could finish telling the story to Tasha and her brothers. But she knows enough to know that she will last longer in the sea than another person might, and she doesn't think the Others have a way of crossing salt water.
So she sets noise traps of brush and brittle sticks to alert her if something comes near and does her best to sleep that night, knowing she will need her strength. It is dark when she wakes, but that is not unusual in these times. Grimly, she eats her remaining store of food since she doesn't have a way to keep it dry while she swims. Then she fills her canteen with snow so that she'll have fresh water when she reaches the islands, takes off her boots, uses the laces to tie them up with her weapons, and wraps the whole thing into a bundle with her cloak.
No more preparations to make, she steps into the waves.
It's freezing. She didn't count on the cold. Though she tries to take it slow, to give her body time to adjust, by the time the water's up to her shoulders she's gasping and using every mental trick Mother ever taught her to manage her instinctive panic. She can feel her heart pounding, her pulse thumping in her ears as she clutches her bundle close in front of her and kicks. She tries not to submerge her head, but the choppy waves thwart her, leaving her coughing and sputtering as her hair is plastered to her face, obscuring her vision.
Jon, she whispers his name to herself, picturing his crooked grin and his blushes and how appealing he looks practicing shirtless in the training yard of the Rock. Arya thinks Tasha's habit of spying on him disgusting and Sansa thinks it scandalous, though she never says a word when it's Gerion who strips off his tunic...
She keeps kicking long after she stops being able to feel her toes. At some point she loses her bundled boots and weapons, her fingers too numb to hang on properly. She dives in an attempt to retrieve it when she notices, her sluggish mind drawing a comparison to dropping a cloth in the bath. Of course she doesn't find the bundle. The water is too dark and deep.
Her breath is coming shallower now. Her limbs are heavy. Twice, she has to turn on her back and float when she feels as if she'll sink if she doesn't rest. At one point she passes out, only to cough herself awake when she inhales a lungful of water. Her course lists to the side, and she has to force herself to swim at an angle lest she miss the islands completely. As it is, while she started out for Littlesister, the easternmost island, she has drifted far enough that she will make land on Longsister, the westernmost, bypassing Sweetsister entirely.
At last the waves change direction, carrying her toward shore.
When her feet hit sand she tries to stand, but falls to her knees instead. Undeterred with her goal so close, she crawls, dragging herself onto the rocky beach. With a supreme force of will, she forces herself to keep going until she isn't being lapped at by the water anymore. Once satisfied that she won't be dragged back out to sea, she collapses on her side.
Her lips are chapped and cracked with salt. She's thirsty. She can't feel her arms or legs, but her chest is burning. She can't see anything and can't decide if it's still night or her vision going dark. Everything is heavy and she's so, so tired, all her energy leaving her now that she is no longer fighting to stay afloat.
Jon, she mouths.
Her eyes flutter shut and her heart stops.
For two minutes, she is dead.
As well as Tasha was taught by the Black Widow, she never heard enough of the story surrounding the Ironborn Rebellion to know how much warmer the water her mother swam through was. She never knew that the Lionfish needed Jaime to warm her up afterwards. She doesn't have the background knowledge of biology necessary to understand just how much strain the cold puts on her heart, her muscles, her organs. She doesn't know the terms Cold Shock or Hypothermia.
Had Natasha Romanova tried the same feat under these circumstances, she would have died. Tasha Pendragon does die.
The difference is, Tasha lives again.
Two minutes after breathing her last, her body starts to shake, limbs twitching as a ripple of change moves over her skin, infusing her pale flesh with warmth and color. Muscles that had become lean over months of little food grow strong again, curves once more lush. Her ears shift into points just enough to be noticeable at the tips, and her canines elongate into fangs.
For there is something else that Tasha does not know. Something that even her mother never suspected. Tasha has inherited more than beauty and strength from her foreign parent. Something that did not exist on Planetos until Natasha Romanova had children. It is a quirk of genetics that allows one man to develop superpowers where another would die; one man to become a super soldier where another becomes an abomination; one girl to live to claim the title of Black Widow where all the others succumbed…
The Meta Gene.
Her death serving as a trigger, Tasha is transformed and reborn. And when a group of the smuggling, thieving, slaving scum that rule the Three Sisters and dare to call themselves noble stumble across her resting on the beach and start loudly discussing whether to keep her for themselves or sell her in Essos, she opens mismatched eyes with pupils slit like a cat's and roars.
She doesn't have her bow or her knives, but she doesn't need them. When she springs at the men casually discussing raping her, her fingernails sprout into curved leonine claws.
An enraged, feral howl echoes across the land, the unearthly battle cry followed by an inhuman growl.
The screams of dying men last for days, stopping only when the Sistermen try to hide from the one who hunts them. But they cannot escape. Not from the wild woman who can smell their fear, hear their pounding hearts, run faster than the fastest horse, and move through the shadows like a jungle cat. And no matter what they do, no matter how true their aim, whenever they manage to fell their hunter she gets right back up again, her flesh knitting together before their very eyes.
For the first sennight she exists in a hazy cloud of red, knowing only rage and pain and hunger. A host of newly emerged instincts coupled with the trauma of her reawakening steals her reason, to the detriment of House Longthorpe and its members. And when Tasha's conscious mind emerges once more, she's seen enough of the evil inflicted on the smallfolk by their so called lords that she sees no reason to halt her rampage. It seems that with the Long Night preventing what little oversight the Sisterman had they have sunk even further into villainy.
Rapists, thieves, slavers, torturers, she chants inside her mind, sickened by the injustice that surrounds her. Starving children, beaten women, men worked to death, she snarls. Murderers, she howls, taken up in battle frenzy.
Out loud, she says nothing. Not when they scream. Not when they run. Not when they beg for mercy, offer her gold and jewels, other men to kill, to rape, to feast upon. Only roars and growls pass her lips.
"Demon!" some of the men whisper, jumping at shadows. Others make for their ships, only to find the sails savaged by claws. Still others throw themselves into the sea, hoping to swim for the closest island, Sweetsister, or perhaps a less painful death.
At last, at the end, the only ones left standing on the blood stained sand are the smallfolk who have been so used and abused by their liege lords that they don't lift a hand to help Lord Rolland Longthorpe when Tasha wraps her thighs around his neck and uses momentum and her unnatural strength to snap his spinal cord even as she sends him careening off a parapet of Longcastle.
The smallfolk don't run. A lifetime of being beat down by men no better than pirates has taught them running always leads to worse things. Instead they huddle together before the figure of Tasha, whose leather armor hangs off of her in shreds, barely preserving her modesty. She is covered from crown to sole in blood, both her own and that of others, some of it dry and some still wet. Her hair is matted and flares out around her head like a lion's mane. Only her catlike eyes are free of rusty brown and scarlet red, even her teeth stained from using them to tear out a man's throat.
The people kneel in the dirt of Longcastle's rundown courtyard, some praying, some weeping. She doesn't blame them. She looks the part of a monster. Perhaps she is one. She has spent close to two years now slaughtering hordes of wights, but this is the first time she has turned her deadly skills on living men. This is the first time she has fought with nothing save fangs and claws - the first time she's had fangs and claws at all, an evolution she cannot fathom save to attribute it to her mother's heritage. It is the first time she has run mad, nothing but a mindless weapon bent on death, a sword without a hilt. It is the first and second and twenty-third time she should have died.
It is not the first time she has enjoyed the hunt, has smirked at the sweet vicious thrill of obliterating an opponent, has rejoiced at the challenge presented, and perhaps that is the most monstrous thing of all.
"Be not afraid," she says to the pleading smallfolk. They jerk back from her, perhaps not thinking her capable of speech. "I mean you no harm."
No one moves, and Tasha suppresses a sigh. It would be foolish of them to trust her word after what they witnessed her do, but she is in no mood to coddle them.
"You," she selects an older man at random. He wears rags and a slave collar, which is one of the many reasons she had no mercy on the 'nobles' of this island. Slavery is supposed to be illegal in Westeros, and yet here one stands. He is dark skinned with a scraggly grey beard and wiry hair that sticks straight up. He was a Summer Islander before being taken as a slave then, or maybe from the Basilisk Isles. More importantly he regards her with a steady stare. He is wary of her, but not a gibbering wreck as so many of the others are.
"Yes, Keliodi-ryna?" he asks after bowing as deeply as he can from his already kneeling position.
"Gather some of your fellows and retrieve the bodies of the slain. They need to be burned before the White Walkers make them rise again. If there are too many to fetch into a pyre, you may burn them where they lay."
He bows again. "Yes, Keliodi-ryna."
"Good man." Turning her attention to rest of the group, who now appear marginally less inclined to run screaming from the sight of her, she singles out one of the hardier looking women. Middle aged and flint-eyed, the woman has cried a great deal less than the others and subtly put herself between Tasha and a group of children, for all the good that would do if Tasha meant them harm.
"You will show me a place I may bathe and help me find suitable armor," she tells the woman. "I will rest for a few days, then I will depart in search of my husband." Turning her gaze to encompass the entire group she continues, "All of you may stay here or go elsewhere as it pleases you. I would recommend staying. All of Westeros is embroiled in a war with the White Walkers of Old, and the sea gives you marginal protection from their wrath."
"Yes, Keliodi-ryna," the woman replies, stumbling a little on the pronunciation of the foreign word, slowly getting to her feet and gesturing for Tasha to follow her.
She is put in the Lord's suite, but does not notice. The meagerest guest room at the Rock is grander than the Lord's suite of Longcastle.
-l-
Several days later, when Tasha is clean and rested and as well armored and provisioned as she's going to get without waiting for a smith to custom fit her, she prepares to leave. Horses shy away from her now, so she will be heading toward the northern shore on foot. A small fishing boat waits there to take her across the Bite.
The smallfolk meet her at the gates of the run down keep. In the time between witnessing her slaughter everyone who opposed her in what they are calling the Liberation of Longsister (when they think she can hear; it is the Week of Red Weeping when they think she cannot), they have stopped fearing the demon woman and now revere her as a newly born goddess.
"Only gods are immortal, Keliodi-ryna," they tell her whenever she tries to disabuse them of the notion. It is a difficult argument to dispute, as not even in the Age of Heroes was there ever a figure who healed so fast as to constantly resurrect if killed in battle. She eventually gives up on persuading them otherwise. They will believe what they will.
"Your Reverence," Jho, the old Summer Islander, addresses her when she stops before the crowd. "We have spoken amongst ourselves and agreed to stay here as you advise. We will swear ourselves into your service and care for your island as best as we can in the hopes that you will return once you have found your husband and free our brothers and sisters on the other two islands."
"It's not my island," Tasha says, but it is a token protest only. She grew up learning the game of thrones at the feet of her parents, and she recognizes a stepping stone towards her ultimate goal of seeing Jon's birthright restored to him. And dear Cousin Joff surely won't begrudge her a few small islands, not when the history of the Three Sisters proves that the Sisterman will heed no Lord Arryn unless made to bow.
Jho shakes his head. "You killed Lord Longthorpe in honest battle. By Right of Conquest, this place and everything on it belongs to you, Keliodi-ryna."
Tasha stares at him for a long moment, weighing his sincerity and wondering just who he was on the Summer Isles to be speaking so eloquently. And then she lets a slow sultry smile take her face, the tips of her fangs giving it a exotically dangerous edge. "That name you call me. It's a dialect that I don't recognize. What does it mean?"
Jho smiles back at her, and his grin is just as bloodthirsty, fangs or no fangs. "It is not a name, but what you are. Keliodi-ryna. Lady Demon Lion."
Tasha's grin widens. She grasps the old man's shoulder with one hand and with the other tilts his chin so that he will look her in the eyes. She can feel his racing pulse. "Once I have found my husband, we will come back here and take Sweetsister and Littlesister for our own."
"You give your word?" Jho croaks through chapped lips and a dry throat, a strange glint lighting his gaze.
"My oath as a Pendragon," she vows. "We always return."