Roose Bolton didn't immediately leave his solar when the guard informed him Theon Greyjoy returned to the castle without Ramsay or his bedwarmer. Most of the hounds the trio took out returned hours earlier, yipping and barking up a storm, clearly panicked but unharmed. All but one, according to the kennel master. Roose had the dogs returned to the kennels and then gave little thought to what mischief their master had gotten himself into.

With the Starks gone Ramsay's petty amusements were not the threat they once were, and while Boltons ruled the North now, such games wouldn't do much to win anyone over. Ramsay's diversions will only reinforce the North's hesitance to swear allegiance to House Bolton.

It was clear their rule was far from secure and would remain unstable for some time to come before things got better. Tywin Lannister, their strongest ally in the South, was dead. The Manderlys loomed and still refused to come and kneel. The Umbers were on side, but their alliance was tenuous, at best. And a hundred other houses, great and small, were waiting for any opportunity to turn against them openly.

Lord Baelish's offer would do much to win some loyalty from at least a few Northern houses. Even the Manderlys would find it difficult to refuse to bend the knee if the prize Baelish promised was true. If it was genuine, then once the details were ironed out, Sansa Stark would wed Ramsay, in Winterfell.

Roose had until then to bring his erstwhile bastard to heel.

When Roose did leave to question Greyjoy, he gestured at two of the four guards on his door to follow. It was never a good idea to go about unprotected when he didn't know where Ramsay was. Roose didn't necessarily trust Greyjoy either. He was Ramsay's dog as much as those "girls" of Ramsay's in the kennels.

Roose sensed Greyjoy feared him in a way he did not before he came under Ramsay's care, but whatever shivers Roose gave him was nothing compared to the terror his master inspired. A word, perhaps even a glance, is all it would take for 'Reek' to curl his mutilated hand around a knife and for that knife to get buried in Roose's neck. It's better not to take any chances.

The guard who told him of Greyjoy's return said he awaited in the Main Hall. That was not so strange. Roose insisted Theon be seen about the castle in a more or less presentable state by the household and visiting guests. Much had been gained by letting the North see Balon Greyjoy's last surviving son and heir securely under Roose's thumb. Many northern lords had come and sworn to Roose just to see if the turn cloak had been justly skinned and mutilated for his betrayals.

Roose's first real hint something was amiss was the absence of guards who should be stationed at the doors of the Hall. Roose halted abruptly and so did the guardsmen walking beside him. He took a few moments to recall every twist and turn he took to reach the Hall—Roose did not remember seeing any guards in place.

The silence within the castle was expected. A quiet land. A quiet people. But there should be those seen and not heard everywhere in Dreadfort.

"You," Roose pointed to one of the guards, "go inside and tell me what you find."

The man knew better than to hesitate and quickly let himself into the Hall. Roose stood behind the remaining guard. Roose's hand hovered over the handle of his sword sheathed at his hip. He was tempted to draw the blade free but restrained himself. Being cautious in front of his servants was fine, but never seen as craven.

"Tis Reek, milord," the guard's voice carried out from the Hall.

"Alone?" Roose said.

"Yes, Lord Bolton."

That was strange as well. Passing strange. Someone should be questioning Greyjoy about Ramsay's whereabouts until Roose arrived and took over.

Roose lowered his hand from the pommel of his sword and then swept into the Hall. Intent on getting answers from the disgraced Greyjoy right quick. If Ramsay's pet rat fails to provide satisfactory answers, Roose will ask his questions more sharply.

Roose was struck silent the moment he entered the room. Between two crackling fireplaces a dozen long tables meant for guests and the servants quartered within the keep were covered with plates, bowls, and platters piled with food. Some of the food was half eaten, and the rest was not only untouched but still steamed as if it had just been served from the kitchens. Yet every chair sat empty.

There should be guardsmen inside the Hall gorging on sweetmeats, roasted swine, and ale, yet Theon Greyjoy stood alone at the center of the space, filthy and ragged as ever. Ramsay had allowed the Greyjoy to wear different tatters than normal. What he wore now was all black and hung less awkwardly on his body.

Roose approached Greyjoy a question already forming behind his lips when he noticed it—or rather the lack. There was no foul odor. The closer he got to Greyjoy the worse the stink should have been, but Roose only smelled food, burning wood, and the scent of the keep itself—stone and dust.

"Why have you returned unaccompanied, lord Greyjoy?"

Greyjoy, with his lanky, curly brown hair hung over his eyes and arms loose at his sides, looked appropriately cowed but there was something still wrong about him. More than the lack of stench. But what? What was missing?

"He's gone, milord," Greyjoy murmured, his eyes still turned to the floor.

"What do you mean gone? Where has he gone?"

Briefly, Roose considered the possibility a mob of small folk, tired of Ramsay's games with their women and maidens, finally took the law into their own hands. But Ramsay was a lord in his own right now. Acknowledged by the crown and Roose as his legitimized son. No small folk in these lands would dare risk Lord Bolton's wrath.

Greyjoy shuffled his new, yet worn black boots like a child being reprimanded. The gesture irritated Roose. He would do more than lecture Greyjoy if he did not speak plainly.

"Got all ate up," Greyjoy said in a sing-song voice. The corners of the young man's mouth twitched like he was attempting to fight back a grin, and in his turned-down eyes, Roose spotted a glint of humor.

Alarmed, Roose almost backed away from the wretch. But he'd seen Greyjoy crawling on his knees in the kennels with Ramsay's hounds fighting for scraps. He'd seen Greyjoy stop breathing and tremble whenever Ramsay walked into the same room. Roose saw Theon Greyjoy as being lower than the dirt under a snake's belly, and he would never allow himself to act upon the fear that made him want to run from the broken squid before him. Resolve did not prevent sweat from beading on Roose's neck and between his shoulder blades.

Instead of retreating, Roose gestured to the guardsmen who'd escorted him to the Hall to grab Greyjoy.

"I'll get a straight answer from you soon enough," Roose said as the guards advanced on the Greyjoy.

Greyjoy's head shot up as the guards restrained his arms, his pale green eyes wild with fear and pleading. Roose scoffed and thought the fool should know better by now begging was a road that led to nowhere in this place.

"I told you the truth, milord! Swear it!" he exclaimed.

"Take him to the dungeons and tie him down."

"Yes, Lord Bolton," one of the guards said, and then both lifted Greyjoy off his feet and dragged him passed Roose.

Then all three stopped just short of the Hall's doors.

"What's wrong?" Roose said. "Get him out of the Hall."

"W-we're trying, milord!" one of the guards said, his voice laced with confusion and a hint of panic.

Roose soon saw why. Greyjoy's feet, no longer held off the floor, were planted on the stone. The guards were tugging at his arms as well, which were straight and unbudging at his sides. They had become two men attempting to move the Titan of Braavos with only their bare hands.

Greyjoy raised his arms and despite the guards' efforts to hold them in their grasps, it was no use. Greyjoy brought his hands over his head and tossed the guards into the air.

The guards screamed briefly before they collided with the ceiling with resounding thuds. The next sound they made was their limp, armor-clad bodies hitting the stone with a clang and a splatter. For Roose, the encounter happened quickly, hardly longer than it took time to take a breath and let it out.

Greyjoy turned around and the look on his face was one of demented joy. His grin was so wide, that Roose finally understood what he felt was wrong when he laid eyes on Greyjoy: His teeth were clean and brilliantly white. Unnaturally so. Scars were missing from his skin, as well. Some old, brown, and badly healed. Other fleshy pink and newly mended. All gone from every visible inch of Greyjoy's pale, unblemished skin.

Now that Roose studied the Greyjoy more closely, the Lord of Dreadfort saw the ruined man before him who had been ground into a dead-eyed ghost of his former self, was no longer sallow-skinned and bone-thin. Greyjoy was no longer any of those things. He looked as young and hale as he did when he rode beside Robb Stark during the war.

"Milord," Greyjoy said, "We said the truth. You should believe the truth when it is spoke to you."

Roose tried not to swallow, though his throat was bone dry.

"You killed Ramsay, then."

"Aye. We swallowed him whole."

We? Why is he speaking so strangely?

"The girl?" Roose asked, not because he cared for the wench. Roose wanted to keep Greyjoy distracted with questions as his hand inched for his sword.

"Rancid to her core, she was," Greyjoy frowned with what seemed like exaggerated condemnation before another big smile twisted his pink, unscarred lips. "But her brains were still quite tasty."

All his talk of devouring. Of eating brains. Did Ramsay's tender mercies drive Greyjoy mad? Roose's hand snapped around the handle of his sword. He no longer cared to move carefully, for another realization struck him. As he drew his blade he backed away until he was at the center of the Hall and surrounded by tables covered in food and drink but seated no people.

"Those in the Hall with you, you somehow killed them all as well," Roose said.

Greyjoy shook his head and advanced toward Roose with a lazy stride, his boots made no sound on the stone.

"Not all. None of the servants. Only your guardsmen. The ones so proud of bloodying their swords at the Red Wedding. And those who reeked of evil," replied Greyjoy, his grin grew somehow more twisted when he said 'reeked.' "Such a banquet this place gave Us. Why, We had our fill tonight!"

Greyjoy's deranged smile shrank to nothing.

"Almost."

Roose did not believe his people were eaten by Greyjoy. Whatever strength he may possess to throw two full-grown men fifteen feet into the air did not mean he was capable of dispatching dozens more as effortlessly. If he did kill them, where? Not there in the Hall where not a dish was shattered on the floor, or a single chair overturned. If a slaughter had occurred in the Hall, it would be splashed with gore. Yet, there wasn't a speck of blood anywhere to be seen. Except for the pools of red spouted from the guards smashed on the floor by the doors.

If murders did happen, then Greyjoy had someone to help him kill that many men and then hide the remains. Roose needed to get out of the Hall. If Greyjoy was to be believed guards remained somewhere in the castle, like the pair still standing outside at his solar's door, once Roose gathered all that was left they would go find Greyjoy's accomplices and skin everyone who survived.

As for Greyjoy himself, Roose will find some way to cut him down despite his freakish strength. No matter if it took a dozen—a hundred men to do so. But first, Roose must escape this room and the twisted creature before him.

"Am I to believe you massacred a room full of men on your own?" Roose asked.

A delighted, proud smile found Greyjoy's lips again.

"We did."

'We.'

Greyjoy has said it all along. It wasn't madness. He does have comrades lurking somewhere. "How?"

Greyjoy stuck out his tongue, which seemed too long, as a string of slobber drooled from the corner of his mouth. More disturbing, Greyjoy's irises turned from pale green to pale white.

"Should We show you?" Greyjoy asked though his tongue was still slidden out of his mouth. And his voice. It suddenly sounded like one thousand voices echoing down a well.

Roose's blade shook in his grasp, but he held his ground while the Greyjoy stalked closer and his footfalls sounded like a giant's striking the floor. Roose felt them as much as he heard them.

"Don't come any closer!"

Greyjoy did not stop. He came nearer, his milky-white eyes that should be blind peered down at Roose with predatory intensity.

Wait. Down?

By the time Greyjoy's stomach was only inches from being pierced by the point of Roose's sword, the lord needed to tilt his head back to maintain eye contact with him. Greyjoy was taller than Greatjon Umber. Perhaps Greyjoy was as big as Gregor Clegane, and he looked to be just as hulking as the Mountain was purported to be as well. The black rags he wore should have torn from how much larger he'd gotten but seemed to have grown in size with the Greyjoy.

Impossible! Roose thought, but there was no denying what stood right before his eyes.

"Monster!" Bolton shouted before he stabbed the thing that called itself Theon Greyjoy in its bowels.

Black tendrils spilled from the wound instead of intestines and wrapped around the sword and pulled it from Roose's hands. The tentacles whipped the sword away and it clattered to the floor in front of one of the roaring fireplaces in the Hall. Free of the blade, more black slime poured from the wound in the monster's belly. The substance, whatever it was, spread over the monster's body like thick, black tar.

As the pitch crawled up the creature's massive chest something white appeared, swirling like someone had poured milk into the tar. When the white began to take shape, it reminded Roose of a spider with its bulbous body and eight legs. The shape continued shifting until the body stretched, and the eight spider legs became tentacles. Two more tentacles formed, longer than the others, and wrapped over the monster's shoulders, and then eight tentacles-arms became ten.

A Kraken. House Greyjoy's sigil, Roose realized. White instead of gold on a field of oily black.

When the substance reached the grinning face that once belonged to Greyjoy, the ebon materialized more white color that took the shape of two large ovals where Greyjoy's eyes would be. Their outer corners curve up towards the top of the thing's head.

"How do We look? Don't We look sharp!"

"W-What are you?" Roose asked as he gazed up at the horror that peered down at him with eyes that appeared to be painted on a mask.

The creature began to smile, slowly revealing rows of long sharp teeth, thin as knitting needles and nearly as long. It clasped its hands over Roose's shoulders and swept its long, slimy pink tongue over Roose's chin and up his cheek. Roose took a breath to scream but gagged instead. Its breath smelled like a swamp and something else. It was pungent enough to burn Roose's nostrils and make his eyes water.

"We are Venom."

The thing had spoken with a voice made of nightmares, then opened its jaws wide. Now Roose screamed as he stared into the pink, slimy gullet behind its enormous teeth and flailing tongue.

Roose was still screaming after his world became wet and dark. He screamed when there was no air to fill his lungs. He screamed after he no longer had lungs.

Then Lord Roose Bolton stopped screaming.