Sanjen had never wanted to get involved with the likes of Ramsay Snow.
He had grown up the only child of a southron farmhand who had moved North seeking to serve under one of the Northern Lords in their fields or their farms. His father was bitter about their life ever since coming however. His mother had died crossing the Neck whilst he had survived. Sanjen knew his father had never truly forgiven him for that. But his father had not tried to punish him too harshly for it, only ever praying to the Stranger in secret when he thought Sanjen was asleep to bring his child back to their cloaked arms.
Sanjen hadn't understood until after his father died some days following his twelfth nameday what that meant. But he couldn't blame him for being human and placing his grief upon another. Humans were not gods: they could never hope to achieve such perfection. That was why the gods tried to guide humanity after all.
Otherwise, what was it all for?
He had moved further North to the lands of Hornwood and spoken with one of the rare Begging Brothers that found his way to this frozen place. That was when he discovered that his father had wished him to die. He did it in so many flowery words and prayers, but he had still wished his only son dead because of how he had been weak and survived the Neck while his mother had been strong and still managed to be killed by it.
He hadn't really known what to make of himself when his father was gone. He had the knowledge to tend animals and to plant if necessary, but he didn't truly want to have to deal with others that would demand room and board when he could barely stand most people's vulgar idea of what life was worth. He was sure there was more to it than that. So he decided to become a Begging Brother: moving from place to place offering what help as a brother of the faith he could though he wasn't ordained and didn't believe he would be any day soon. He performed funeral rites where asked, taught of the seven faces and what they meant to those who chose to follow the faith and generally tried to make the world make sense as best he could.
Despite such a pious occupation typically requiring large amounts of compassion, Sanjen had always been a loner: much happier left with only the company of nature and his own thoughts. As such he had never had many friends in his life aside from the occasional animal he looked after: the longest being the last of a small clutch of sparrows that he had discovered upon the ground one day. All but one of the chicks had succumbed to the inhospitable cold of the North. And soon as it was grown, it too left him for the wider world. He had never named his small brown friend but he constantly thought of him. Wondering if he had ever found his personal purpose as Sanjen continued to seek his own. So when the Grimwell bandits came for the small hamlet he had stopped at briefly and taken them all prisoner, he hadn't much cared beyond his own survival. And when they asked what he could do for them, he offered his services as a rat farmer rather than a minister.
To raise up rats he found so they could be sold for use in torture, food, sabotage or anything else they thought to use them for. That was what he could offer these ruthlessly immoral men. He asked only to be spared for his service: knowing it would be useless to ask for anything more and might instead earn him one payment of the steel variety to his thin neck. It turned his stomach that innocent creatures should be turned to such sinister purposes but he swallowed his revulsion and did what he could to treat the rats well.
And so his service to the Grimwell marauders began.
It wasn't such a terrible thing in truth. He was an average, unassuming man to most of them if a bit older than the rest at the age of three and forty. Sure, they would disparage him for taking care of the rat shit and feeding. He managed to convince himself it wasn't his fault that the others were hunted or taken to the river never to be seen again. He had only wanted to live. Another hour, another day, another minute. Whatever it took to continue serving the only beings he could truly trust: the Seven.
And what could he truly do against men such as them?
He was no good with a sword nor a shield. His eyes weren't good enough to be a bowman. And even when he had been young enough to do so, he had never been the sort of man to seek violence on others: even those who had done violence unto him. All he could do was pray to the seven faced god that the poor souls the Grimwells sent away or hunted would find peace in the afterlife they had been denied in life.
He knew most believed in the weirwoods and the Old Gods without faces but what did it truly matter in the face of death? Such were the thoughts that played through his mind during his limited captivity.
And then the black haired boy had annihilated the camp.
He had come tearing through it like a force of nature: fire and death and blood left in his wake. Sanjen had been asleep when it started, listening absently to the scratching of the rats. That was how he knew something was wrong. When they all started squeaking in a panicked pitch that he only ever had heard when they were stuck in the bucket that the Grimwells tied to someone's chest that wouldn't give them the answer or respect they wanted or felt they deserved. He'd registered the smoke before anything else came to mind: his nostrils filling with the stuff as his eyes shot open and he started automatically coughing, his body trying its' damnedest to eject the noxious stuff from his airways.
He'd gotten out of the tent only for an arrow to strike it and a moment later watch as it enflamed behind him. The rats squeaked and squeaked and scratched as if they could feel their death through the heat. Sanjen wanted to help them but couldn't after he started to go back and some of the burning fabric landed upon his shoes. As if the fire sought to consume everything, his shoes lit up just as quickly as the tent despite being somewhat damp from the recent sprinkling and melting of snow that had happened in their camp a few days ago.
Sanjen had panicked, yanking the boots off his feet without regard for his hands as the heat and the fire stung and burned at him. He'd managed to prevent any serious damage to his hands and feet despite some redness in his extremities that throbbed painfully whenever he flexed or twitched them. He'd lain there for only a moment before he scrambled backward, moving away from the tent as it collapsed and the rat's cacophony was drowned out by the crackling of the dancing fires now consuming their camp whole. As he got to his feet and tried to figure out where he could possibly go to be safe, he glimpsed the black haired boy.
He was about an average height, much younger than Sanjen's near fifty years he was willing to bet. But he saw him take the hand of Ramsay in his hands and speak something: setting him alight with some sort of sorcery.
Sanjen couldn't breathe for a moment as he sprinted to the outside of the camp, his mind racing as he tried to get the image of Ramsay's burning body looking up at the merciless face of the black haired boy.
The wandering man would've been the first to say Ramsay deserved punishment for the sins he had committed in life. But not like that. Not at the hands of a conjurer. Divine justice was meant to remain in the gods whether the gods were true or false. It was not meant to be wielded by the all too corruptible and easily misled hands of humans. Elsewise, people like him would not survive if others asked of the gods to take their life from them. And that was without the painful manner in which he had done it being taken into account…
That was no work of a man who would simply execute. That was the work of a man who provoked and indeed believed suffering to be necessary at the end of life in order to justify the death that would come. But it went against Sanjen's belief in what the meaning to death was. Death was meant to be an end to suffering in his mind. Upon the one hand there was life, the six faces of the seven who showed that there was so much more to living than there could be to any sort of afterlife. And upon the other hand there was death: that final journey to the welcoming arms of oblivion that all must make regardless of station or birth. To make a man suffer in that time before their final judgment was simply inhumane, a way of showing no understanding as to the sanctity of life.
As he caught his breath whilst the remains of the camp burned and the last few people fled, he missed seeing the dark haired boy escape and come toward him with one of the prisoners beside him. When he had at last recovered enough of his wits to see them sitting upon the ground to watch the destruction, he knew it was time for him to leave. He tried to sneak as quietly as he was able in his bare feet and his tattered robes.
He wasn't very successful.
In the darkness of the night and the dying of the bonfire the snapping of the branch he stepped upon was as loud as a clap of thunder across the darkened sky to his ears. He froze as the black haired boy stood and turned toward him so fast he almost missed it by blinking. His brown eyes looked into this ashen pools from a distance, mind racing as he wondered whether this was the end for him. But amazingly, the boy did not plan to kill him it seemed. Instead he simply told him to leave this place and never return.
He hadn't even finished his sentence before Sanjen was running as fast as his feet could carry him away from that accursed place: the echoes of screams both rodent and human echoing in his ears.
He wandered through the North, barely stopping to eat or to drink. He couldn't sleep: not when he knew the images that would wait just behind his eyes. Not when he wasn't even sure if the fire demon would be able to reach him within the realm of his own mind.
And a demon made flesh he had to be: for what righteous man would play with the most dangerous element of them all? The element that provided naught but destruction and death in its wake? Oh certainly dabblers might light a candle or warm a fire, but this…this was something else entirely. Something unnatural.
After several days of continuing to run and listening for any branch snap or crackling blaze behind him Sanjen wasn't sure whether he was dreaming as he walked or not. But he would not give up. Not until he was safely out of the accursed North that had brought such pain and misery to so many people. And with time he managed to succeed.
He didn't know for certain how many days had passed since he had left the Last Lake and come through the Neck in such a haze. He knew he should've by rights died from the creatures and cranogmen that infested the boggy swampland. But somehow he hadn't been hurt. He laughed a bit hysterically to himself as he thought of it. 'When lost or in doubt, consult the Seven for all your kingdom treking needs.'
A bit uncharitable toward the Seven truly. It seemed that despite being devout and pious, he was still but a human after all.
Eventually the landscape was more lush and fertile. This must be the Riverlands. He wondered whether he should know that because his mother had been from this part of the seven kingdoms before she went north with his father. But truly the only thing he could think to himself was that he hoped to find a Sept soon so that he could at last find ground that would feel safe, familiar, comforting.
It happened when he stumbled upon a crossroad village whose name he did not know. Whether it was near the Kingsroad or not, whether it was near a river or not, whether they even had a lord or not he didn't know. Sanjen only knew he had stepped through the door of the Sept and promptly collapsed onto the hard tile face first.
His dreams had been troubled to say the least: images of the Last Lake burning intermingling with visions of his father and mother burning. He knew he reached for them at one point only to find himself climbing a bell tower of some sort. He could hear that infernal burning sound: the fires of the black haired boy at his feet. He didn't know how he knew this but he did. And when he came to the empty top of the bell tower he looked over the landscape.
He couldn't tell whether this was a city, a town or untouched wilderness. All he knew was that it was all consumed in fire. He could hear screaming from inside the fire: their squeaky cries of fear and pain managing to lift all the way up to his bell tower. He looked to the smoke filled sky: no hint of the stars, sun or moon could be seen. Blackness above and unholy light below. He heard the door behind him burst open. He turned to see what had followed him up to witness this hell on earth.
It was the black haired boy.
He didn't know how he knew that. Perhaps it was the facial structure he saw in him. It certainly wasn't the hair which was gone. Or the eyes which were only pits that glowed the color of burning blood. And it couldn't have been the skin: for that was black as burned out wood with glowing red cracks running in patterns all along his body. Or perhaps he was simply connecting this…creature to the boy because it seemed the only connection he could make to this inhumanly human looking thing that stood before him.
The creature was before him in an instant with a devil's grin upon it's blackened and cracked lips. Its right arm impacted his chest with the force of a battering ram: preventing him from even crying out as he was shoved out of the tower and sent tumbling into the hellishly burning landscape below the tower.
The closer he got to the fire, the hotter it felt. His clothes were the first to catch aflame. Than it was his hair. And then his skin. And through it all, he was unable to stop watching as the creature lifted its arms and face to the blackened sky. It flared in a gigantic burst of fire that he couldn't look away from. It blacked the top of the tower instantly in addition to destroying the very top where he had once been. As the rubble collapsed downward and the burning spread down while his falling body came closer and closer to the fire below him Sanjen did the only thing he could.
He screamed. He screamed so loud, it jolted him awake.
He was in a bed stuffed upon straw. A humble bedding that was meant for utility more than comfort. He looked around wildly as his hair stuck stubbornly to his sweat soaked forehead, brown eyes unable to take in everything at once as it searched for the hell he remembered from his dreamscape.
He heard shuffling outside his door as he tried to stand from his bed and was struck by a spell of dizziness so intense he had to immediately sit down least he empty his already heaving stomach onto the floor.
"Ah! Seven be praised: you're awake!" An older voice said.
Sanjen looked up to see who it was. It was a man even older than himself, wrinkles around his blue eyes, mouth crinkled in a small smile of true thankfulness. He was a bit stooped in his age, the weight of years visible in the bending of his back and the veins beneath his skin that shone blue like a clear sky. But still he seemed satisfied to hold his simple cotton robes that signified he was the town's Septon.
"It is good for you to remain in the bed stranger. Your fever lasted several days. I was not certain my work alone could help you, so I prayed to all the Seven for any help they could lend me in aiding you." The older man said, making his way to Sanjen's bedside slowly. He held a bowl of some kind of broth in his hand.
"All the Seven?" Sanjen asked hoarsely, his scratchy voice grating as it emerged from his chapped lips.
The older man nodded.
"Even the Stranger." He confirmed. Sanjen was unsure what to make of that. The Stranger was the aspect of Death and the end of all things. The one face of the Seven there were almost no songs of for fear that speaking of it would draw the Stranger's gaze upon you. Surely he had to know that.
"What is your name?" The older man asked a few moments later, after Sanjen had taken several spoonfuls of the stew presented to him. The broth and the meat inside tasted of chicken he thought. And though there weren't more than a few bits of carrot in it too, it was a blessed relief to have true food in his gullet after so long of subsisting on whatever he could scrounge from the wild whilst he fled…
'No,' Sanjen told himself sternly. 'I won't think of it again.'
The older man smile dimmed a bit and his eyes seemed more melancholy as Sanjen remained silent.
"Well, that's fine." He said good-naturedly. "I suppose we'll get to know one another soon enough."
As Sanjen finished the stew and the Septon rose to leave, he asked a question.
"Septon?" He said aloud as he reached the door.
"Yes my child?" The Septon turned to answer, head slightly cocked to the right in curiosity.
"Do you believe the Seven have a purpose to all things?" He asked.
The Septon pondered Sanjen's question for a few moments before he nodded.
"I do child." He said. "From the greatest king to the lowliest animal, the Seven have a plan for them all. We simply must find what it is. And when we do, we follow their will."
Sanjen's eyes drifted to the ceiling as his mind's eye filled with the memories of the Last Lake and his fever dream that remained etched in his brain.
"Of course." He whispered softly as the Septon turned to go again. "Of course they do."