Arya Stark had been a light sleeper by nature all her ten years of life.
This had been most thoroughly documented by her lady mother when as a new babe she had once managed to awaken her wet nurse and her mother a combined total of nine times in the course of a single night.
Then as she got older it was less her messing herself or suddenly becoming hungry than it was her jolting herself awake by moving too suddenly beneath her covers or her dreams getting too vivid for her to continue dreaming.
Robb always said her imagination was too active for her own good.
But she'd always thought it more a fun thing than any sort of hindrance. It gave her more to think about outside finding a handsome prince or pretty lord's son. Something Sansa and Jayne Poole seemed to talk about constantly even when there hadn't been any lords or ladies to Winterfell for months on end.
But lately, she'd been having deeper and deeper sleep that held stranger and yet oddly comforting dreams. She'd thought after her brother Jon left Winterfell that she'd be so lonely with no one to really call her own in Winterfell. She had been proven right in this unfortunate assumption. Robb and Theon considered themselves too grown for her company. Bran and Rickon considered her too rough, though Arya was personally sure that was more due to Bran not appreciating being shown up at anything boys were supposed to do by the sister closest to his own age.
The less that was said about her relationship with Sansa and Sansa's friend Jeyne the better.
She could pinpoint when her deeper dreams had first started. When Jon had first left, she did have some serious trouble being able to sleep. She missed her brother. She missed seeing him with Robb in the courtyard. She missed seeing him in the great hall when the family ate together. She missed how he would indulge her in practiced sword play with a stick when he could find time away from her lady mother's sharp eyes. So she'd tried to lose herself in her practices. Though she displayed more of her competency with sums than she previously had in her lessons, it was not enough to offset Septa Mordane's frustration with her limited ability in the more traditional arts of ladyship.
Her mother was not so inclined to scold her when she did get into trouble, perhaps because she could no longer use it as an excuse to chastise Jon for 'putting ideas' in her head. (In truth it had often been Jon who would try to get her to plan more of what she was doing so that if they did get into trouble, the provable evidence against them would be limited at best.) She did notice that some distance had developed between her mother and father if the stilted silences they tried to cover with talk of Winterfell's affairs was any indication.
But she knew they would never share anything of it with her unless it had first been shared with Maester Luwin, Rodrik Cassel and then Robb and Sansa. And she could certainly never rely on any of them telling her the truth about it even if she pestered with all her considerable creativity.
So one night several months after Jon had left Winterfell feeling a bit emptier, she had decided to pray like Sansa did. She had borrowed a candle from Septa Mordane: citing something she couldn't recall now about wanting to deepen her touch with the Seven. That sort of explanation usually worked on the well-meaning older woman.
When she had lit it and begun to silently pray whilst mother was taking the time to brush Sansa's hair, she didn't think until that moment just who she was going to pray to.
The Seven hadn't been the ones to intervene when she had been dying. Same for the Old Gods. (That and she didn't think praying to them with a candle borrowed from a Sept would really be the same as when father secluded himself away in the Godswood.) And Jon had never told anyone but father what power he had made an appeal with to ensure her health. So she decided that since she was here anyway, she may as well cast her prayers toward her wayward brother for whatever good they may be able to do.
'I hope you can hear me Jon.' She said to herself. Despite an initial feeling of foolishness of kneeling in front of a candle that flickered absently from the wind that whistled through the stony corridors of Winterfell, she refused to give up. This was the most she could hope for since her brother was across the sea and not expected to be anywhere ravens could reach him for the foreseeable future.
She continued her prayer before she could make herself feel sad, clenching the fingers of her right hand tighter as the fist they made inside her overlaid left hand brought her back to attention of what she had been doing before.
'Winterfell has continued on since you've been gone.' She thought, her forehead coming to rest on her hands as she leaned toward the flame to feel its warmth upon her skin. It reminded her of how heated Jon's flesh had been the night she snuck into his sickroom and sat by his side. He'd woken the next day, coming back to her like she'd asked him. But he'd left the morning after. Never before had she thought it was possible to avoid losing a treasured presence one way only to have it be lost another so soon after.
'And yes, I'm still doing what I can to improve like we talked about before you left.' She reassured imaginary Jon, able to perfectly picture the uptick of his left eyebrow as he asked whether she was still trying to better her stickmanship so as to challenge him again and maybe get a real blade in the process.
'But even so…I miss you Jon.' She said internally, her thoughts growing heavier at the mental admission. Her father and Robb had told her that Jon would be alright, that he would return one day. But it didn't ease the ache of his absence.
'I wish you hadn't gone. I wish you'd stayed here.' She confessed, her eyes and fingers clenching tighter. The sound of mother and Sansa chatting as they comfortably talked of what had happened during the day filled the room for a time. Arya took a mental inhale and exhale before she continued. 'But…but I can't blame you for going.'
That was perhaps the worst of it. Even in the face of his departing with no immediate idea of when or if he would return, she couldn't bring herself to hate him for leaving. Because he wasn't doing it to be selfish or follow his 'bastard nature' as she'd heard some of the older scullion maids mutter when they had both snuck down to the kitchens for snacks before. He was doing it for the Starks. The same as when he'd tried his hardest at all the lessons he'd been given: be they from Ser Rodrik, Maester Luwin or even their father on occasion.
Even in the face of this new and strange power he had unlocked, Jon's first loyalty and love was for their family. Arya barely noticed when her fingernails dug into her palm enough to draw the slightest trickle of blood.
'I can understand you leaving Jon. I won't lie and say I like it or wish it hadn't been otherwise. I can't tell you that, wherever you are right now. But I can do what I did when you were sick: tell you I miss you. And that you need to come back soon.' She opened her eyes: a smile on her face even as she unclasped her hands while shaking the small bits of blood that had gathered on her palm and her fingernails so mother wouldn't scold her and would perhaps wait another day to reprimand her for not taking care of her nails as was expected of a proper lady.
She clearly remembered the last thing she had thought as a prayer before her mother had told her to blow out the candle and come to her. She remembered that she had thought: 'I want to you back again Jon.' And she'd certainly meant it with all her heart.
That night was the first night she had the dreams.
They always began the same way. With her awakening among a field of shadows and lights. Sometimes it shifted into the shape of a city. Sometimes it became Winterfell. And yet other times it became a forest: lush and ripe for exploration. But there was always a constant presence to it. There was always Jon Snow.
When she had first seen him, Jon had been just as shocked to her see as if he hadn't been expecting her company. Which she had thought passing strange, considering that it was her dream they were in and so he should've expected to see her. But he was always glad of her presence after he got over his initial shock of it. What she enjoyed most of it was that dream Jon was like real Jon in the ways that mattered.
He still mussed her hair and called her little sister. He still had her demonstrate what she learned. Though she found it unfair that even in her dreams she couldn't manage to best him at stick fighting. And he always had a tale or a snatch of song to share. But when she was silent, he too was often silent: not prompting her to talk or relive the hardness of the day but simply allowing her to sit by the fire with him and enjoy his imaginary companionship. And through it all, she slept as peacefully as a moss covered stone. Oftentimes she wondered if it were possible for her to be speaking to her brother in her dreams and that she had managed to open a pathway to him through the candle. But she managed to dismiss that thought after a while.
She knew that he wasn't real though because as time went on, his appearance became stranger and distinctly less human.
One night she had started to notice that his pupils were becoming slitted like one of the lion lizards that Maester Luwin spoke of living in the southernmost swampy area of the North known as the Neck. He seemed surprised when she pointed that out to him. But when she insisted that it was so, he would only say that it must be his heritage showing through. He laughed when she replied that their father had only ever been a direwolf. She didn't see what was so funny about it, but they'd soon after played tag between the shadows and the lights and she promptly focused on catching him for once.
More time passed before she noticed that his fingernails were more like talons instead of nails: their color black as night and their edges sharp enough to rend some of the trees they sometimes found themselves among when the dreams took a more nature oriented landscape. She asked him why he had such sharp nails now. He told her that it was because he sharpened them as often as he could: to be ready for any predators who thought him easy prey.
"But why would you need talons for that?" She asked him when he told her that, her longer hair falling into her eyes even as he looked at her from the other side of the fire.
"Unless I intend to sleep with a dagger under my pillow, I need to be able to fight with my hands too Arya." He told her, the upturned corners of his lips expressing his happiness at seeing her again even as he absently let the fingers of his right hand make its way through the upper edge of the fire.
Arya thought about this and gave a sage nod of approval. She decided it was a very practical approach to take in the dream world where nightmares could often sneak up suddenly and without warning.
"Do you think you could teach me to do that?" She asked him, leaning back against the rock that was warmed by both her own body heat and the ambient heat of the fire she and her dreamscape Jon were sharing.
"When I return to Winterfell little sister." He answered easily, stretching backward with his hands straight out as if to try and realign his spine. He groaned as he did so, eyes temporarily closing as he managed to elicit one or two soft cracks from his shoulders that sounded like the logs burning merrily in the fire pit.
Arya sighed in response.
"Too bad." She said. Jon's eyebrow quirked in question. "If you were the real Jon saying that, I'd believe you. But you're just my dream, so you'll say whatever I want you to say."
Jon's eyebrow was joined by its' twin.
"Oh, you think I'll say what you wish simply because this is a dream?" He asked her.
"No, I think you'll say what I want you to say because this is my dream." She answered him. It was a very simple thing really. But dreams could prove such a silly thing really. She'd managed to find improvement in her ability to deal with her mother and her sister now that their attention was focused with a hawk-like intensity on her for being 'unladylike' thanks to her dream Jon's advice on letting their words wash over her and how best to practice in secret around Winterfell. It was truly helpful, but it also made her wistful and wonder when her real Jon would be returning home to be where he belonged again.
"Oh, this may be a dream Arya." He conceded even as she pointedly interrupted him with a "My dream" for emphasis. "But why on earth should that mean it isn't real?"
She laughed at the absurdity of his question and pointed to his eyes and his talons before looking at him in a silent query of if he needed more proof.
"All dreams have some roots in what we consider real Arya." He said in response, leaning closer to the fire. The light seemed to cast shadows upward on his face that made the hair on his head and closer to his eyes seem much darker than it was while showing a sharp contrast to just how much his eyes had changed. The pupil was now almost entirely slitted though the grey color remained the same as ever. It gave him a strange contrast between what he was and what her imagination conjured he might be after the fire magic she knew he had used to heal her.
"But you're still in my head. So you're not really Jon." She reasoned. Maester Luwin and Septa Mordane had been very clear on dreams being the wanderings of an idle body that didn't mean more than a child's wild imaginings in the grand scheme of things.
He leaned back, allowing his features to seem more human again as she answered him.
"As you say little sister." He conceded with a wider smile.
After that, he'd never tried to dissuade her of her knowledge as to what he was. And from there she thought it would be a simple matter to tell Jon about the strange dreams she'd had of him while he'd been gone.
But tonight was different. Tonight she was upon a ship, something that had never happened in all her nighttime imaginings with Jon.
Jon Snow was standing on the deck of the ship, only the light of the stars to illuminate his eyes as he looked idly out upon a blue grey sea that looked simultaneously endless and limited as it disappeared into the darkened horizon. There was no land to any side of them.
Jon looked at her with his peripheral vision, strange flashes of what appeared to be scales peeking out beneath the skin at the corner of his eyes.
"I wasn't expecting you here Arya." He said to her, smile absent.
"Why not? This is my dream." She told him, standing alongside him at the wooden railing that kept them from the watery depths beneath this simple wooden ship. It seemed a humble ship to Arya's eye, no flashy colored cloth for sails like she'd heard ships across the Narrow Sea were known to possess. No symbol upon the white windcatchers.
"Why are we on a ship?" She asked him, wondering why she was on a ship with Jon when she was more comfortable with the forest setting that could allow her to pretend they were in the Wolfwood that held Winterfell's Godswood.
"Because this is where I am." He told her. She didn't know what that was supposed to mean. How could dream Jon have an existence independent of her dreams? Did he even exist outside of them? He was a figment of her memories and thoughts on her brother. But on the other hand, she'd never had such a persistent set of dreams before. Or if she had she didn't remember them.
As she was about to ask him what he meant, she spotted storm clouds on the horizon and a bank of what seemed at first glance to be a dark fog. But when she looked closer, she realized it wasn't a fog bank. It was in fact smoke. And smoke that appeared to have sparks and visible heat emanating from it. When she saw that, her question changed to address the more immediate concerns before her.
"What is that?" She asked him, pointing into the distance behind the ship.
Jon appeared to jolt where he stood. As he did, the dreamscape changed. It became sharper, more defined. As though more details were being added where before there was a vagueness and a half blurry look to it that unfocused the eye if one tried to look at it too long. But with the change in the landscape came a reduction in the blackness and the smoke that she had seen before.
Instead there was now only featureless ocean as far as she could see, with choppier waves that seemed somewhat agitated. The caps of the waves never reached over the sides of the boat, but they definitively slapped against the hull like an insistent guest demanding another portion of a meal due to them. Arya looked around, uneasy at the suddenly less dreamlike quality of the environment.
With the strange shift had also come a change in Jon's appearance. Instead of the talons she had seen on his hands for some time now, his hands were now an ordinary humans with nails only slightly longer than could be healthy. Instead of scales, he had the paler skin she remembered of him with a great deal more facial and head hair than she had thought he would gain.
But still the slitted eyes remained.
Jon's eyes were fixed in the distance on the place where she had seen the smoking fog not moments before. He swore under his breath and started striding toward the pair of men she noticed at the stern of the boat.
"Jon? What's happening Jon?" She attempted to ask him. But now his eyes slid over her as though she wasn't there. He came within range of the men, pointing at the horizon behind them. In an urgent whisper, he spoke to them.
"We've got trouble coming up behind us Captain." He said, still not looking at Arya even out of the corner of his eyes.
A brown haired, brown eyed man looked at Jon sharply. The crow's feet surrounding his eyes scrunched in confusion.
"What're you talking about boy?" He asked, revealing somewhat reddened teeth that could only have been gained from chewing sourleaf for years on end. "There's nothing back there."
"I know you don't want to trust the word of a sellsword, but please." Jon asked, urgently gesturing behind them. "I'll be glad if I'm proven wrong, but I feel uneasy about simply waiting to find out whether these are the raiders I heard tell of in White Harbor."
Arya felt her heart drop into her stomach. What kind of dream was this?
As it turned out, not a good kind.
A/N: Finally, it's out! My thanks to you guys for leaving your reviews, for favoriting and for following the story! Be sure to let me know what you think of this continued world-building exercise! :D