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Alayne Stone does not dream. She wonders and wishes, thinks on the past and future. She bites back memories until she is alone, and can slip out of herself back into herself, the self she was as a child. The self she still is. Sansa Stark had a father who kissed her forehead, not her mouth. Sansa Stark had a castle made of snow. Sansa Stark was somebody real and beautiful. Is. Not was. She is.
Sansa Stark dreams. At night she slips out of her Alayne gown and lays down to bed in the same way she did as a child, in the same body she had as a child, a million years ago or two. She closes her eyes and dreams Sansa’s dreams.
Or at least she tries to.
She dreams she walks the halls of a Winterfell made of red stone, she in her wedding dress, she in an infant’s gown, shrinking smaller and smaller with each step. She can’t stop walking, for if she stops walking, her feet will fly on without her. Silly birds, her feet. Ungovernable.
None of the hallways look right. She cannot find a doorway, and as she grows smaller the windows stretch high above her reach. The walls shudder when she looks at them too long, move in a gasping rhythm like the tired sighs of an animal at rest.
When Alayne was a little girl, she had a cat. Sansa never had a cat, but she’s decided Alayne did. It had soft pale fur and it slept on her bed, and it died in the middle of the night. Died sleeping, died old. Oh, to die sleeping. Oh, to die in a dream.
The walls breathe like that. Tired old girl, waiting for the end. She hates to watch them, so she doesn’t look. She stumbles forward, shrinking out of her clothes, and jerks awake before she winds up naked.
Her room in the Eyrie is still, so still. The walls are only walls, and she is only herself, whoever herself might be. There’s no sun, so she lays still and waits for sleep to take her again. Rest does not come. She wants to thrash like a sick child, toss and turn over and over until she opens her eyes and is home. Instead, she holds her limbs as stiffly as possible, like the old story about the frozen maiden and the brave knight who warmed her heart. In the half-awareness before dawn, there are still such impossible songs.
She lays there until the thrumming comes. At first, she thinks it is her own heart sloshing around in her chest, Sansa’s heart pounding the old ungovernable rhythm. But it is something entirely external. The bed twitches with each beat, and even the stones of the still walls seem to rattle in place.
She is up from the bed –– there is nothing else to do. The thrumming has burrowed underneath her skin, and she is seized by the terrible notion that perhaps the Eyrie is falling around her, that the mountains themselves have collapsed. But the world does not crumble, and a quick examination of the room reveals nothing is seriously amiss. Nothing, that is, but the pulsing noise still in her ears, her eyes, her throat.
It is not like the pounding of drums, and while she approaches the door she wonders how she could have ever mistaken it for a heartbeat. It is steady, sure like a harper’s shoe tapped across the floor, but it cracks. One’s first footfall through clean snow. The scrape of a knife on a plate. Each note is brief, but the aftermath is long. It makes her teeth ache.
She opens the door. There is no guard outside her apartments, but then again, there was not meant to be a guard outside her apartments. Was there? She can’t recall. Was there once a guard outside her apartments? She is alone. The hallway is dark, and she is alone.
She should have brought a candle, she thinks for half a moment, but she does not want to go back. Besides, she can see well enough.
It is not proper to be here, alone in the hall, each step further from where she should be. It is not her business, to chase after strange noises in the dark, the undark, this interior twilight. But she is curious, frightened, or both, and she continues.
Her feet are bare and the floor is wet. Why is the floor wet? The damp stones shimmer as bright as stars and twice as cold. Is it water then, that she’s hearing? Her mother had told her the story of Alyssa’s Tears. Sansa’s mother. Alayne’s mother was dead. Sansa’s mother was… Alyssa Arryn had lost her children and did not cry. The great waterfall that bore her name had never touched the ground. Perhaps her weeping was waylaid, had spattered into the castle somehow.
No, the floor is not misted. It’s a stream. The water is not high, only halfway up her chilled toes, but it rushes like a river, so fast if there was any more of it it’d knock her off her feet. The quickest trickle. But that’s not the noise. She knows the sound of running water, and its music is nothing like this.
The cracking grows louder, and she hurries, even as the water splashes up to her ankles. She must keep going. She must find the source of this terrible sound, the source of this impossible river. She thinks of the edge of a waterfall, snowmelt, a statue of a woman with the eyes cut out, streaming from the empty holes. She runs.
The stones of the floor are no longer visible under the tangling blackness of the water. She stutters to a stop at a silver flash to her right. Impossible. Impossible. But for a moment, she’d have sworn she saw the gleam of scales. She swallows, and her throat throbs in tune with the crackling noise. It must have been the edge of a stone tile catching the torchlight. What torches? There are no torches, no windows, no stars.
She wants to stay longer, search the water, catch her breath, but she knows that she cannot. There is a horrible hollow within her, and it whispers that she cannot turn around. She cannot look. There is something behind her, but she cannot look. Her momentary lapse has let the shadows lay their great hands on the back of her neck. She shakes them off and runs.
The halls of the Eyrie twist, labyrinthian, and the convent she grew up in, the castle she grew up in –– the place she grew up in was never so large. The floor is dry again beneath her dancing shoes, and she is unstoppable, a white hind through the green woods, a brown lark through the white sky, a girl on the brown soil, feet pounding so hard against the earth she cannot hear the thrumming that took her from her room in the first place.
She runs and runs and runs and runs until she slams, headfirst, into a stone wall. There is a horrible noise, and she realizes it comes from within her skull. She pushes herself back from the wall and pokes at her teeth with a clumsy tongue. They fall out of her mouth in a red stream, Alyssa’s statue leaking from the face.
She will be ugly now. How silly, her first thought. She will be ugly now.
Her second thought: she must turn around. There is nowhere else to run. Her feet shake within her sturdy boots as she tries to gather her strength. Every part of her –– her knees and her ears and the hairs on her arms –– burns with terror. She turns.
The woman has long red hair that covers her face, lovely long red hair, and for a moment, Sansa thinks mother. Mother, my mother, my beautiful mother, I am home again and a child again and I will throw myself into your sweet arms, your everlasting arms, and you will weep no more.
But it is not her mother, of course. The woman twitches closer and the sheets of her hair part like a waterfall.
Part of Lysa Arryn’s cheek hangs sideways from her skull. She must have landed upside down. Her smashed lips make her wretched pout look even more petulant and childish, despite the darkness of their red paint.
Her aunt reaches out an accusatory arm, and it unfurls like a snake from her shoulder, broken in a dozen pieces. She takes a jerking step closer, and Sansa recognizes, at last, the sound she had heard. Bones sliding against each other. The scrape of undone sinews.
She cannot go back. She cannot go forward. She closes her eyes and waits for her judgment, but finds herself flying instead.
She rises up and up, beyond the Eyrie and beyond the mountains, the golden and glimmering mountains, beyond Alayne’s convent and beyond the crushed walls of Winterfell, beyond the grasping arms of a tangled embrace, beyond a small red river of a woman’s blood, a cut neck, a crossing. She is so far beyond anything, for a moment, and then she is awake in her bed.
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Alayne Stone does not dream. She takes a heavy breath of crisp morning air and tries to recall what could have possibly left her sheets so twisted and heavy with sweat. She cannot remember. That’s alright. She has much to do today.