The Last War

Chapter 11 : Goodbye Brother

The ashes were always flying in the air, falling gently, mixing with the snowflakes that also came to rest gently and littered the ground.

The ai was loaded, and smelled horribly, a mixture of burnt, charred human flesh, smoke, the scent of death.

The footsteps of Sansa and Seldan were almost silent, barely squeaking in the white snow covered with black ash.

She was looking for Jon.

She hadn't seen him since the members of the Army of the Dead had collapsed to the ground, lifeless, as it should have been all along, and the White Walkers had evaporated into the air, pure and simple, as if they had never existed.

They were forced to step over corpses, unrecognizable, of which it could not be said for sure whether they had belonged to the army of the dead or to the army of the living, it didn't matter now.

When suddenly she stopped, obsessed by the scene a few meters away from her, while not wanting to believe it, it was not possible, it was only a nightmare, nothing but a nightmare, nothing but a horrible nightmare.

But Daenerys' scream proved her wrong.

There she was, kneeling in the middle of snow and ashes, in the middle of fire and blood, cradling a body.

A body.

Sansa's eyes blurred with tears as she recognized the identity of the dead man, even though deep down she had known it all along, since she had seen that he hadn't returned.

Jon had a dagger deeply embedded in his entrails, a blade of ice, the weapon of the White Walkers, from which only the handle came out.

His blood stained the white fur coat of Daenerys, whose tears streamed down her face before falling on Jon's cold cheeks.

Sansa looked for Ghost of the eyes, thinking that when she saw the white wolf, it would be over, she would be sure that Jon was still alive, that the dæmon had not evaporated into a cloud of golden dust.

But no matter how hard she looked for him, she saw him nowhere.

It was over.

Jon Snow was dead.

Sansa closed her eyes, refusing to see another minute of this, an image that would already remain indefinitely etched in her memory, and tears as warm as the breath of life flowed down her cheeks, too.

oOo

The White Marchers may have been defeated, but that did not stop the snow from continuing to fall, covering the ground with a thick, immaculate mantle, covering the blood and ashes, covering the traces of the Great War.

The smoke from the flames of the funeral pyres would die in the gray winter sky, as if souls were escaping from their fleshly prisons, ascending into the air, before fainting, dead is dead, life is over, but so are the dead.

The last survivors, too few in number, unfortunately, looked weary, tired, the adrenaline of victory had not yet had time to rise in their spirits, not when there were so many people to bury, not when so many of their brothers, their fathers, their sons had fallen.

Sansa looked at Daenerys out of the corner of her eye as she stood in front of the pyre where Jon's body had been placed.

She had claimed the privilege of cremating him, she was the queen, as she had not failed to remind him, and then, Fire and Blood was her motto, after all, their motto, and Sansa did not have the strength to fight anymore, she was fed up with fire and blood, like all Northerners, like everybody else.