Wilting ♞ Sandor Clegane

тwo-αɴd-ғorтy

A smile tried to tug at his lips, but it turned into a frown. "It's not safe here."

"I know that; it's not safe anywhere," Anya retorted. She moved closer to the fire and pulled Dark Sister from its sheath. Its dark ripples seemed all the darker and now the rubies within the hilt and crossguard truly looked like blood. Benjen balanced the blade on his blackened fingers and passed it back to his sister, nodding in approval. "I killed one of them," she told him.

It was when she lifted the supple leather sheath that Benjen Stark saw the long, thin cut on her arm that still bled. "Your arm," he pointed out and she glanced down, pushing the ruined material aside to see there was a dark, almost blue spot coming at the ends of the cut, but it wasn't frostbite. The Ranger sat next to her. "Let me see it," he said, and Anya surrendered her arm to his care.

He ran his thumb along the length of the cut, wiping away the blood that had gathered before pulling out a small shard of dragonglass from his belt. "This is going to hurt," he told her with his typical amount of penury, "but it must be done to stop the magic." Anya's brows settled in a deep furrow and she was half tempted to snatch her arm from his grasp.

"Magic?" she asked in return, despite seeing White Walkers and wights beyond the Wall it still seemed odd to believe in magic.

Benjen nodded, his long and thin face solemn as ever. "The Walker's magic," he explained, knowing well that only one of two things could have left a cut that clean and he doubted his sister had cut herself with her own blade, "if left then it would spread and you'd become one of them."

Anya paled, understanding now what had happened to her dear brother. "Who helped you?" She asked, not looking down as he eased the tip of the black glass beneath her skin, deeper than the cut itself had been. Benjen did not answer at first and in turn, she watched as he finished pushing the piece of dragonglass into her arm.

Blood sprung up from its entry point before the burning took over. Anya Whent believed that the worst pain she had ever felt had been when Melly and Meg laid a red-hot dagger on her festering shoulder, but this, this was indescribable. It felt like she was burning from the inside out, but this time it wasn't the heat, it was ice. Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while, you don't have the strength to fight it. It had been Benjen who told her that.

The Ranger took his sister's face into his cold hands, forcing her to look at him. She gritted her teeth together and tried not to scream. "The Children of the Forest," he answered, "a piece of dragonglass into the heart was the only way they could stop it." Anya squeezed her eyes shut, the slim cut had begun to seal itself, leaving nothing but a faint silvery line. The markings of the Walker's magic had faded too. When her eyes opened again, the pain was gone and Benjen was looking into a clear winter sky.

She looked down at her arm, felt the raised scar beneath her fingertips and frowned. "Can't you come home?" Anya suddenly asked, her voice had turned meek. She longed for the days when they were children in the yard at Winterfell, they had all been happy then, they had all been safe then. Benjen should have never left for the Wall, Ned should have never gone to King's Landing.

"No," he began, "the Wall's secrets keep me from passing over." The dead could not pass over the Wall, she remembered that from the stories that Old Nan used to tell them. The Children of the Forest had interwoven their deep magic into the ice as giants hauled blocks of ice and built it up brick by brick. "I saw Bran," her brother added, "he was with the Reed girl heading back to Castle Black."

At first, she wondered why he would ever come north of the Wall, but she feared the question was one she would not want to know the answer to. "He's home now," Anya told him, "with Sansa and Arya."