Work Text:
The candle at her bedside burned lower and lower until it finally sputtered. Sighing, she reached for a new one and lit it with the dying flame of the first. Unable to sleep, she had tried reading a book, but found that she could not get further than a sentence or two without her mind wandering.
At length she gave up and crossed the room to her clothes trunk. She flung it open and rifled through it until she found what she was looking for. Tenderly, she unwound the scarf she had wrapped around her greatest treasure. It had become dried and withered, her crown of blue winter roses, but no less beloved.
She returned to bed and laid the crown in her lap. Closing her eyes, she summoned the memory that had been dancing at the edge of her thoughts all night.
Their eyes had met as he circled around the crowd, flushed with victory, to name the tournament’s Queen of Love and Beauty. And in his eyes she had known a deeper sadness and a higher joy than she had ever before experienced. But he was in King’s Landing now, with his lady wife, and she was at Winterfell with only her memories to warm her.
Something inside her seemed to shift, and she slid into a dream.
She could taste the cold winds on her tongue as she raced over moonlit drifts. She was only a little surprised to discover that she ran on four legs, not two. The scent of her prey goaded her relentlessly forward, blood and smoke burning acrid in her nostrils.
As she ran the snow gave way to rivers and the rivers gave way to mountains, until she found herself in the far south where the sun and stars were strange. And still she ran onward.
At the end of her stamina she came at last upon her quarry, a snapping beast of claws and scales and wings. The air wavered with hellish heat as the dragon turned to face her. Her survival instinct told her to flee, to run back to the frozen north and the safety of her pack, but a stranger instinct made her stay, when she read the sorrow in the dragon’s molten gaze.
She awoke with a start, still clutching her flower crown. Uncurling her fingers, she stared wordlessly at the blood beginning to pool where the thorns had sunk into her skin.