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⠀⠀⠀CARSEN DRIFTED ON THE crest of a lone wave, unreachable in this dark cavern of daydreams.
⠀⠀⠀She was dry, this she registered. The water that slid over her skin was dry as ash but smooth as silk, as if she were floating on one of the grey swells of cloud that crowded the pale sky. She could see no such sky now. Only darkness. Only death.
⠀⠀⠀Death, all around. It was all she seemed to be now, a gateway, a vice, a vice held by steel fists, waiting for the darkness. She was the inbetween, the place between life and afterlife. It was woven through her ribs like ribbon, shot through her blood like a poison, in her lungs like a knife, and with every breath she took, they cut her deeper.
⠀⠀⠀Kressa. She was the first. Carsen scarce thought of her, hadn't in months, and guilt swarmed her like a flock of bats. Kressa was sweet, timid, only twenty. Her hair was soft like raven's feathers over the curve of her narrow shoulders, and she had a smile like a sunrise. She made Carsen anklets of braided blushgrass and tucked flowers into her hair. Her Pentoshi accent sung like sparrows when she proclaimed, "beautiful!" and kissed her upon the cheek. Kressa was Carsen's first secret, a stolen kiss under a drooping curtain of wisteria in the haze of summer, drunk on fruit wine and giddiness.
⠀⠀⠀Roahn. She saw his warm, sleepy eyes like hazelnuts, hands soft but callused at the same time. He made good mutton pie with raisins to feast on when they could duck under their father's eye. He had a hand-crafted sword made of expensive steel - not Valyrian, but just shy of. The pommel was carved into a pig's head, because Ceria used to call him pigheaded and so he threw it in her teeth.
⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀Rogon. His features blurred into each other now, uncertain. She was forgetting him, but she would never forget was he did. His hands had burned as the clawed and groped at her skin, kneaded her like dough beneath his hands, wrested her knife from her fingers and she was useless, so useless, like a sparrow with no wings. She'd never forget the way it felt to jam her knife into his neck, to twist into flesh, marring bone and muscle and skin in one grotesque pirouette of a blade. She'd buried him in the frozen earth and marked her grave with her spit.
⠀⠀⠀Qhorin Halfhand. His name tasted odd on the brink of her thoughts. He had meant almost nothing to her, and yet she was a big part of the reason he was dead. She had stuck her sword through his back, heard his last words. "We are the watchers on the Wall," he had whispered, and his words floated up in a frozen cloud of pale mist, lilting like ghosts over to her to wrap their fingers around her bones. There they lay now, cold spirits pressing into her, buried under warm flesh and hot blood. Hot blood. So hot it melted the snow as Qhorin Halfhand bled out on the plain of white.
