WARS TO COME, game of thrones

𝐈. drought

Anrir walked through a black corridor. The walls were made of black, rough stone and mercilessly sharp-edged. The floor sloped slightly beneath him, causing him to fall rather than move in an orderly fashion. He was barefoot, but he didn't know why. The walls came at him, driving their sharp protrusions into his flesh. Anrir kept running, though he felt his flesh tearing and the stone clawing at him, desperate to keep him here. Was he running away from it? From the inevitable?

Don't fight it, his inner voice seemed to scream. His instincts told him otherwise. Run, run, live! But where did these instincts come from? From his core, his innermost being? Or were they something he had been taught?

Then Anrir paused.

The stone seemed to do the same for a moment. Then it ate through Anrir's flesh. Shredded him until he bled out. But he did not die. His blood wet the midnight-black world around him, pulsing through its veins.

And when Anrir opened his panicked eyes again, he saw -

Kings Landing.

Again and again.

Drenched in sweat, Anrir straightened up, pulled the soaked shirt off his body in disgust and threw it on the floor, kicking the sheets aside. He staggered like a drunk to the side table and emptied the jug of stale water that was still there from the night before. Breathing heavily, he put the jug aside again, leaned on the side table with his hands and waited for his heartbeat to calm down.

He didn't know how long he had slept, but it didn't really matter. It was late afternoon and the city beyond the walls of the Red Keep was pulsating with life outside his window. People scurried through the alleyways like ants, while the city's smell hung over everything like a thundercloud. Anrir spat out of the window.

His sense of day and night had been lost sometime in the last weeks and months. He slept when he was tired and woke up when he couldn't sleep. The best days were the ones he slept through completely so he didn't have to remember them.

The last time he'd seen Lark had been half an eternity ago, in that alley after Ned...

He could do nothing but hope that his knight was still alive. Lark was not a lord and had been knighted by Anrir. He didn't have that strange, unspoken protection that Anrir had kept from being exterminated like Rob and Ned. Or perhaps he simply wasn't interesting enough for his enemies.

Anger got the better of him and with a roar he hurled the jug against the wall, shattering it into a thousand pieces. The room showed countless traces of such outbursts, of which Anrir had had more than enough since the first day of his captivity.

He couldn't really complain. Anrir was provided with food and drink and given water to wash himself. He was only supervised when it came to shaving. He was not left alone with a razor blade.

Anrir took a big step over the broken pieces and went into the slightly larger adjoining room, where there was a sofa and a small desk. Ironic, because he had no pen or paper. Not even a book. Some days he had thought he was going mad.

With a muffled sound, he settled down on the sofa and watched the sun sink until it disappeared from his field of vision and red light bathed the city in the color of blood.

At first he had believed that the Lannisters would use him in some way for their plans. But he wasn't even brought before the king. They simply left him to rot in his luxurious prison. Anrir could only imagine what was happening in Westeros in the meantime. When he thought of how long he had been absent from Riverfall without word, he felt sick. Perhaps his men there thought he was dead and had left the castle. Whatever Lysa had done in the Vale in the meantime - if he ever returned to his homeland, it was certainly no longer the place he had once left.