Salt

Introduction to Castillon and Dorne

   Valentina Castillon was not the type of girl that Sandor Clegane would have expected to fall in love with. She was, in retrospect, tall; however when compared to the hulking man of six-foot-six, the girl of only five-foot-eight seemed Lilliputian. She was young with sparkling brown eyes and a dark face that remained stoic most of the time. She enjoyed writing in her journal and painting on freshly stretched canvas, but none of these did she enjoy more than fighting. Valentina found great pleasure in proving that femme did not always equate to frail, and so she spent most of her life learning to fight with not only her sword, but her fists as well. The Castillon temple was located in Dorne, and it's tan-skinned people were known for being in alliance with the Martells; they were also known for being people of great beauty. They all bore sun-kissed skin and Castillon women were curvy and long-legged. They wore their hair in wild, yet elegant curls and donned themselves in silk dresses and diamonds; it's no wonder men from around the world had traveled to Dorne to wed the rare highborn beauties.

But Valentina was different than the rest of the women in her family. Sure, she had the long legged beauty aspect on her side, but she lacked the confidence that they all wore so proudly on their sleeve. Her long legs were not slender and graceful, they were thick and muscular; thicker than any other part of her body, mostly due to her frequent fighting. Her hair did not fall in tousled brown waves, but in tight reddish-brown curls that just touched her shoulders. Perhaps what was the most defining characteristic for Valentina was that she had no interest in love. Once in her life, she had wanted to meet a charming man and be his little wife, but the girl had been proved enough in her life that she was the last of the seven Castillon girls that a man would want to marry. There was no man in the world who wanted to wed a thick legged, strong bodied girl such as herself; and so she focused on what mattered most to her: her fighting and her family.

Valentina had not met a man who could bring out a loving side of her until she met Sandor. She was a quiet girl who could keep her emotions suppressed, for the most part, in any situation of hardship. As for love, she never felt any feelings of love at all; even when she had first met Sandor, she simply disregarded him for another Westerosi knight with a spine-chilling face, meant to cause nerve wracking fear in anyone who bore witness to it. Being that Valentina hardly felt fear at all, she only thought negatively of him at the fact that he served the Lannisters. Perhaps the reason why the two had later established a friendship is because they were both outcasts where they were from, and that they were both fearless fighters; and perhaps those were the exact reasons the two would fall madly in love with one another.