only the gods are real

You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. 

Thoros used a lot of words, but all they meant was no, that much she understood

They say the pack is led by a monstrous she-wolf, a stalking shadow grim and grey and huge. They will tell you that she has been known to bring aurochs down all by herself, that no trap nor snare can hold her, that she fears neither steel nor fire, slays any wolf that tries to mount her, and devours no other flesh but man. 

Arya at God’s Eye lake by Goravsky

Another “Song of Ice and Fire” inspired illustration. In the book Arya Stark and her companions at God’s Eye came across deserted town. At first my idea was to draw all of them, but I think this one with just Arya on it catches the right emotion. It’s easy to forgot just how young she really is. A child caught in the middle of all that horror.

The lost child of Winterfell. The Starks were scattered but accounted for, dead or trapped or freezing to death at the wall - every Stark, but her. The forgotten sister, young and wild, resembling her father and bastard brother more than her lady mother. With hair chopped short and dirt on her skin, she was a thousand servant girls, slipping in and out of names, moving quiet as a shadow. Brave and silent, deadly and vengeful, the one Stark to slip through the fingers of a kingdom. She ran and toiled and ate with the enemy in the summer, but winter lived in her and her heart remained hard. She relented her dignity, her name, but she never forgave, and she never forgot. The list of names became her only possession, repeated to herself quietly in the night, a mantra, a bedtime story for a forgotten child. But Arya Stark of Winterfell was a child no longer, and the names burned in her blood, a reminder, a war cry for the wolves to finally return.

That was the best part, the dreaming. She dreamed of wolves most every night. A great pack of wolves, with her at the head. She was bigger than any of them, stronger, swifter, faster. She could outrun horses and outfight lions. When she bared her teeth even men would run from her, her belly was never empty long, and her fur kept her warm even when the wind was blowing cold. And her brothers and sisters were with her, many and more of them, fierce and terrible and hers. They would never leave her.

“It’s just a stupid sword,” she said, aloud this time…

… but it wasn’t.

Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile.”