:: FROM GRAVES ::
⤨ celys saintmont
Atop the grassy knolls of Saint’s Hall at the edge of the Stormlands, Celys of House Saintmont grows up with muddied knees and hands callused from the weight of both a sword and sewing needle. Her father names her wayfarer, feet straying across the fields and forests, but she can never seem to go too far before the pull of home calls her back.
Until the family with a name as old as its land is widdled down to nothing.
It starts with her uncles on their journey back from Dorne, necks snapped during a nasty fall. Then her cousins and their children, slain on rumours of infedelity. Day by day, word arrives on sorry lips. Day by day, the looks shared between her parents grow more grave. She’s fourteen now, and forbidden to go past the rickety old bridge at the edge of their keep. Her father’s rages grow like wildfire, and the warning in her mother’s eyes –usually so warm, so free–, are foreign to Celys.
It’s only until trouble from the stepstones reaches Lord Saintmont that Celys gets her first taste of blood. On the day her father and brother’s bodies return from the fighting –one missing his legs, the other his head– red is all she can see. The rest pass in a blur, until death becomes a passing shadow, a glimpse instead of the full truth. From the corpses comes a sickness, and for weeks Celys lays rotting beside her mother and sister, tended to by only the strongest and most loyal that remain. When the last of their sworn swords, the bastard knight Qoren Sand pulls Celys and her baby brother off the day-old corpses, the Triarchy invade her lands.
With no other choice, Celys flees the only home she’s ever known, journeying to King’s Landing to beg for the King’s aide in claiming back Saint’s Hall. But even in the light of the Red Keep, Celys is hunted by wandering eyes and selfish intent, her grief shackling her to a life where she must decide whether to continue standing her ground, or to let all the devastation wash her away.