"Sorry," he murmured, the word vibrating deep in his chest. "Is that what they're calling it now?"
He could feel her trembling—the frantic, fluttering beat of her heart mimicking a bird hitting the bars of a cage. Her fingers knotted into his sleeves, clutching him as if he were the only thing keeping her from drifting away. Alaric leaned back, just enough to catch her gaze, his face a mask of hard, unyielding intensity.
"I am going to show you something, Sansa," he whispered. His thumb traced a slow, possessive line from her chin to the hinge of her jaw.
"But I need your word—here, in the dark—that you won't be afraid. Do you promise me?"
Sansa looked up at him, her pale eyes searching his. "I promise," she breathed, her voice nothing more than a silver thread in the quiet of the room.
Alaric didn't offer a verbal reply. Instead, his gaze dropped to the floor. With a silent, inward tug of his will, he called to the dark.
The shadows at his feet didn't just move; it boiled like water.
Sansa's eyes went wide open, her air cutting off mid-inhale as the flat ink of the floor surged upward. The darkness didn't just move; it swallowed the candlelight, taking on a terrifying, heavy density
Sansa recoiled, a strangled sound catching in her throat, but Alaric's grip was iron. He held her fast, pinning her to his chest.
"Easy, Little Dove," he rumbled against her ear.
The wolf. His eyes, two pools of molten amber, burned with a sharp, piercing intelligence. He brought with him the sudden, sharp scent of sub-zero forests and old iron. Despite his size, the beast moved with an eerie, predatory silence, his massive paws sinking into the rug without a sound.
With a flick of Alaric's mind, the monster shifted. There was no snarl, no threat—only a fluid, haunting grace as the apex predator sank onto its haunches.
It sat before Sansa like a common hound, tilting its massive head. Shadow's black nose twitched, catching the scent of winter roses and the frantic heat of her skin.
It was a terrifying display of restraint from a creature built to crush steel.
Sansa remained paralyzed, her nails digging into Alaric's arms, unable to look away from the wolf's glowing eyes. They didn't look like the eyes of an animal; they looked like they were waiting for an order.
"He's yours to command now, Sansa. Just as much as he is mine." Alaric's voice was a rough scrape against her ear. "Think of him as the guardian I promised. In a city full of snakes, he's the only thing that can't be bought, poisoned, or swayed."
Sansa couldn't look away from the thing. Her breath came in jagged, shallow pulls, her lungs feeling too small for the air in the room. The wolf—if it could even be called that—was a nightmare given physical weight, a mass of ink and burning amber. She was shaking so hard her teeth clicked together, a rhythmic, frantic sound in the quiet chamber.
"Alaric..." Her voice cracked. "The hound from the road... how is he this? How is he so big?"
She looked down at the floor, Lokking at Alaric's shadow.
"The floor—I saw it. He didn't walk in. He came out of you. How did you hide something that large inside yourself?"
The questions started spilling out of her, faster and sharper, her voice climbing toward a hysterical peak. "Was he always this size? Have you always been... this? Does my father know?—?"
Alaric didn't let her finish. He caught her by the shoulders, turning her in his arms to force her gaze away from the beast and onto him. He didn't use words to quiet her; instead, he pressed a calloused finger firmly against her lips. The contact was blunt and grounding, snapping the thread of her panic.
"One thing at a time, Sansa," he said, his voice low enough that she had to strain to hear it. He waited, holding her gaze until her eyes stopped darting toward the corners of the room.
He adjusted his grip, pulling her into the heat of his chest until her shivering began to dull. "Should I start from the beginning?"
With a brief glance toward the monster, Alaric gave a silent nod. The warhorse-sized creature began to buckle and fold, its joints popping with a wet, heavy sound as it shrank. Within seconds, it was just the black hound she remembered from the Kingsroad.
Alaric guided her back onto the furs, settling beside her and propping himself up on one elbow. He looked at her for a long moment, his thumb tracing the curve of her jaw.
"You know my history. A ward with a dead name," he began. "I didn't know the truth of it myself until my eighteenth birthday—the morning the King arrived at Winterfell. When we were together under the sentinel tree."