The first time Catelyn can remember entering a Sept, she is a little girl with a mother as well as a father and sister. Riverrun’s Sept is grand and imposing, the statues of the Seven beautiful and polished and the room is filled with the smell of incense. When Catelyn looks up, at the ceilings that stretch higher and higher still, she feels small and breathless, and she finally understands the hushed silence that blankets the room. Her mother smiles and squeezes her hand, and afterwards Catelyn asks her a million question.

As a married woman and mother herself, her Sept is small and understated. Yet, it is filled with the warmth of her family and the love of the husband who built it for her, which is slow to grow but so, so worth it. Catelyn never truly gets used to her husbands gods, just like she knows Ned will never be comfortable in a Sept, but she comes to respect them all the same. And slowly, over time, they wriggle into her heart and claim a little corner there, adjoining the vast space that is taken up by her husband and children.

The same cannot be said for the Drowned God, who she observes with apprehension and disdain. And then he takes everything she holds dear, and there is nothing left in her heart for him but hate.

Catelyn’s life is filled with old gods and new, but in her final moments she thinks not of the gods she worshiped or feared, but of the husband she loved and lost.

And then Catelyn dies, and all she knows is red.