House of Black and White

The House of Black and White is the Braavosi sanctuary of the Many-Faced God, a death cult whose servants—the Faceless Men—give the gift of mercy to those who seek it. It is both a place of worship and a training ground for assassins, where Arya Stark, under the alias of the blind girl, undergoes a brutal apprenticeship in sensory deprivation, disguise, and the philosophy of self-annihilation.

Architecture and Symbolism

The temple stands on the Isle of the Gods, its entrance marked by a door of ebony and weirwood, black and white, representing the duality of death. Inside, a still black pool reflects the faces of the thirty tall stone gods of many lands, and candles burn with dark red flames beside the dead who have come to drink from the pool and receive the gift. Beneath the temple lies a maze of vaults and tunnels, including a sanctum on the third level where the faces of the dead are stored—thousands of skins, old and young, male and female, each preserved for use by the Faceless Men. The kindly man and the waif are the primary priests who oversee the training of acolytes.

Arya's Training and the Blind Girl

Arya Stark, having shed her identity as Cat of the Canals, is taken into the temple and made blind as part of her training. The waif brings her a cup of milk each night, a bitter drink that she loathes, and she is told she will remain blind until darkness is as sweet to her as light, or until she asks for her eyes back. She learns to navigate the temple by touch, sound, and smell, counting steps, feeling the markings on walls, and distinguishing the scents of different candles. She is beaten daily by an unseen assailant with a stick, a test of her reflexes and her ability to sense an attacker without sight. She learns to hear lies in the play of muscles around the mouth and eyes during the lying game. Her duties include finding the dead in the temple each morning, stripping them of their clothes and possessions, and counting coins by touch alone.

The Philosophy of the Many-Faced God

The kindly man instructs Arya that the Faceless Men do not kill for their own purposes or pleasures. They are servants of the Many-Faced God, who gives his gift to the best of men as he gives it to the worst, without judgment. Arya is told that she killed the singer Dareon for her own reasons, taking god's powers on herself, and that this is why she must walk in darkness until she sees the way. The price of becoming a Faceless Man is everything: one's name, one's face, one's past, one's very self. Arya is given a new face, that of an ugly girl with a broken nose and jaw, and sent on her first mission: to kill a man she does not know, a stranger, to prove herself worthy. She succeeds by using her skills as a cutpurse to plant a coin, leading to the man's death, and is then given back the face of Arya Stark and sent to begin her first apprenticeship with Izembaro.

The Faces and the Sanctum

The kindly man leads Arya down to the deepest sanctum, a chamber where a thousand faces hang upon the walls. He tells her that mummers change their faces with artifice and sorcerers use glamors, but the faces of the Faceless Men are as true and solid as the face one is born with. He cuts her face and pulls a new face down over the old, which softens and turns supple as her blood soaks into it. She experiences a moment of terror, feeling hands around her throat and seeing a fat, bearded face, but the kindly man tells her to breathe out the fear, that the person whose face she wears is dead and her pain is gone. The faces are earned, not given freely, and the price is the acolyte's own identity.