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Torrhen Stark stared straight ahead at nothing, tired and solemn, as his sons and lords formed a half-circle in front of him, his back to the heart tree of a godswood just south of the Neck. He'd bent the knee to the dragonlord last week, and this was the first opportunity they had to… express their opinions.

Their furious shouts and demands as to what the hell he was thinking blurred together into an unintelligible cacophony, but he let it wash over him without reacting, as much as he wanted to yell back that bending the knee and forfeiting his crown was the hardest thing he had ever done. True, the dragonlords might not be able to hold the North even if they got enough men past Moat Cailin, but that wouldn't stop them from burning every keep and town in the North to the ground.

Being King in the North was more than a pretty title and bunch of privileges, he was responsible for the well-being of the North. And seeing the North devastated to the point that it would take centuries to recover, if it ever did, would be a dereliction of that duty.

Bending the knee was the right thing to do.

Even if all future Starks damned him for it.

The noise abruptly cut out with shocking suddenness, causing Torrhen to blink in surprise. But as he opened his mouth to begin his rebuttal, he realized that everyone was staring at something behind him.

He spun on his heel and beheld an enormous white direwolf stepping out from behind the heart tree, large enough that he had to look up slightly to meet its golden eyes, with red markings the exact shade as the sap that bled from the faces carved into the weirwoods decorating its face and flanks in intricate patterns.

Oh.

Maybe bending the knee hadn't been the right decision after all.

He stared at his house's sigil and avatar of the Old Gods, and it stared back with an imperious gaze.

With a defeated sigh he dropped to his knees and lowered his head to his chest, baring his neck. His only thought, please let it be quick.

He didn't open his eyes as he listened to the direwolf pad closer and sniff him, the wind generated ruffling the hair on the crown of his head. It stopped sniffing him, then there was the rustle of leaves and the thump of something heavy landing on the ground, and something was placed on his head.

He raised his hand to feel it. Leaves, intertwined branches. It didn't cross his forehead. A wreath?

He blinked his eyes open in confusion in time for the wolf to nose his chin upward. Looking up he met the wolf's golden gaze for a moment before it nosed his chin upwards again. What did it – oh. 

Torrhen stood, and after another pointed poke from the nose, turned to face his lords. They were looking understandably poleaxed. A flicker of movement caused him to look to the side in time to see the direwolf sit by his right hand. It – no, she, he could see her teats poking through the fur of her pregnant belly – looked back at him.

And then she licked him from chin to hairline, completely ruining the solemnity of the moment and causing several to chuckle semi-hysterically. As he wiped his face and corrected the fit of the wreath – he'd have to see what it was made of at some point but he suspected weirwood – a small smile graced his face. The Old Gods wouldn't reward him such if bending the knee had been the wrong decision, and with renewed confidence he faced his lords again.

"Lord Stark, wake up."

Torrhen stirred himself from sleep, blinking up at the underside of his tent.

"Lord Stark."

There was someone in his tent, and he didn't recognize the female voice. He reached for Ice but the direwolf dropped her head on his chest, stopping him.

"Peace, Lord Stark. I am no foe of yours."

A faint red light lit the tent and he saw a figure right out of the old legends. Colors were all washed out, but the small woman had a four fingered hand, large almost bear-like ears, slitted cat eyes, and clothing that seemed to be made from leaves. Torrhen knew his legends.

"A Child of the Forest?"

"We were here long before the First Men came," came the quiet retort, the light fading, "You are the children, not us."

He slowly nodded at that.

"Why are you in my tent…?"

"Our names do not translate well into the Common Tongue, but you can call me Vine. And I am here to give you the other half of the God's gift."

He gently pushed the direwolf's head off him so he could sit up. 

"Which is?"

"Idgra has vital information from the Gods that you need to know, but your natural warg abilities will take years to awaken and bond with her, and that's assuming you spent every moment you could on that. Realistically, it would take decades, and we cannot wait that long." A vial sealed with a thick wax cap was pushed into his hand. "That is an elixir that will forcibly open your bond to her so that you can communicate freely."

"Idgra?" The direwolf twisted to look at him. "That's your name?" She nodded.

He stared. Wolves weren't supposed to smart enough to fucking nod. He looked at the vial in his hand.

"What's the catch?" he asked.

"You will lose the ability to warg into any animal other than Idgra, as well as any possibility to develop into a greenseer, and you will be bonded so deeply that when one of you passes, the other will likely follow before too long."

He shot Vine a sharp look.

"Direwolves can live up to fifty years," she added, "likely longer with good food and care. I would bet that she outlives you, even if you die of old age, as she's only five."

He stared at her, then the vial, then his gaze drifted to the looming shadow and gleaming eyes of… Idgra. The unnaturally intelligent direwolf. Who had been sent by the Old Gods.

With a general sense of fuck it, Torrhen broke the wax cap and downed the elixir in a single gulp.

Rather expectedly, it was utterly vile. 

He grimaced as it sludged down the back of his throat, suppressing the reflex to hack it back up. 

"It will take some time to take effect," Vine said as the former King in the North dove for the nearest wine skin, "A few hours most likely."

After several desperate gulps he asked 

"What can I expect?"

"How does one describe color to a blind man who has had his eyes opened for the first time? I have heard wargs and skinchangers describe it through all allegories and idioms of sight or touch, and no two descriptions are the same. Though given your singular link… I suspect you might describe it as a corridor in your mind, or maybe a window? Neither the Common nor Old Tongues have the vocabulary to properly describe it."

Torrhen hummed as he closed his eyes, feeling around inside his head. There was a… fuzziness, that seemed to have something hidden in it. Or behind it? He began to reach for it.

"…Don't push yourself Lord Stark, the bond will form on its own over the next few – "

There was a discontinuity, and he saw himself topple backwards on his cot, now able to see everything in decent detail despite the ambient light not getting any brighter, though all color was washed out. It was so jarring he very nearly lost his fragile grip on… this. Was he warged into Idgra? Like in the old stories?

Vine sighed loudly, exasperation wafting from her. His head turned without his input to look at the Child and found her giving him (them?) a particularly flat look.

"Do neither of you know the meaning of moderation or patience?" she asked, exasperated.

He (Idgra?) promptly stuck out his (her) tongue at her, drawing his attention to the large black nose at the end of the snout protruding from his (her) face. Vine's hand darted forward and snagged their tongue, prompting an indignant warble.

"None of that," Vine chided, lightly bopping them on the nose with her free hand, "I told you what would happen if you stuck your tongue out at me again Idgra."

They whined, giving Vine remorseful puppy eyes.

She responded by slapping something on the tip of their tongue that tasted so foul Torrhen was snapped back to his body. As he sat up and glowered at Vine Idgra whined and whimpered, frantically licking things in an attempt to clean her tongue.

Noticing Torrhen's look she quietly said

"I've raised Idgra since she was a newborn pup, when the Old Gods brought a soul from beyond and fused it to her." His eyebrows shot up at that. "There were some… complications from that, but that is for her to tell." A beam of torchlight from a passing guard slipped through the opening in his tent, illuminated a sad smile on her face and glinted off a tear on her cheek. "Take care of her for me, will you?"

"…Aye. With my life."

"Thank you."

Vine rose and slipped out the entrance to his tent. He was unsurprised to hear no shouts of alarm, given that she had also reached his tent undetected, but that wouldn't stop him from lambasting his men in the morning. 

Castle Black, 3AC

Torrhen Stark sat in a spare room in Castle Black, quietly scribbling in a leather-bound book, Idgra curled around his feet, keeping his toes and shins warm as he waited for the person he was meeting to arrive. It was a fairly domestic scene, so long as no one saw what the Lord of the North was drawing. A cut-away diagram of a triple-expansion steam engine was taking shape on the page, Idgra watching through his eyes and sending pointers through their link, other pages holding cut-aways of various sub-components. 

It was without a doubt a revolutionary technology that would usher in an age of prosperity for the North, and the world.

It was also something that he would never see constructed in his lifetime. Nor, he suspected, would his sons or grandsons live to see it either.

Having the plans was all well and good, but no one in Westeros, nor Essos, knew how to make the alloys needed for the engine, as even the best castle-forged steel would quickly rust away from steam exposure, and that was ignoring that no smith could forge parts large enough for the engine to actually be practical. An engine small enough to fit on one's desk, while an interesting demonstration piece, wasn't useful.

True, they might be able to manage to make a large enough engine with thicker parts made from bronze, and building a foundry capable of casting such parts was a solvable issue, but bronze was expensive, and most of Westeros' copper mines were located in the Vale.

Supposedly there were steels capable of handling this, but Idgra was unable to convey how to make them through the images and thought-impressions she communicated through the bond. They had both hoped that she would have been able to communicate with actual language, but it was not to be. Though their bond was still steadily, though slowly, deepening, so it might yet be possible in the future. They could hope. He could now understand more complex thought-concepts that would have been garbled into unintelligibility had Idgra tried to communicate them to him last year.

The deepening bond also made it clear that Idgra's knowledge was… incomplete. Which was disappointing… but not surprising. Enhanced by the Old Gods far beyond what her species was supposed to be capable of or not, there was only so much divinely-granted knowledge a mind could hold.

She had the broad strokes, the crucial and vital insights that proved that it could be done. It was the details that were missing, details that could be filled in should enough learned and intelligent men invest the needed time and effort into them.

Which was a problem in of itself, for it would be a cold day in the hells before he let those southerners in the Citadel get their greedy claws on this god-given knowledge.

If everything went well he'd begin the process of solving that today. For Idgra hadn't just shown him insights into machines and concepts, but also things certain parties would, hopefully, give a lot to know.

A roar rattled the windows of the room, causing Torrhen to still. After a moment he replaced the quill in the inkpot and carefully blew to dry the ink. As he stowed the writing supplies Idgra stood, did a full body shake and stretch, then started to don her harness, Ice and a pair of panniers still strapped to it. She couldn't tighten the belts, but she could thread herself through the head and foreleg holes.

They exited the room, Torrhen donning a heavy woolen cloak, in time to see a Black Brother jogging towards them.

"I heard him arrive," Torrhen said, pre-empting the watchman, "lead the way."

Balerion the Black Dread had landed outside Castle Black as the courtyard was too small for him, King Aegon in quiet conversation with the Lord Commander as he surveyed the castle and the Wall. Torrhen politely waited a distance away, taking the opportunity to center himself. A lot was riding on this. Idgra sat next to him, brushing her shoulder against his and sending encouragement through their bond. The crunch of snow drew his attention to the King approaching him. He knelt.

"Your Grace."

"Rise, Lord Stark. What is this threat you have found?"

Torrhen rose, then gave a pointed look at the curious Black Brothers who had gathered to watch them.

"Might we have that conversation atop the Wall, your Grace? It is your prerogative to inform who you wish, but I assume you would approve of removing the possibility of any tongues wagging. The Wall is large enough to support Balerion."

The king gave him a long look, but nodded and turned back to the Black Dread. Torrhen and Idgra likewise hurried to the nearest iron cage and began their ascent. After the Watchmen manning the wall were sent back down King Aegon approached, the Black Dread looming behind him.

"Well?"

"I bring news of multiple threats your Grace, but while none are imminent action will need to be taken soonish to prevent them from developing into crises. Would you like me to start with the greatest threat, which will also take the longest to manifest, or would you like me to start with the lessor, but more immediate one?"

The king considered.

"The latter first."

"The maesters are going to be a problem."

"Explain."

"The Citadel believes that magic no longer exists and the world can be explained purely though scientific observation."

King Aegeon Targaryen, dragonrider, wordlessly gestured to Balerion, The Black Dread, the largest dragon alive.

"Aye," Torrhen said wryly, "You and your dynasty proves them wrong completely and utterly. But they have been insisting on that for generations. They're not going to accept that."

"You think they're going to revolt."

"Nothing so obvious. The maesters are collection of the smartest, most learned men in Westeros. They also know that no one will raise a sword in their defense, so they are going to be cautious and enact very long term low risk plans, intending to whittle away at your dynasty until it topples."

"Such as?" The King asked, scowling.

"Did you know that lead is a slow acting poison that addles the mind and can cause insanity, your Grace?"

"…I did not."

"It's not well known. Lead can leach into food and drink through several ways, but the most common is through pewter tableware and pipes that carry water. Some sweeteners and paints also contain lead, though I don't know how to test for that. No taste tester would catch this, as the lead concentrations would be too low to taste. But the damage lead causes is cumulative, building up over time. By the time symptoms start to appear in five to ten years, it is already much too late. Children are especially vulnerable."

His Grace nodded.

"Are there other materials that might be used?"

"Arsenic and asbestos are the other two that would be over-looked. Quicksilver is extremely toxic as well, and is occasionally used in tonics by hacks and fraudsters."

"What about copper or iron?"

"Those are actually needed for proper health, surprisingly. It is possible to poison someone with excesses of them but the amount needed would be easily noticed."

King Aegon thought for a long moment.

"…The maesters have near total control over ravens…" he mused.

"And many lesser lords don't know their letters," Torrhen added, "Change or misread a word or two here, lose a message there…"

The king nodded.

"…Do you have any names?" The king asked.

"I wish I did," Torrhen replied honestly, "but they're too good at covering their tracks. Worse, their antipathy against magic is institutionalized, a purge would only solve the problem for a generation or two. And given how spread out they are there's no way to get them all before some flee."

"And completely destroying the order would cripple the kingdom."

"Aye. We have to break their monopoly first before we can deal with them. The realm is still recovering from your conquest, and the lords don't yet have your measure. In the past the Citadel has stifled any competition through legal and less-than-legal means as maesters have the ears of the lords of the realms. We won't get another opportunity like this for centuries."

"…You have a plan?"

"Parts of one. I don't know enough about the intricacies of the southern houses to give you a full one."

Keeping his hands away from Ice Torrhen reached into Idgra's left pannier and retrieved two leather-bound journals that he offered to the king.

"Options and ideas, your Grace."

King Aegon took them and briefly flipped through them before stowing them in Balerion's saddlebags.

"And what of the other threat?" He asked as he returned.

"That requires a bit of history to provide the needed context I'm afraid, though considering your ancestors were involved you might find it interesting."

The King raised an eyebrow and gestured for him to continue.

"One thing that has been forgotten about the War for the Dawn was that dragonriders were present, forming the hammer to the First Men's anvil."

"Why were they forgotten?"

"My best guess is that after they left to found Valyria the First Men downplayed their accomplishments, and after centuries or millennia they were eventually left out altogether. But they were crucial in turning the tide against the Others, especially when the White Walkers got creative in response to the war turning against them."

"They can't have lasted long beneath the might of dragons."

"Many thought the same when the dragons inflicted the first major defeats on the Walkers," Torrhen replied gravely, "they quickly discovered that the enchanted ice the Walkers use as weapons can pierce dragon scales as easily as bronze plate or flesh, and the Walkers could throw ice javelins high enough to down dragons in flight. They also discovered that Walkers could reanimate dead dragons. But despite that the arrival of dragons under Azor Ahai did permanently turn the tide. Eventually the Night King fell to the combined might of Azor Ahai and Bran Stark the First, also known as Bran the Builder."

"How is this relevant?"

Torrhen gestured to the Wall.

"Would my ancestors have gone to the trouble to build the Wall if the only threat was Wildlings armed with stone and bronze?"

"…no. But that does not mean the threat it was built to guard against still exists. Our ancestors would never allow such a threat to persist."

"They tried, your Grace. After the death of their leader and greatest general the surviving Walkers fled north to their citadel of Hopemourne, far into the Lands of Always Winter, pursued by the Army of the Dawn. Unfortunately, the Others had enough magical strength, so close to their birthplace, that they conjured a blizzard so cold that even dragonriders were freezing to death on the backs of their dragons. I saw dragons so desperate to keep their dying riders alive in the sheer cold that they set them on fire with their breath."

"You saw."

Torrhen cursed in his head.

"Yes. After I bent the knee to you the Old Gods sent Idgra," he gestured towards the direwolf "as a reward for having the courage to do the right thing, and through her I see visions of the past and of possible futures."

"A Dragon Dreamer," King Aegon murmured.

"They're known as Greenseers here in the North, your Grace."

"…You said possible futures?"

"Aye. I see different ways the Walkers can assault the North. The most common are where the Bays freeze and the Walkers march their dead army around the Wall, though they do sometimes attempt to force their way through if the Night's Watch is on the verge of collapse or has fallen. The only constant is that we have three hundred years before they begin their campaign, give or take a few years."

"Why not attack sooner?"

"In the aftermath of the failed expedition Bran the Builder began the construction of the Wall, but in order to buy time for the Wall to be completed the dragonriders enacted a great warding to prevent new Walkers from being created. They believed that it would only be a few decades until the Great Other managed to break the warding or figured out a work around, but for once they overestimated the remaining strength of the Others. The warding held as decades turned to centuries, then to millennia. The catch was that to power the ward they had to link it to a powerful magical nexus, and as Westeros' was being used to build and maintain the Wall, they went to the most powerful nexus they knew of, the Fourteen Flames of Valyria."

"But the Fourteen Flames have been destroyed."

"And the warding with them. Even if no Walkers survived the millennia, the Great Other still dwells in Hopemourne, and can create new ones. It remembers its last defeat, and will be cautious. Which brings us to your dynasty, your Grace."

"Explain."

"Without dragons and a united Westeros, we lose the second War for the Dawn," Torrhen said bluntly, "And three hundred years is more than long enough for a devastating civil war to erupt over the Iron Throne between your descendants. Dragon will fight against Dragon, which will devastate their already endangered numbers, especially if the losers of the war decide to deny the victors as many unbonded dragons as they can as a last act of spite. This nearly always drops the population below the level that can be recovered from, especially with many actors doing their best to ensure no new dragons survive to adulthood, and the species dies out, followed by the Targaryen dynasty. This cannot be allowed to happen."

King Aegon looked grim. It was clear he could easily picture the scenario all too clearly.

"And what do you suggest, Dreamer?"

"A new dragon colony needs to be established, away from and out of sight of the power struggles and intrigue of the capital," Torrhen answered, choosing to ignore what the king called him as he retrieved three more journals from Idgra's other pannier and offered them to his King, "I recommend either Bear Island or Skagos for the colony, the third is for an order to take care of the dragons and try to rediscover lost dragonlore."

"Both of which are beholden to the North," the king noted.

"They are also the furthest from King's Landing. Of the two I recommend Skagos. The island is difficult and treacherous to reach by ship, has good fishing nearby to provide food, and is sparsely populated. Given the rumors that regularly make their way from the island no one would think twice at rumors of dragons coming from there. The only catch is that the Skagosi only respect individual strength, not a person's family, though that could be a boon."

The King hummed to himself as briefly flipped though the journals before looking up.

"Anything else?"

Torrhen thought about raising concerns about the long-term stability of the Targaryen line if they continued to practice incest, but decided he had pushed his luck far enough. Idgra, feeling the direction of his thoughts, also sent him an image of his family tree, the locations for his yet unborn grandsons and great-grandsons highlighted. He sent back agreement, that would be their concern to raise. That said,

"Other than that I strongly recommend that you set up some mechanism to remove someone wholly unsuitable from the throne without having to resort to a civil war like I have done in the North, no, your Grace."

"The let's get back to Castle Black. It's freezing and I want to have another conversation with the Lord Commander."

Winterfell, 5AC

Idgra was in heat again. Torrhen could feel the need to fuck echoing though their bond, always there in the back of his mind and quite distracting as it kindled his own lust. It was annoying enough that he had given her his permission to fuck the larger hounds just to put an end to it, but she wanted a direwolf that wasn't one of her offspring, not a hound. 

The great direwolf grumbled and shifted uncomfortably from her position by the hearth in the Lord's Solar as Torrhen managed the administration of the North. Torrhen sighed.

"Just go fuck one of the hounds, Idgra," he grumbled.

Refusal. Direwolf.

He sighed.

"There aren't any of those south of the Wall other than the wolves you birthed and bonded to my children," he reminded her.

This time she sent the image of North Wind and Astral Lights, her son and daughter, mating, followed by his newly born grandson looking despondent at a malformed pup, then the thought-concept of great-grandchild and absence-in-place-of-wolf.

He stilled.

"And what do you propose to fix that?"

Rider holding the Stark standard at head of a host. A map of the wall with an arrow being drawn northwards, then back south. The rider again, but this time accompanied by direwolves, giants, mammoths, and Children of the Forest, including Vine. 

That took a moment to parse.

"An expedition North of the Wall? You think that would work?"

Determination, hint of desperation. Direwolf and man walking side by side, the direwolf with harness and lead, paired with the image of man walking away from the bones of a direwolf.

"Direwolves will die out if not domesticated?"

Agreement. Defiance paired with a setting sun. Wolf, the concept of many years passing, paired with the wolf slowly morphing into a dog. Done-before. Do-again.

"I see. You do know that if direwolves are successfully domesticated they won't remain direwolves?"

Sad acknowledgement. Torrhen rekindling a dying campfire. Herself leading a Stark bannerman towards Vine.

"…I suppose that would allow me to keep constant tabs on the expedition. It will take time to organize though."

Agreement. Do-right, first. Patience.

Winterfell, 8AC

Torrhen made his way down to the castle's courtyard, keeping his anticipation from showing. Idgra was being coy about some of the details, but his vassals had already sent ravens confirming that the expedition had been wildly successful. 

His lords had been understandably skeptical when he had announced the expedition, but between the favor of the Old Gods and how Idgra's knowledge had already created a noticeable improvement to the North they had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

And by the reports it had paid off handsomely. 

Three tribes of giants and their mammoths, dozens of rare wood and plant seeds and cuttings, nuggets of precious metals, three dozen Children, a wildling tribe that decided to bend the knee and would be inducted into the North under the same rules as the Mountain Clans – his lords had not been happy about that, but they had an unusually large number of wargs, skinchangers, and a greenseer and were being persecuted by their neighbors, as such Torrhen wanted them in the North – and the whole point of the expedition: a dozen direwolves.

Idgra had let him know when she had the castle in sight and he had told the servants when to expect her, which had utterly baffled them, especially since he hadn't left his Solar and it was another hour before the guards spotted them.

Torrhen was eagerly looking forward to the reunion, it had been a very long seven months without Idgra. Even with the link it was surprising how much he had missed the oversized wolf.

They timed it perfectly. The moment Torrhen reached his position as head of the castle Idgra lead the expedition through the gatehouse, tail wagging furiously and a familiar Child sitting side-saddle on her back. He managed to restrain his surprise to merely raised eyebrows, though his retinue weren't so restrained.

"Welcome to Winterfell," the Lord of the North proclaimed, "It is good to see you, Vine."

"It is good to see you too, Lord Stark," Vine replied, ignoring the muttering of everyone trying to figure out how he knew her name, "The Old Gods chose well. The confusion you caused your lords by sending a raven to arrive shortly before we did was most amusing."

Torrhen smirked at that, but quickly returned to a solemn expression.

"As the Lord of the North, it is my responsibility to ensure the prosperity of the North. I say that for too long we have allowed our legends to fade to myth, it is time we rekindled the magic of old. Will you help me, Forest Singer?"

Vine smiled.

Chapter Text

…What was discussed between Aegon the Conqueror and Torrhen Stark atop the Wall will likely never be known. What is known is that after the king returned to the capital he immediately secluded himself with his sister-wives for a day before emerging. While Visenya left for Dragonstone and then vanished northward, not seen for a month, Aegon proclaimed that the Citadel would be unable to produce enough maesters to fulfil the needs of his kingdom, and that each kingdom was required to establish their own center of learning.

This, obviously, angered both the Citadel and the Reach, though when they protested Aegon pointed out that many keeps, and not small ones, did not have a maester and hadn't seen one in decades, and that many of the larger settlements needed more than one to deal with the sheer work generated, yet only had one very overworked maester.

Most of the Lords Paramount's efforts in following this directed were half-hearted at best, the colleges established clearly inferior to the Citadel, with the exception of Winterfell University which made a credible, though doomed, attempt to achieve parity…

-Founding of the United Kingdoms of Westeros, 0-10AC, by Maester Stockland, written 109AC

"Let the Maesters cling to their laurels and entitlement. They have little else. When was the last time a Maester invented something that measurably improved people's lives? We do that regularly here."

-Nory Liddle, Fifth headmaster of Winterfell University.

Be careful in Dorne, a dragon will fall if you are reckless. Nothing is invulnerable.

-Raven from Torrhen to Aegon shortly before the ill-fated attempted conquest of Dorne resulting in the death of Meraxes and Rhaenys.

"The Starks did warn me, but I was expecting treachery towards us riders, not that Meraxes would fall in battle."

Aegon to Visenya after Rhaenys' death.

…Torrhen Stark decided to abdicate his position as Head of House Stark and Warden of the North in 20AC in favor of his son and heir Brandon. His reasons for this were to ensure a smooth transfer of power and more time to transcribe Idgra's divinely-granted knowledge, though he later admitted that not wanting to deal with the chronic headaches involved in ruling the North played a part. While he did function as an advisor to Brandon, more of his time and effort was spent in ensuring the Winterfell University was properly established...

…In 34AC, Torrhen's health started to deteriorate, and crashed in late 35AC. He died on the third day of the second moon of 36AC, his family in attendance, and was mourned across the North, then Crown Prince Aenys attending his funeral to pay his respects on behalf of House Targaryen as Aegon was in too poor of health to attend himself. 

After his death Idgra slowly wasted away despite the North's best efforts, something that was sadly expected and predicted by Torrhen before his death, dying a bit over a year later. The pair are entombed side by side in Winterfell's crypts.

Thus ended the life of Torrhen Stark, Blessed of the Old Gods, The King who Knelt, Last King of Winter.

-Biography of Torrhen Stark by Master Historian Torrhen Whitesmith, 102AC

…Given the legends around the Starks of old, no one was particularly surprised when Torrhen's children bonded with the pups Idgra whelped and revealed themselves to be wargs, though it wasn't until the First Expedition brought back wargs that they could actually begin their training in earnest. 

This resulted in problems with the southern kingdoms. In 12 AC Ronnel Arryn accused his wife, Serena Stark, of devilry and witchcraft and attempted to have her killed. This failed due to Serena somehow knowing his intentions – some say she received a warning from her father who had a greendream, had a greendream herself, or was warned by a loyal servant – and escaped the Eyrie on the back of her direwolf Astral Lights, disappearing into the mountains.

While Serena and her direwolf would eventually be safely returned to the North with her marriage annulled thanks to the direct – and furious – intervention of Aegon the Conqueror, relations between the North and the rest of Westeros became noticeably strained, especially with the highly pious Reach.

It was due to this, and other exploits by the Starks, that the then Lord Karstark decided to wed his second son to a spearwife warg he had inadvertently "stolen" on the Third Expedition and was smitten with, banking on the close bloodline ties the Karstarks had with the Starks. His gamble paid off when she bore two wargs and a greenseer. 

By 40AC, being a warg changed from something to be persecuted for to being highly coveted by the North's nobility, who were eager to add the ability to their bloodlines, and didn't particularly care if the warg was of smallfolk or Wildling descent.

A conservative faction, led by the Boltons, loudly railed against this "dirtying of noble blood", but were largely ignored by those not sworn to them, and as their liege lords were wargs themselves they couldn't protest too loudly.

By 80AC, there were enough nascent wargs that Winterfell University opened dedicated classes to train wargs in their powers, under the instruction of aging Elder Singer Vine…

-Wargs of the North, by Historian Brendan Snow, 203AC

…Wargs are another superstition of the North and are as real as grumpkins, snarks, giants, and Children of the Forest, which is to say not at all. These supposed "wargs" are merely men capable of training their animals very well…

-Superstitions of the North, Maester Mallister, 111AC

…The 6AC reformation of the Night's Watch was one of its most significant, as for the first time it allowed Black Brothers to retire. Black Brothers still forsake any and all prior allegiances upon taking the Black and that is not reversed upon retiring, instead after twenty years of service a volunteer may choose to retire to settle a small farmstead in the Gift, and later the New Gift, or receive a small amount of coin to set up a trade in the same.

Noticeably, this is not offered to those sent to the Wall in lieu of execution for capital crimes, such as rape, murder, banditry, etcetera. However, those sent to the Wall for political reasons are in a purposefully vague area, as they generally don't fall under either criminal or volunteer and no category is established for them, meaning in practice it's often the Lord Commander who gets to decide where they fall on an individual basis.

The objective of the reformation was to halt the slow but steady decline of the Night's Watch by both attracting more volunteers and improving the order's economic health by increasing the prosperity of the Gift. In this, it succeeded, as at the time this is written over half the castles are manned and the remainder can be brought to full readiness in under a year should it be needed, and the Gift, while not the most prosperous region in the North, is still considered to be a peer to the like of The Barrowlands, Deepwood Motte, or the Dreadfort.

The Night's Watch Rebellion in 50AC that led to the death of Lord Walton Stark resulted in further reforms in regards to how political dissidents were integrated into the Watch…

-The Shield that Guards the Ream of Men, by Eddard Woodstark, Historian and retired First Ranger, 231AC

…Durning the reign of Aenys I the North sent a volunteer force to assist in putting down the rebellion in the Riverlands that arose after the death of the Conqueror, though no assistance was given to the Vale, the North having neither forgotten nor forgiven Ronnel Arryn for his treatment of their once-princess Serena Stark.

Despite Maegor initially being skeptical of the force due to it mostly consisting of aging veterans and whitebeards when he visited it before going to deal with the situation in the Vale, undoubtedly men who would have "gone hunting" during the winter, he was extremely pleased by the Northmen's performance and counted the force among his most elite formations, much to the ire of the Faith Militant as the Northerners cheerfully distained the Seven and loudly proclaimed their faith in the Old Gods… 

…Maegor's first act when he returned to the Seven Kingdoms was to send a letter to the Starks requesting another volunteer force to help deal with the Faith Militant. This resulted in a much larger volunteer force coming south compared to the last one, surprising many. When asked, Gallart Glover, uncle to the then Lord Glover, who led the force, said

"We were told we could crack Andal skulls and be thanked for the privilege. Why wouldn't we come?"

As those who worshiped the Seven often were reluctant to engage the Faith Militant, the Northerners became Maegor's preferred option to break the order wherever he became aware of them, turning a blind eye to how the Old Gods worshipers left many septs in ruins, further straining relations between the North and the other kingdoms.

This meant the Northerners also had a front row seat to Maegor's increasing madness as they spent the rest of his rule in the south, hunting the Faith Militant…

-The Southern Expeditions, Historian Joer Ravenshield

…In 48AC Aegon's Contingency, the method Aegon the Conqueror left to remove an unworthy king peacefully, was invoked for the first time. The only reason it took so long was that the lords didn't know how Maegor would react, and no one wanted to risk facing Balerion.

The four Lord Paramounts of the south called for the Contingency to be invoked simultaneously, which instantly destroyed Maegor's legitimacy as that was the number needed to remove a king from the throne – Aegon had planned for Dorne to bring the number of Lord Paramounts to seven when he set it up – even as Jaehaerys put forward his candidacy.

 As expected, Maegor was furious, raging through the Red Keep, before grabbing Blackfyre and flying to Winterfell, which was not expected.

The Northmen like to claim that Lord Walton Stark, who ascended when his father Brandon retired in 40AC, would have joined the other Lords in denouncing Maegor had he known the Contingency was being invoked, but considering how the North had been Maegor's staunchest supporters that reeks of revisionist history.

Regardless, upon arriving at Winterfell Maegor, Lord Stark, and a supposed greenseer sequestered themselves in the godswood for a full day.

What transpired there is not known, even in the North, but the next day a subdued Maegor left for Skagos, where he spent a week before returning south. 

He then spent two months rampaging through Westeros, destroying every trace of the Faith Militant with dragonfire, allowing Jaehaerys to seize the reins of power mostly uncontested, but when Jaehaerys went to seize the Iron Throne Maegor returned and challenged him to a duel, man to man, no dragons involved. The new king accepted, and slew Maegor the Cruel after a short yet vicious fight, cementing his rule with a storied triumph of Good over Evil.

-Maegor's Reign and Fall, Maester Cressard, 77AC

"Maegor let me kill him. He declined all offers of armor or even a shield, determined to face me in nothing but his riding leathers while I was in full plate. At the end, he knew what had to happen for the good of the realm, and made certain it would come to pass."

-King Jaehaerys I Targaryen to Alysanne Targaryen. 

…The relation between the North and the Iron Throne during the reign of Jaehaerys was defined by two events. The first was the Night's Watch Rebellion, where Jaehaerys exiled so many supporters of the Faith Militant and Maegor that they raised their banners in revolt, resulting in the death of Lord Walton Stark.

Aleric Stark blamed the king for sending so many men to the Wall that the Night's Watch's loyal men couldn't keep them under control, even with the 6AC reforms increasing the Watch's numbers of volunteers.

The second was the forced donation of the New Gift to the Watch. Under pressure from the Southern lords who still held a grudge from when the North answered Maegor's call for men, even though Maegor was the undisputed King at the time and the order was lawful, and reactionary alarm to the North reaching equal prosperity to the Stormlands and looking to surpass them, King Jaehaerys forced the New Gift to be given to the Night's Watch, Lord Aleric Stark vehement protests falling on deaf ears.

The first event left the North angry at the Iron Throne's negligence. The second left them feeling betrayed. 

Towards the end of his life Jaehaerys would privately admit that the New Gift was one of the biggest mistakes he made in his reign.

The king realized the problem he had caused when many Northern traders decided that they would rather trade with the Free Cities rather than the rest of Westeros, even with lower profits and higher risks. Contrary to popular folklore most merchants didn't do this, it wasn't even half, but when over a third of a kingdom's trade abruptly stopped doing business with the rest of Westeros it sent shockwaves through the kingdoms' economies.

This unrest combined with the fear that the North would cut off trade entirely – many debate how likely that would happen, but none can dispute there was a real fear of it at the time – gave Jaehaerys the political capital and leeway with the southern lords to try and make amends to the North, ignoring the calls from his less intelligent lords to simply force the North to trade with the other kingdoms. He managed to appease the North with tax breaks, a lessening of tariffs on trade between the North and the other kingdoms, and financing the Eighth, and final, Expedition beyond the Wall.

But the North never forgot the slight. Half a century after Torrhen Stark bent the knee, the honeymoon between the North and the Iron Throne was over. 

For the rest of King Jaehaerys' reign, and that of Viserys', the North largely kept to itself, as it had before the Conquest, having little political impact or influence on the rest of Westeros. That changed in the last stages of the Dance…

-The North and the Iron Throne, by Historian Gerrart Forrester, 256AC

For the first half-century after the founding of Winterfell University the gods-given knowledge from Idgra largely remained unsolved as the University was set up. True, Torrhen Stark implemented many of the policies the Gods showed him, such as crop rotation, replacing trees that were cut down to prevent deforestation, ringing new farms with trees to prevent wind from blowing away topsoil, etcetera. 

But the world changing parts of Idgra's knowledge, the inventions… almost no work had been done on them by the time Jaehaerys took the throne. The reason it took so long was that the Citadel absolutely refused to provide any assistance with establishing the University, not even sending a single book. To be fair, the Citadel refused to help establish any of the centers of learning Aegon the Conqueror ordered established, but it meant the North had to build things from scratch, and that took time.

There were some early successes though. Concrete, for instance, was discovered in 19AC, though mass production wasn't set up until 31AC. The printing press was another, Torrhen Stark himself having been the driving force behind that one, invented in 9AC though only a handful of presses were built – mainly due to a lack of demand for books that wouldn't significantly change until after the Dance of Dragons.

Quite a few prototypes were made during this time, but most fell by the wayside due to issues in design, construction, and/or excessive cost, save for a small handful that fulfilled niche roles. If looked at as proofs of concepts then they could be considered successes, but it was generally agreed that the underlying sciences and manufacturing infrastructure needed to be developed before the designs could be made viable.

The first hints of the coming renaissance appeared in the eighth decade, when several innovations combined with newly developed infrastructure to revolutionize shipbuilding…

-A History of Innovation, Historian Jerrard Wull, 201AC

…In 82AC the North revolutionized naval warfare when the first galleon, White Harbor's Wrath, hit the water from its slipway. At 152ft at the waterline, and with a beam of 33ft, it was half again larger than the largest ship in either Westeros' or Braavos' navies… and there were another five ships of equal size under construction in White Harbor and another three laid down at the still newly founded Dragon Harbor on the west coast.

The size alone would have been shock enough, but it was the other inventions that caused the true revolution, mainly the compact ballistae in a battery deck and full-rigged sail plan the galleons mounted. Compared to previous ballistae designs the compact ballistae featured a bow made of a special spring steel alloy and dual cams, allowing it to be significantly smaller horizontally than non-compact ballistae while matching them in power and range. The main trade off was in cost, complexity, and increased maintenance.

There had been attempts to mount artillery on ships before, but other than scorpions, which were more anti-personnel than anti-ship, no previous attempts were successful. The inaccuracy of catapults meant that they were never truly considered, while the size of ballistae meant that only the largest of war galleys (which were less than half the size of the average galleon) could take them, and even then only one or two situated in the fore and/or aft castles. That much weight high up in the ship caused stability and seakeeping problems however, and thus were extremely unpopular among captains and ship designers.

So the knowledge that the Wrath-class galleon carried twenty ballistae (eight on the broadside, two pointing fore/aft) with another twenty scorpions on the main deck and upperworks was terrifying. As was proven during the Dance of Dragons, your average war galley could take between seven and ten hits from a ballistae before being left combat ineffective, while a longship, being much more lightly built, could only take two or three hits, and would likely founder afterwards. 

In comparison, southern-built galleons (once they built them) could take several dozen hits from ballistae and northern-built ones, with their thicker hulls and stronger frames, could take significantly more.

The galleon wasn't a perfect ship however. It was a bit too large for oars to be effective, which made docking at piers a long, stressful, and somewhat dangerous affair, even after major ports built deepwater docks to service them. They were also expensive to build and run, not ruinously so, but enough that between the cost and difficulty in operating them the North never had more than twenty galleons at any one time, and other navies had similar numbers.

As such production shifted to producing light galleons, or started with light galleons for everyone other than the North, which were galleon-style ships of less than 100ft in length at the waterline and six-and-ten ballistae or fewer. The North's Wolf-class, while not the first light galleon to hit the water, quickly became the standard everyone compared to. At 82ft in length, 21 ft in width, twelve compact ballistae (five a side, plus one fore and aft) and eight scorpions (four on the one-deck high forecastle and aftcastle), its signature feature was that the battery deck was also the main deck through the midships section, and that the broadside ballistae were offset to allow sufficient room to maneuver around them. Light galleons, while also being cheaper and easier to run than full galleons, were also small enough that they could reasonably row themselves into port and dock at piers, which resulted in many living a double life as merchantmen while the galleons became the symbol of the military fleets….

…There has long been a persistent rumor in the North that the reason the southern kingdoms didn't produce a full galleon until 102AC, the same year the North's prestige ship, the grand galleon Pride of the North, was launched, was because they couldn't see how superior galleons were over the ships that came before them (reasons why vary depending on the telling).

This is patently untrue. 

The southerners and Free cities instantly recognized that the galleon represented a paradigm shift the moment they saw it, and would have immediately started construction of their own had they been able. 

But they were not able.

Even if one ignores that they had to invent their own versions of the compact ballistae, which are, to this day, inferior to the North's versions due to the North's consistent lead in metallurgy, the largest slipways and drydocks, owned by the Redwynes, could only accommodate vessels up to 127ft in length and 30 ft in width, and there were only three of such slipways and docks.

They also knew that they could not wait until they could produce galleons of their own, indeed it wouldn't be until 94AC that the southern kingdoms could begin to produce light galleons, four years after the North, and their first attempts had such significant problems in construction and performance that they didn't shift to sole production until 100AC. 

Enter the galleyass as an interim solution. Built as an oversized war galley with four (non-compact) ballistae mounted along the centerline between the mast and fore/aft castles on mounts that allowed them to fire over either broadside, the southern kingdoms and Free Cities began to produce them in mass as while they couldn't stand up to a galleon, or a light galleon, in a one-on-one fight, it was still heavily armed enough to pose a threat to the new warships. Their shallower draft also meant they could go places galleons couldn't, and is the reason Braavos still produces galleyasses given the shallow waters of and around their lagoon… 

…As with many naval matters, the introduction of prestige ships, ships that are much larger and more powerful than their contemporaries to demonstrate their builder's industrial and technological might, is the fault of the North.

The grand galleon Pride of the North was, and remains to this day, the largest and most powerful ship ever built, 300ft at the waterline, a 59ft beam, two battery decks with two-and-thirty compact ballistae a side (six-and-ten per deck), thirty scorpions, and a thick hull that is impervious to ballistae shots at long range.

The other kingdoms tried to build similar or even larger prestige ships, but without Idgra's insights none lasted longer than twenty years before they worked themselves apart and had to be scrapped. Even with Idgra's insights the Pride has to be drydocked every few decades for repairs. There is universal consensus that the North's flagship is at the absolute limit as to how big it is possible to build a ship.

Unable to match the Pride, other navies settled for demonstrating their wealth through the use of rare and expensive materials for their prestige ships…

-History of Naval Development, Master Historian Willias Manderly, 268AC

…The North hoards its innovations like a miser does coin. Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to find any information of this Idgra, much less her supposed innovations. She is supposedly a contemporary of Torrhen Stark, yet the only Idgra from that time period that we can find is the man's pet direwolf.

That's not to say we have had no success. The concrete that was used to build the North's road network has proven to be of immense use, as well as their methods of crop rotation, accounting, stellar navigation, semaphore towers, and more. 

Unfortunately even the Master of Whispers has no idea as to how the North keeps catching our and his spies…

-Letter from Grand Maester Elysar to the Conclave of the Citadel, 83AC.

All those accomplishments you listed were achieved by your predecessors or others. The Lords are demanding answers from us and we cannot give them nothing. Find out how the North managed to build such things….

-Letter from the Conclave to Grand Maester Elysar in response to his previous letter. 

Chapter Text

…yet the North had surprisingly little impact on the outcome of the Dance. The five thousand strong Winter Wolves were betrayed and slaughtered by dragonfire at First Tumbletown, and while the Wolves had brought scorpions and two ballistae in anti-air mounts, those were the first things that burned when the two traitorous dragonriders turned their cloaks. And by the time the North's main army, five-and-ten thousand strong, with Lord Cregan Stark at its head, arrived in the south the war had ended. 

Many have asserted the impending arrival of the North's forces was a key driver in the Greens making peace, yet it is unclear if a mere five-and-ten thousand men would have significantly changed anything, and with winter arriving no further reinforcements could come from the North…

…The North's greatest impact was on the Sunset Sea. After the Iron Fleet was destroyed by the might of the Westerlands and the Reach, the North's Western Fleet set sail from Dragon Harbor and came south. 

At the start of the Dance, the Western Fleet consisted of eight galleons (four Wrath-class, three Winter-class, and the flagship Weirwood's Resolve) and six-and-forty light galleons (of which a full twenty were the iconic Wolf-class, which would be a workhorse of the Northern fleets until 200AC). 

Meanwhile the combined fleets of the Westerlands and Reach, once losses inflicted by the Ironborn are taken into account, consisted of three-and-ten galleons, seven-and-eighty light galleons, six-and-thirty galleyasses, and two-and-fifty obsolete war galleys.

On paper, an overwhelming advantage to the Reachmen and Westerlanders. In practice, not quite. The galleys and galleyasses were kept near ports as a final harbor defense, and thus didn't take part in any major naval actions. Of the galleons and light galleons, where the North had only three classes of galleons and four of light galleons, all with extremely similar sailing and handling characteristics, the southern fleets had over two dozen different classes of light galleon alone, and each galleon was essentially unique. In addition, a sizable portion of the southern fleets were made up of first-generation light galleons, which universally had significant structural and/or handling issues and were clearly inferior to their successors, which in turn were noticeably weaker than even their oldest Northern counterparts.

The three-and-thirty surviving longships of the Iron Fleet rallied to the North's fleet, and while they were kept as far from action as possible, they provided far superior spotting and reconnaissance to the ships of the south….

…Compared to the static blockades of the Narrow Sea the naval theater of the Sunset Sea was exceptionally active. The Northern fleet preferred to skirmish, whittling away the strength of the Green's fleets in a series of small engagements where the superior quality of their ships gave them assured victories. 

Lord Redwyne, who was in command of the joint fleets, was not inclined to let the North pick off his forces piecemeal, and tried to force a battle multiple times. Twice the Northern fleet, under Lord Seastark, baited Lord Redwyne out into the open ocean before using the then newly invented sextant and compass to break contact at night, leaving the Green's fleets searching aimlessly for their quarry for several days before they returned to port.

The first time the North did this they sacked many small holdfasts along the coast of the Westerlands before the Greens could return. The second time the North and Ironborn raided Lannisport. 

The defending galleys and galleyasses were quickly smashed aside by the North's warships, which anchored in the harbor and began to bombard the city while Ironborn stormed the port. As part of an agreement with the North the reavers didn't take saltwives or thralls, but were free to seize as much loot as they could carry. 

The raid lasted less than twelve hours before they retreated to their base on the Iron Islands, yet did so much damage it took two generations for Lannisport to recover. 

This caused a significant loss of morale among the Westerland crewed ships, and Lord Lannister's ire nearly cost Lord Redwyne his position as Commander of the Fleets.

Rather desperate due to the political pressure on him due to his failures, Lord Redwyne marshaled the fleet and set sail for the Iron Islands, intending to either force and engagement with Lord Seastark or raze as much of the Iron Islands as he could if the North declined engagement again. They did not.

The Battle of Pyke. The greatest, and largest, naval battle since at least the Doom of Valyria, also rivaling the Battle of the Gullet for the bloodiest. Many books can and have been written on it in great detail, so it will only be summarized here.

Lord Seastark entered the battle with his ships in line astern, while Lord Redwyne attempted to break the North's line and force a melee where he could leverage his superior numbers with a head-on charge. Technically, he managed to do it, but the somewhat calm winds meant that it was incredibly costly. To both sides.

The North lost five galleons (one sunk, one captured, three constructive losses) and two-and-twenty light galleons (five sunk, three captured, four-and-ten constructive losses). The Reach and Westerlands fleets lost eight galleons (three sunk, two captured, three constructive losses) and eight-and-forty light galleons (two-and-ten sunk, nine captured, seven-and-twenty constructive losses).

Lost ships alone does not showcase the sheer damage done to both sides. Two of the North's remaining galleons would be under repair for the rest of the war, with only Wrath of the Bears able to set sail three moons before the Dance's end. After two moons of repairs (neither side had any ships capable of battle without repairs in the aftermath) the North only had two-and-ten light galleons capable of fighting. On the Green's side, none of their remaining galleons left their drydocks before the war's end, and after two moons they had only eight-and-ten light galleons.

Including the loss of men and ships, the North lost Lord Mormont and six lesser lords while the Greens lost Lord Redwyne and Admiral Kevan Lannister, along with six-and-ten lesser lords. Lord Seastark almost perished as well when the galleons Might of the Hightower and Mander's Strength boarded and captured his flagship Weirwood's Resolve (which would be renamed Might of the Reach and serve as the Redwyne fleet's flagship until it caught fire in harbor in 232AC), the head of House Stark's cadet branch throwing himself overboard and swimming to safety with the help of his pet dolphin.

Tactically, the battle was indecisive, the two fleets mutually disengaging from each other after night fell. Strategically, it was a pyrrhic victory for the North.

In the aftermath one would be forgiven for thinking that the North had a credible chance of seizing control of the Sunset Sea, the qualitative superiority more than capable of offsetting the Green's six ship advantage, especially if Lord Seastark could get local numerical parity. Indeed, many have criticized Lord Seastark for not acting aggressively in the moons that followed. Those critics have either forgotten or discarded that the Greens still had almost seventy galleys and galleyasses at this time. 

Obsolete they may be, that was still more than large enough to overwhelm the North's remaining light galleons if they sortied as a single fleet, and that was if none of the remaining light galleons joined it. And so Lord Seastark resumed his strategy of cautious skirmishing and raids, steadily picking off warships a handful at a time. By the end of the Dance the few remaining light galleon captains had taken to adding every galleyass they could find to their squadrons, especially after Wrath of the Bears sailed past Faircastle with five newly built light galleons…

…Some have speculated what might have happened had the Dance continued. An eventual Northern dominance of the Sunset Sea is uncontested by all, the Greens were decisively losing that campaign. But despite what some may want to hear, as a naval invasion is a popular scenario, not much would change once total dominance was achieved. The North and Iron Islands simply did not have enough shipping left to enact either a naval invasion or a blockade…

…There is broad agreement that had the Sea Snake not rejected the North's offer of assistance in blockading the Gullet the Battle of the Gullet would have gone very differently. The Triarchy was slow in developing galleons, the Stepstones favoring the shallower draft of galleys, and thus the fleet they sent consisted of galleys and galleyasses, with a single light galleon acting as flagship… 

…Prince Jacaerys Valeryon's recklessness got himself and Vermax killed when he flew too close to the Triarchy fleet…

…the southern force managing to slip past the Velaryons in the night, allowing them to sack Spicetown…

…come morning the southern force did not manage to escape the vengeful wrath of the Sea Snake…

…in the end only two battered ships made it back to Tyrosh. The unmitigated disaster causing political unrest that took the Triarchy out of the war…

…The Hour of the Wolf is regarded as the definitive end point of the Dance of Dragons.

­-The Dance of Dragons, by Maester Wyman, 241AC

…The meeting Lord Cregan Stark had with King Aegon III at the end of the Hour of the Wolf set the tone for the relationship between the crown and the North once the regency ended. What was discussed is unknown, though given how it left the Dragonbane in a towering rage it presumably touched on dragons at some point…

…Lord Manderly was summarily dismissed as the Hand the moment King Aegon took the throne from his regents, not even receiving a word of thanks from the king for his service, greatly insulting him and the North…

…When informed of the death of the last dragon, a stunted, twisted thing that lingered more than lived, the king is reported to have said "Stark was right" before ordering his master of whispers to investigate the Maesters, resulting in the Grand Maester and several of his assistants being executed for supposedly poisoning the last dragons though the evidence of their supposed guilt was circumstantial and weak…

…Eventually, with great reluctance, late in his reign King Aegon came to believe that his dynasty did, in fact, dragons in order to enforce their will…

…In 154AC King Aegon abruptly left for Skagos, setting sail from King's Landing with only a handful of guards and servants with him, saying that he was "going to solve the dragon problem". How Skagos fit into the "dragon problem" is unknown, though there have long been unsubstantiated rumors of dragons in the far north. 

Unfortunately, the king's ship struck a submerged rock off Skagos' notoriously treacherous coast and foundered. The Skagosi attempted to rescue them, but most drowned or froze to death in the icy waters by the time they could get a boat to them, hampered by having to avoid the very rocks that sank the king's ship.

King Aegon was not one of the handful survivors pulled from the waves, and it is unknown if it was the cold or the sea which claimed him. Even then, most of those survivors would die from illnesses caused by their exposure to the freezing seas. A single lone sailor would eventually return to King's Landing, the sole survivor of the doomed voyage.

-King Aegon III Targaryen the Dragonbane, by Maester Gerard, 177AC

"No, I don't know why Father went to Skagos. Maybe he thought the remoteness would allow him to hatch new dragons without interference?"

-King Daeron I Targaryen

…The North withdrew from southern politics following the Dance of Dragons. Between Aegon the Dragonbane's antipathy, the death of the Stark heir in Dorne, Baelor the Oathbreaker's insane zealotry, and Aegon the Unworthy, who needs no further explanation, this should be unsurprising to any with a decent knowledge of history, but it would still be nearly a century before the North meaningfully engaged with the rest of Westeros, the kingdom's attention turning inwards and becoming insular.

For most this would cause stagnation, yet the North was not focused on preservation, like most insular societies, but innovation. For the seeds Torrhen Stark planted finally began to flower in full. The improvements in food production meant that the North's population began to boom after the winter of 130-136AC, new settlements and holdfasts springing up all over the North. The increase in population allowed more lands and resources to be exploited, and the prosperity generated was funneled back into building more settlements and infrastructure, driving the cycle onwards.

It is a testament to just how underdeveloped the North was that this economic boom lasted over a century before the North had to start looking beyond its borders for resources to feed its ever-growing industry. 

Countless innovations occurred during this time, not all of which were derived from blessed Idgra's knowledge, such as the horse-drawn seed drill, thresher, and harvester, the first steam engines used in mines to pump out water and bad air, canning, modern cartography that produced the first truly accurate and detailed maps, pendulum clocks, and so many, many more.

But there are a few inventions that stand out.

First was that House Clayfield, lessor lords that ruled Ramsgate, finally managed to start plate glass production in 148AC after many false starts and failed attempts over the preceding century, the delta of the Broken Branch river providing the best sand for glass making in the North, and in 155AC they figured out how to produce tempered glass, the strongest glass in the world to this day.

With the harsh winter of 130-136AC still well within living memory, Lord Cregan Stark decreed that glass used in the construction of glass houses must be sold at-cost, a decree that has never been rescinded, House Clayfield receiving partially waved taxes as subsidy. Such was the demand for glass houses that nearly all of the North's glass production was consumed domestically for decades, the few pieces sold outside the North at great mark up being treated more as curiosities than a true threat to Myr's glass monopoly.

As such it wasn't until 180AC that the Myrish realized they had not only had a true competitor in the North, but that the North could produce superior glass to them. When they complained to Aegon IV the Unworthy, he levied an excessively heavy tariff on Northern glass in exchange for numerous gifts from Myr, something that greatly annoyed the North yet domestic demand was such it had barely any impact on the North's glass production.

Ever since the tariff was lifted by Daeron II in 185AC Myr has been steadily losing its share of the glass market to the North, with Westeros having almost entirely weaned itself off of the slave city by 225AC…

…Many who lived though this time described it like riding a galloping horse that only nominally listened to its rider. Between the constant upheavals as industry after industry was revolutionized by new inventions, and keeping the secrets of their manufacture out of the hands of greedy southerners and Essosi, living during such times was certainly interesting. It would have been cold comfort to them to know that the breakneck pace of advancement was being throttled significantly from what it could have been due to the fuels that could be found in the North, or rather, not found. 

The North's few coal mines yielded coal that ranged in quality from poor to very poor, and the only oil seeps were located deep in the Neck, impossible to exploit due to the terrain. Some have pointed out it was, and is, theoretically possible to set up a trade lane to exploit the rich, and high quality, coal veins in the mountains of the Stormlands, but the upfront cost to build the needed infrastructure and coal ships was, and remains, so prohibitively expensive, and would be equally expensive to maintain and protect, that it would stunt the North's economy significantly. And that ignores the political situation.

Importing the massive amounts of coal needed would leave the North catastrophically dependent on the Southern, Seven-worshiping, Stormlands. Any disruption to the supply, either from natural causes or manmade ones, would crash the North's economy, and any who think the Baratheons wouldn't exploit their leverage until the North bent to their every whim is either dangerously naive, a fool, or being paid off. The very concept was, and is, antithetical to the North. 

So they made due with wood and charcoal, and intensely studied every scrap of knowledge Idgra imparted about thermodynamics and boiler design to extract as much efficiency as possible from sub-par fuel, though they were and remain constrained by metallurgical knowledge and manufacturing as steam, especially pressurized steam, is particularly corrosive, and the work arounds and compromises made to deal with that all had their own issues… 

­-The Century of Innovation, by Historian Edric Flint, 277AC

…By 150AC the North's directed breeding of direwolves had increased their average size to the point where they could start being used as war mounts. Initially only used among scouts and light cavalry, it wasn't until 220AC that direwolves were large enough to mount barding and be incorporated into the North's main cavalry formations.

Compared to traditional horse cavalry direwolf cavalry lacked the shock value of their heavy charge, but were much more dangerous and terrifying in melee. The wolves also caused horses not acclimated to them to panic, making them particularly effective against southern cavalry.

While direwolf knights did use the sword and the lance, as a whole they favored pole- and war-hammers, as direwolves tended to move a lot more than horses in combat as they bit, snapped, and clawed at foes, making precision strikes through the gaps in plate much more difficult with swords and lances, even for wargs half-merged with their mounts. Impact weapons don't require such precision…

…Direwolf knights fought on foot alongside their wolves as often as they fought from wolfback. There have been many debates whether unhorsing a direwolf knight actually made the pair more dangerous…

…While direwolves are omnivores, like dogs and wolves, they do require a fair amount of meat in their diet to remain healthy, resulting in direwolves being more expensive to keep than a warhorse on average (all other factors being equal). This has resulted in direwolves becoming a status symbol among the wealthier nobility, and knights and nobles who will not or can not keep their direwolves in good condition (within reason, no one expects a wolf to be well kept after three months on campaign or traveling though the wilderness) quickly find themselves shunned by their peers…

-Rise of the Direwolf Knight, by Brandon Stark, knight and honorary historian, 272AC

…Between Idgra and the return of the Forest and Earth Singers, known in the old tales as the Children of the Forest, it should be unsurprising that faith in the Old Gods began to resurge, but it wasn't until 141AC that the Green Men were officially re-founded. Concurrently the number of wargs, skinchangers, and greenseers in the North became large enough that the noble families began to be more selective about the ones they married, and many produced multiple wargs each generation with the exception of the Starks, who were always skinchangers in the main line, and it was incredibly rare even in the cadet branches for a child to be born without magic in their blood.

As such no one thought much of when the first wargs joined the Green Men, but when they began to not only communicate with the Old Gods, but enact divine miracles as well, everyone faithful to the religion of our ancestors immediately paid attention. Fiercely loyal and deeply religious men were quietly sent across the known world to find out more as the Blessed Wolf had not left behind even the slightest hint that this was possible in any of the knowledge Lord Torrhen Stark had put to paper, not even in the restricted books kept under close guard by the Starks. But between the Green Men asking the Old Gods and the explorers sent abroad, knowledge quickly came in.

The Gods exist. All of them.

Their power comes from their worshipers, the more they have, and the more devout they are, the more powerful the pantheon, though gods with fewer worshipers than men in a moderately large city are so weak they are irrelevant for all practicable purposes.

But in order to act they need a bridge between themselves and the mortal world, a mortal (the Singers existence proves they do not need to be human) who has awakened the magic in their blood and is sworn to them.

Rather embarrassingly, this was, while not common knowledge, still well known among the upper ranks of the Essosi religions, to the point being a mage-priest was a de-facto requirement for attaining high office in many of them (the fire priests of R'hllor are a good example).

The Old Gods, though the Green Men, also informed that while many deities and pantheons liked to proclaim themselves all-knowing, the truth was that their ability to gather information, and generally act on the world, even with a mage-priest, sharply decreases the further they get from their domain. For the Old Gods, their domain is wherever the weirwoods grow, with godswoods and heart trees being local nexuses of their power that magically inclined Green Men can tap into.

Unsurprisingly, a great many weirwood trees would be planted in the fallowing decades …

…The Seven-who-are-One do not have any mage-priests among their Septons or Septas in this age, but they did once. When the Andals first invaded they brought mage-Septons with them, who managed to successfully counter the magically inclined Green Men and Singers who faced them due to having blooded themselves against the far more dangerous mages of Valyria… 

…Even back then the Andals and the Seven had a deep antipathy towards magic, likely a reactionary movement from dealing with the horrifyingly creative nastiness the Valyrian Freehold's mages came up with, and after they conquered all the kingdoms south of the Neck that antipathy turned to persecution.

The fact that killing everyone with magic meant that there wouldn't be any who could become mage-priests doesn't seem to have occurred to the Seven, or if they did eventually realize it was at far too late a date to stop it.

The last mage-Septon that can be definitively identified died in 849BC, burnt alive on charges of witchcraft by a High Septon who in turn would be executed for a long list heinous crimes…

…Even ignoring the obvious aspects, the Green Men differ greatly from Septons. For starters, while they do forswear any prior allegiances and inheritances, they do not take a vow of chastity and are allowed to marry and have a family, those with magic in their blood being greatly encouraged, both societally and divinely, to have the latter. As the Old Gods are deities of nature denying those in their service the opportunity to reproduce runs counter to their nature. They also allow women to join…

…There was a great deal of concern when Baelor the Oathbreaker ascended the throne as many worried that he might awaken as the first mage-Septon of the Seven since before the Doom of Valyria. Especially when one of his earliest acts was to have the Red Keep's godswood cut down.

Eventually the conclusion was reached that he was not a mage-Septon, namely because none could believe that the Seven would let their mage-priest be so incompetent if they were whispering in his ear, rather than the complete dearth of miracles the King routinely failed to perform.

Some have humorously suggested that the Seven were whispering in Baelor's ear, but he was just that inept, and would have been far worse without their guidance. Others have posited that the king could hear them, but with great difficulty, like trying to listen to someone shouting to you from a great distance.

All the same, Baelor's unthinking destruction of the ancient treaties not only between the Targaryens and the North, but between the Andals and the First Men, very nearly tore the realm apart into a religious war between the Seven and the resurgent Old Gods.

Mobs of zelous smallfolk and hedge knights led by ambitious and/or bigoted Septons ravaged the Riverlands, burning and cutting down any weirwood or heart tree they could find and lynching any who tried to stop them. Of course the First Men did not take this lying down and gave as good as they got, especially after the North, with Lord Stark willfully turning a blind eye, sent men and arms, including a hundred of the new and untested direwolf knights, to assist in response to Baelor forbidding Lord Tully from calling his banners to put down the unrest…

…The Clash of the Faiths ended with the death of Baelor, as the moment Lord Tully received word of the King's death he called his banners and rode out to put his kingdom back to order. The First Men and Northern soldiers largely stood down peacefully, but the Faith, who were rapidly reforming into a new Faith Militant, did not, resulting in several bloody clashes before the order was put down once more.

In the end the Old Gods won the Clash, successfully converting over half of the Riverlands' smallfolk to their faith, thanks to the Green Men performing miracle after miracle in front of the smallfolk (which the Maesters and Septons wasted no time in discrediting and "debunking" but only convinced the nobility, who remained largely uninvolved, and the other southern kingdoms) and re-settled High Heart, the weirwood grove resurrected with new growth from the stumps through the ritual sacrifice of thirty-one septons who took up arms against them, one per stump.

That said, large and strong bastions of the Seven remain in the Riverlands, mainly around the major settlements like the Twins, Seagard, Riverrun, etc. which saw no fighting or attempted conversions, none wanting to give Lord Tully an excuse to disregard King Baelor's command…

…In a reversal of historical trends, since the Clash the Faiths of the Old Gods have been slowly expanding, spreading into the Westerlands and crownlands, though having little purchase in either the highly pious Reach or Vale, something that is a constant source of strife as septons still clash with Green Men…

…After the Manderlys converted in 181AC, the Seven no longer had any hold in the North…

-The Green Men and resurgence of the Old Gods, Green Woman Alyss Snow, 254AC

…One of the very few things Aegon IV the Unworthy did right was to stomp down hard on the religious unrest after ascending to the throne, even if it was because waging a war would force him to take time away from his mistresses, excesses, and general corruption (financial and moral). 

Ironically, the North's isolationism during this time shielded them from the worst effects of Aegon IV's misrule, as they were out of sight and thus out of mind for the king. That is not to say they escaped entirely unscathed, the excessive tariff on Northern glass was the most egregious but not the only example, but compared to the other kingdoms they got off lightly…

­-The Life and Misrule of Aegon IV Targaryen, The Unworthy, by Maester Warrace, 222AC

…Despite one of his great ambitions being to re-integrate the North, Daeron II spent his entire reign integrating Dorne into the Seven Kingdoms and dealing with the Blackfyres and thus did not have the time nor political capital to draw the North out of its isolation. 

He did his best to leave a foundation for his successors to build of off, making great strides in calming the religious friction in the Riverlands, Westerland borders, and the crownlands…

-Biography of Daeron II Targaryen, The Good, by Maester Warrace, 225AC

…In comparison to the non-entity that was Aerys' rule, Maekar focused more on rooting out the Blackfyres and their supporters than continuing Daeron II's work of binding the Seven kingdoms into a cohesive whole, and he, like his predecessors, largely ignored the North as he had more than enough problems south of the neck and the North was content being under Targaryen rule. Or if they weren't no word of dissatisfaction reached King's Landing…

-History of the Seven Kingdoms, 200-250AC, by Maester Weagor

…Aegon V has been described as "a good man, one who you would be proud to have or be at his or your side, but a shit king" by the lords of the North. He spent the last year before his coronation in the North, exploring and discovering its wonders and magics, though he did not visit Skagos, never managing to find the time before he had to head south to take the crown…

…The newly crowned king went to great lengths to avoid answering whether he worshiped the Seven or the Old Gods, rightly believing that while his avoidances were annoying directly answering would cause unrest, but his wife had no such reservations. Bertha Blackwood was a proud worshiper of the Old Gods, and wasn't shy about admitting it, even having a Green Woman in her retinue, one without magic as everyone knew having a Druid in one of the hearts of Seven worship would cause significant trouble…

…Between having a worshiper of the Old Gods as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, the re-establishment of the Red Keep's godswood complete with weirwood heart tree, the assistance sent in the great winter of 230-236AC, and the many friendships among the nobility Aegon established before he headed south, the North finally roused itself from its long isolation and began to rejoin the Seven Kingdoms…

…Of Aegon's children only Duncan and Daeron took to worshiping the Old Gods, the others taking to the Seven…

…Aegon V's smallfolk reforms, while extremely contentious and the source of much unrest in the South, had largely already been implemented in the North as the Northern lords competed to gather as many smallfolk as they could under their banners, many of the wealthier nobles even sending recruiters past the Neck to convince Old Gods worshiping smallfolk to immigrate North, as even with the population explosion over the past century the North remained, and has remained to this day, short on labor. A common saying is that a Northman can do twice as much work as a Southron, which is a good thing because the North has four times as much work that needs doing…

…Becoming convinced that the Targaryens needed dragons in order to get his rebellious nobles in line, Aegon turned to the North for help, and Lord Edwyle Stark sent him five viable dragon eggs. Unfortunately the King's attempts to hatch them led to the Tragedy of Summerhall…

-The Re-emergence of the North, by Historian Torrhen Glover, 282AC

"Why did you not tell King Aegon about Skagos, Father?"

"He didn't ask."

"It's quite obvious that he doesn't know."

"And it's not our place to inform him. We have fulfilled the letter of our oath, he asked for dragon eggs and we have given him dragon eggs. If he fails to hatch them that is not our fault. And I rather like the Targaryens not having dragons. Can you imagine the damage Baelor or Aegon the Unworthy could have done if they had one?"

-Conversation between Lord Edwyle Stark and Rickard Stark

"…You might have been right about telling the King about Skagos…"

-Lord Edwyle Stark to Rickard Stark after receiving news of Summerhall

…While Aegon V is credited with bringing the North in out of the cold, it was Lord Rickard Stark's ambitions to see the North pre-eminent among the kingdoms that saw the North enter the Game of Thrones for the first time in centuries. He betrothed his heir Brandon to Catelyn Tully, securing the increasingly Old Gods worshiping Riverlands, sent his second son Eddard to foster under Lord Jon Arryn with the heir of the Stormlands, and had his eyes set even higher for his daughter.

But in doing so he forgot the watchwords of his ancestors. Starks do not prosper south of the Neck…

-Aerys II and the fall of the Targaryens, by Historian Eddard Flint, 293AC

Chapter Text

Eddard Stark looked up at Sky's gatehouse, relieved to have a good bed to sleep in tonight as he could see basket lifts from the Eyrie, large enough to hold a direwolf without issue, descending towards the Waycastle. Grey Frost, his gray-and-white direwolf, wasn't quite as happy as they knew that he'd have to go back to the kennels, which had originally been a series of small storerooms before Ned and his retinue, and their direwolves, came south as the Eyrie did not have purpose-built kennels, and thus poor Frost, and all the other direwolves, were quite cramped. 

That was one of the things Ned disliked most about living in the Eyrie, that his bonded companion wasn't allowed to roam freely like back home in Winterfell. Well, that and having to hide his skinchanging abilities, he had not forgotten what had happened to the Last Stark Princess, Serena Stark, when she was married to The King Who Flew. 

At least he wasn't as isolated as his distant ancestor had been. Between the bastions of the Old Gods in and around Redfort and Runestone, as well as how prevalent it was in the Riverlands, there would be a lot of allies willing to help him get back North if things went bad. Given the long enmity between the faiths Father had managed to extract a further assurance from Jon, namely the eight direwolf knights led by Rodrik Cassel that acted as his personal guard.

Looking ahead to where Ser Rodrik led the convoy Ned felt another surge of jealousy from Grey Frost at Nyx's – the knight's direwolf – black-and-deep-blue painted traveling plate barding, the light fluting – a structural element that increased the plates' resistance to denting or crumpling while looking like a decorative addition – catching the midday sun and setting the glossy metallic paint gleaming, well aware that Frost's plain mail barding was second rate at best. Unfortunately Frost had barely been weaned when Ned bonded with him and the pair went south to the Vale, and none of the Northmen were willing to share the secrets – and thus weaknesses – of their armor with the Vale armorers, to the point that they had trained under the Winterfell armorsmiths to repair minor damage and denting to their armor, and any major damage would see the armor sent by ship to White Harbor to be repaired. And thus there were none in the Vale who could make plate barding for Frost.

But no amount of armor could save Ned's shoulder when Robert slammed his hand onto it, causing Ned to grunt and Frost to let a short warning growl at the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands, making his horse to shy away from the direwolf. The steeds belonging to the Gates of the Moon may have become acclimatized to the direwolves over the years to the point that they no longer panicked at their scent, but it was still easy for the horses to spook if the wolves behaved threateningly.

"Quit brooding Ned, we're almost home!" Robert said cheerfully.

Ned grunted.

"Oh cheer up you grump," Robert said, "We haven't seen Jon in almost two moons."

Ned sighed.

"Aye. I'm just thinking about Harrenhal."

"Harrenhal," Robert sighed, "What a shitshow. The tourneys were great, but that can't make up for everything else."

"The king or the prince?"

"Both, though the audacity of the Prince to crown my betrothed instead of his own wife…"

"Father hasn't accepted your suit yet," Ned reminded him.

Robert frowned.

"Aye. I don't know why he's been giving me the run around. It's not like he's going to find a better match anywhere else. Though him showing up at Harrenhal was a surprise."

For most, that would have been incredibly arrogant. But in addition to looking like a maiden's wet dream, being six and a half feet tall and built with muscles upon muscles, Robert Baratheon was also the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands.

And the Stormlands held a lot of high grade coal, which the North wanted for its industry.

"I think he's worried about her becoming a second Serena Stark and wanted to get your measure," Ned said, refraining from mentioning how his father had seemed rather unimpressed with his friend, "The Old Gods have little presence in the Stormlands after all."

Robert scowled.

"If any of my bannermen try anything I'll hit their heads so hard their skulls will be crushed into their ribcage!" He vowed.

"…Vengeance wouldn't bring her back to life Robert."

The Lord of the Stormlands glowered, but didn't dispute his statement.

"…Still want to know what was going on between your father and the Martells," he muttered as they entered the Eyrie's lift baskets and dismounted, Robert handing his horse to a stablehand to be returned to Sky's stables.

"I've told you what Father told me," Ned replied irritably, "It was a trade negotiation."

"You don't need the Crown Prince, his wife, and your sister for a trade deal."

True, and that had been driving Ned nuts as much as it was clearly bothering Robert. But rather than saying that again Ned let the conversation die as the lift lurched into motion.

The trade deal was real though, high quality Dornish sand for tempered glass.

Jon met them in the Crescent Chamber after they left the lift, looking grim. News of Harrenhal must have reached him then.

"Did you have any problems on your trip?" the Lord Arryn asked.

Robert scoffed.

"Jon you know the mountain clans go out of their way to not bother Ned. Saw a few scouts, but they buggered off once they noticed the direwolves and banners."

"There were no issues in the Riverlands?"

The tightness in Jon's voice caught everyone's attention.

"What happened?" Ned asked.

Jon grimaced.

"My solar. Now."

The moment Robert shut the solar door and leaned against it, which would have effectively guaranteed it couldn't be opened even if he hadn't closed the deadbolt, Jon sat heavily in his chair and sighed, briefly rubbing his face with a hand and looking very, very old.

"What do you know about what has happened since you left Harrenhal?" he asked quietly.

Ned and Robert traded worried looks.

"Nothing," Ned answered, "No news has reached us."

Jon took a moment to collect his thoughts before speaking.

"Four days ago, I received a raven from Tumbletown. The Prince's party passed through it, heading south to Dorne." Jon looked at Eddard. "Lyanna was with them. The Prince is claiming to have married her."

"What?" Robert exploded, while Ned just stared in disbelief.

"He can't do that!" The Lord of the Stormlands continued, building himself into a proper rage, "He's already married! To a Martell! He can't take another wife! Especially not my she-wolf!"

He abruptly froze, then spun to face Jon.

"Guards," Robert said tightly, "Did Lyanna have any Stark guards with her?"

Ned watched as Jon grabbed a raven message, one of several he had sitting on his desk, and re-read it.

"…Stark guards are explicitly noted to be absent," Jon said.

A pit formed in Ned's stomach as Robert turned to glare out the window.

"What of her direwolf?" he asked, a bit of desperation in his voice.

"There's no mention, but," Jon showed Ned the message, the tiny scroll, small enough to fit onto a raven's leg without over encumbering the bird, was completely covered in tiny script, "there's only so much one can put on a raven message."

"He stole her," Robert snarled, "Rhaegar kidnapped Lyanna, then forced her into a sham marriage. By now he's probably forced himself on her too."

"Robert," Jon warned, "Mind your tongue. King Aerys is… unstable, and could make life difficult and… short should your words get back to him."

"I'm the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands! He wouldn't dare!"

Jon gave Robert a long look before grabbing a pair of raven messages.

"These arrived this morning from Riverrun. The first is a copy of a message from King Aerys to Lord Rickard, ordering him and Brandon to present themselves to him at Kings Landing immediately to answer for Lyanna supposedly seducing Rheagar."

Ned's mind flashed back to what he had seen and heard of the King during the tourney at Harrenhal, and the pit in his stomach turned into a sense of looming doom. This… would not end well.

"He wouldn't dare," Robert repeated weakly, face paling from its previous rage-induced redness, sounding like he was desperately trying to convince someone, possibly himself, "The North is vying with the Westerlands for position of second strongest kingdom in Westeros. He has to know that if he harms a hair on Lord Stark's head his reign is over. He wouldn't dare."

Jon looked even grimmer at their reactions, picking up the other raven message.

"This is from Lord Rickard. He and Brandon are answering King Aerys' summons and are departing from Riverrun with their entire retinues."

Jon gave Ned a questioning look as he mentioned retinues.

"There's almost a hundred knights between them, all mounted on direwoves," and over half being either wargs or skinchangers Ned didn't say, "and many with blood ties to the major houses of the North. Not counting the retinues the knights will be bringing which will probably total to several hundred fighting me all told. But Father has to know this is will end badly no matter what."

"He doesn't exactly have much of a choice," Jon replied, "Aerys is still the lawful king. In fact given the circumstances one could argue that it should be your father demanding an audience with the king, not the other way around. If he refused he might as well call his banners as the king will absolutely proclaim him to be in revolt. Despite the false spring we are still in winter, now is a horrible time to have armies on the march."

"What if we invoke Aegon's Contingincy?" Ned tried.

"I've thought about it, but it won't work now."

"How?" Robert demanded, "We've got the North, me for the Stormlands, you've made your opinion on Aerys clear so that's the Vale, and I don't see Holster Tully not voting against the wishes of Lord Rickard, given Brandon's engagement, so that's the Riverlands as well. That's four. Surely we can get another easily enough?"

Jon grimaced.

"And if this was before Aegon the Unworthy raised the needed votes to five under the pretext of giving the Iron Islands a vote after he barely survived his first no-confidence trial, that would be enough. Unfortunately, we need five.

"The rivalry between the Reach and the North means that Mace Tyrell will always vote in opposition to the North, so he'll vote for Aerys. Before Rheagar ran off with Lyanna the Martells could have easily been persuaded, but now they're undoubtedly feeling slighted, and Elia Martell is in the Red Keep, effectively a hostage. They won't vote for Aerys, but they won't vote against him either. Tywin Lannister is a childhood friend of Aerys regardless of their falling out, and his heir is in the Kingsguard – another de facto hostage – so he'll also abstain.

"Quellon Greyjoy doesn't have a dog in this fight, so he's going to vote for whoever offers him the best… concessions."

"And even ignoring that means dealing with pirates and reavers," Robert said bleakly, "The crown and the Reach can offer the Iron Islands more than the North and Riverlands can, cause there's nothing the Vale or Stromlands can realistically offer given we're on the wrong side of the continent, and they only need Lord Greyjoy to not vote against the king."

"Aye."

One in favor, three abstaining, four against. 

Vote failed.

This was exactly how Aegon the Unworthy managed to survive three Contingency votes.

"…Lord Rickard will probably reach King's Landing in a fortnight, give or take a few days depending on the travel and how long it took the raven from Riverrun to reach the Eyrie. Assuming it takes several days for the situation to be resolved and factoring in travel time for the raven, it will take a full moon before we hear what's happened." Jon looked at Robert. "We should take the opportunity to sound out our bannermen to see where their loyalties lay."

"You think it'll come to that?" Ned asked.

"I think," Jon said carefully, "That while your father thinks he can defuse the situation, King Aerys is going to make demands Lord Stark can not or will not comply with. And that Lord Stark has never dealt with Southern politics before, much less the royal court."

Two-and-twenty days later the raven from King's Landing arrived, and Jon summoned Ned and Robert back to his solar.

Ned entered the room with trepidation, and given the black look on Jon's face he was right to.

"What happened?" he asked, sitting in a chair in front of Jon's desk.

"Our worst case scenario," Jon replied, glancing down at the raven message that was so large it had been split across two scrolls, one tied to each leg of the bird, "When your father's party reached the Red Keep it was late in the day and the king ordered them to be turned away." Which was a significant insult… but not an unexpected one. "They found refuge in the city's inns, but that night…"

Jon rubbed the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath before continuing.

"That night they were attacked by the goldcloaks as they slept. Some are believed to have escaped, but neither your farther nor Brandon were among them. They were brought before King Aerys in chains and he accused them of treason, and that their guilt had already been proven when they arrived with such a large escort. Lord Stark demanded a trial by combat."

"He lost?" Robert asked when Jon paused for a breath.

"There was no trial," Jon replied harshly, "The king's 'champion' was wildfire. It was an execution with a fancy name. It was not quick."

"Brandon?" Ned whispered.

"Was put in a torture device that slowly strangled him the more he struggled. He managed to rip the chain out of the wall, but the device crushed his throat. He's dead too."

Distantly Ned heard Grey Frost let out a long mournful howl, the other direwolves joining in as he began to silently cry.

"I'm sorry Ned," Jon said sympathetically as Robert yanked Ned up into a tight bear hug, "I have to go announce this, but you deserved to hear this first." As he stood he asked "Robert?"

"Go," Robert replied, not moving as Ned cried into his shoulder, "I'll take care of Ned."

Faintly Ned heard Jon open the door and Ser Cassel demand to know what had happened, but all he could think of was that his father and brother were dead.

"First your sister," Robert whispered, "Then your father and brother. They'll pay, Ned. I swear that I'll make the Targaryens pay if it's the last thing I do."

The next day Ned was breaking his fast in the Morning Hall when the Eyrie's maester, Corys Waters, entered, looking pale. As a devout follower of the Seven Maester Waters had never liked Ned, and the feeling was I mutual, but the Maester was professional enough to not let the dislike interfere with teaching Ned, and had been helpful in identifying the poisons that had been slipped into the Northerners' food and drink during their first year in the Vale.

Jon read the message the Maester handed him and swore, catching the attention of the entire hall.

"I have received a message from King's Landing." Ned looked at his foster father in alarm as he continued. "King Aerys has accused Lord Stark and Lord Baratheon of treason, and ordered me to kill them and bring him their heads."

Ser Cassel and the Northerner guard immediately formed up on Ned, but he just watched as Jon rolled up the message and tossed it into the nearest hearth as there were no lit candles in the Morning Hall, lit be the rising sun through massive stained-glass windows. The hall was dead silent as everyone waited on Lord Arryn's formal response, though his burning of the royal letter made his opinion clear.

"Maester Waters."

"Yes, my Lord?"

"Send ravens to all of my bannermen. For his gross violations of the feudal contract, including the murder of a Lord Paramount and his heir, ordering me to violate Guest Right and murder my fosterlings, Lords Paramount Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon, and abject incompetence due to insanity, I, Lord Paramount Jon Arryn, declare that Aerys Targaryen is my king no longer. Henceforth, the Vale is in open revolt against the crown!"

"Aye!" Robert roared, "Maester, send a raven to Storm's End! The Stormlands stand with the North and the Vale in revolt!"

Ned took a deep breath and stood.

"The North stands with the Vale and the Stormlands. King Aerys must be overthrown."

"Death to the Mad King!" Robert toasted.

"DEATH TO THE MAD KING!" the hall chorused.

"Death to the Targaryens!"

"DEATH TO THE DRAGONS!"

The first step of the rebellion was to get Lords Stark and Baratheon back to their kingdoms, complicated by a significant part of the Vale declaring for the Targaryens under the command of Lord Grafton, including the Vale's two deepwater ports of Gulltown and Old Anchor. 

Unfortunately the Riverlands was tearing itself apart in a full blown civil war, split mostly along the religious divide with the Old Gods leaning Rebels led by Lord Tully against the Seven favoring Royalists under Lord Bracken, Lord Tully joining the rebels under the condition that the new Lord Stark would take up his late brother's betrothal to Catelyn Tully. But with Darry having declared for King Aerys Lord Stark couldn't slip through the Bloody Gate and link up with Rebel forces in the Riverlands, and with Snakewood and Heart's Home siding against their liege lord, cutting the Eyrie off from the rebellious northern half of the Vale, attempting to escape though the north of the Vale was also non-viable.

More bad news came in from the Vale fleet, which had split mostly evenly between Royalist and Rebel and promptly destroyed itself with infighting, the ships that weren't sunk or burned at anchor being too damaged to go to sea.

However, that did leave the North's eastern fleet in uncontested control of the Sisters and Fingers, and it was rapidly becoming clear that the Bay of Crabs would be the site of the first major battle of the war when the bulk of the Northern and Royal fleets clashed there, which was still several weeks off when the three Lords Paramount left the Eyrie as both fleets had been caught off guard by the sudden onset of hostilities.

The three lords left in different directions after leaving the Eyrie. Jon went north to deal with houses Lynderly and Corbray, Robert went south to link up with the forces of Redfort and Royce as they besieged Gulltown, and Ned went to link up with the Waynwoods on their way to Old Anchor, along with a detachment of the Northern navy thanks to several ravens sent to White Harbor to coordinate the assault.

Old Anchor was a fairly unremarkable port town despite its age, established to control a natural harbor rather than being a conduit of trade like Gulltown. It was also undermanned, as a significant number of the men nominally sworn to House Melcolm decided to declare for Lord Arryn instead. 

Capturing it was a rather simple affair. With the defenders completely distracted by the sieging army threatening to launch an escalade the North's ships were able to sail into the port and land troops uncontested, and Lord Melcolm chose to surrender rather than fight to the last when he realized he had been thoroughly outmaneuvered, resulting in less than a hundred casualties across both sides.

-Robert's Rebellion, by Historian Rikard Mullen, 288AC

Ned walked up the gangplank onto the Frozen Merman, one of the last Wolf-class light galleons built nearly a century ago, Grey Frost following behind him and loudly complaining though their bond about how he did not like being on something that moved under him, their armor secured in Frost's saddlebags. Ser Cassel and the rest of Ned's guards were still on the pier, observing their equipment and some supplies being prepared to be brought aboard, but Ned wanted to meet the captain and crew that would get him home to Winterfell.

"Welcome aboard, my lord."

Ned turned as he stepped clear of the gangplank to see a man seemingly of six-and-ten with blonde-brown hair and a square face in an officer's vest with the bronze captain's braid embroidered into the collar. He paused in confusion, there was no way for someone that young to make captain, no matter how skilled. Even if one tested out of naval officer collage – which was possible, if rare even for naval-focused houses like the Manderlys – there was a minimum amount of voyages needed before one could even be considered for the rank.

"I'm nine-and-ten, my lord," the captain said with long patience, "I know I look young for my age. I shouldn't have shaved." That last was an aside to himself. "Anyway, I'm Leon Manderly, of the Knifetown Manderlys, a settlement located upriver of White Habor, and captain of the Frozen Merman."

They clasped forearms in greeting as Frost leaned over Ned's shoulder to take Captain Leon's scent. Judging by his lack of reaction other than a twitch of an eyebrow the young man was clearly used to direwolves, unlike almost everyone Ned had met since he went south.

"If you excuse me, my lord, I need to make sure everything gets squared away if we're to sail on the tide."

Ned nodded and let him go.

Several hours later Ned stood at the railing of the command deck, Frost down in the battery deck with the other direwolves to be out of the way, as the light galleon stowed oars and began to unfurl sail as she left port. Anchored in the middle of the harbor was three northern galleons and the Pride of the North, half again larger than the galleons in both length and height, sun occasionally glinting off the copper plating sheathing their bottoms.

"She's a big one, isn't she," Captain Manderly said as he stopped next to Ned and followed his gaze towards the North's prestige ship, "Hundred-eighty years old and still the biggest and meanest ship to put to sea."

Ned frowned slightly. There was something about how the captain said that…

"You have reservations?" Ned asked.

The captain leaned against the railing and looked at him, Ned turning to look back.

"…She's old, Lord Stark. Very old. Half again older than my Mermaid, and I wouldn't want to take her up against the latest light galleons to leave the Royal Shipyards. Practically every plank on the Pride has been replaced twice over except her weirwood keel. Did you know she was able to make twelve knots when she first put to sea?"

"I assume she makes less than that now."

"Nine knots, Lord Stark. Ten if you're willing to risk the masts and rigging. Which is perfectly acceptable for a ship of her size and class, most southern galleons struggle to make above ten knots, but it's a far cry from when she was once able to run down and overhaul all but the fastest ships afloat. Have you heard of the Royal fleet's new flagship?"

Ned narrowed his eyes.

"Tell me."

"She's only twenty percent smaller than the Pride, and she's not hogging or has excessive working."

Ned didn't know what that meant, but he caught the thread. 

"They're catching up."

"Aye. The latest generation of southern-built ships are easily the peer to anything we fielded during the Dance of Dragons. Just by comparing how they handle to Northern built ships I'd bet my career that when we capture one of their newest ships we'll find that the southern shipwrights have finally figured out geodesic hull framing and iron strapping. We still have an edge, the metallurgy of our ballistae is superior and the ironwood of our hulls is stronger than their oak, but that edge is much slimmer than when we last clashed with the southern fleets."

"You're leading to something. Spit it out."

"We'll break the Royal fleet, my lord," the captain said grimly, "and the western fleet will break the Reach's. But it will wreck a lot of ships, and when the Westerland and Dornish fleets, or if a significant part of the Stormland's fleet, join the Royalists we'll be hard pressed to just survive. You have to win the war on land before the naval theaters become campaigns of attrition, Lord Stark, because if that happens it will only be a question of when before Royalist flags are sighted off of the Northern coasts."

Captain Manderly's warning was still echoing in Ned's mind when the Mermaid made port in White Harbor, though a strong southernly wind did delay them. Unfortunately Lord Manderly had left with the bulk of the fleet and so Ned couldn't consult with him, but the retired officers teaching at the White Harbor Naval Academy agreed with the young captain's assessment. 

As such Ned only spent two days in White Harbor before heading up the White Road to Winterfell, one of the six major roads of the North, all of which branched from the capital. The others being the Northern and Southern Kingsroad, the Barrow Road, which went through Torrhen's Square – the industrial heart of the North thanks to the hydropower provided by river coming from Torrhen's Lake – and Barrowtown before veering west into the Rills, the Woodland Road, which went northwest through the Wolfswood to Deepwood Motte and then on to Dragon Harbor, and the East Road, heading to the Dreadfort where it spit into the Grey Road – heading to Karkhold – and the Broken Road, which went south through the Hornwood before following the Broken Branch River to Ramsgate. 

It also allowed him to view the North with new eyes. 

He had been ten when he had gone south and at the time he hadn't thought much of the North's infrastructure at the time, but now, after living most of a decade in the Vale he was pleasantly surprised by what he found.

The White Road, running parallel to the White Knife, was an elevated causeway wide enough for four wagons to pass abreast with a foot of clearance between them, faced with yard-square concrete paving stones and drainage channels. Even many of the capillary roads splitting off to the various small towns and settlements were paved in concrete.

The Vale's High Road and South Road, the latter going from Darry to Gulltown, were not as well built as this, and their capillary roads were almost always packed dirt.

There was also a lot of traffic on the road, far more than he had ever seen in the Vale. Which wasn't to say that there was a dearth of trade in the Vale, but the Vale didn't have twenty wagon long convoys every few hours either.

Perhaps this shouldn't have been so surprising given the war, a lot of those wagons were loaded with military supplies and rations, the latter in tin jars that all armies – even those in Essos – had adopted since the North displayed their usefulness in the Dance a century and a half ago. 

A flicker of movement caused Ned to look up from the farmland he and his guard were riding through – the snow-covered trees separating each farm plot giving it an idyllic beauty – to the hundred-foot-tall semaphore tower built into a waystation along the road as the flags began to wave a message down the line. The party slowed as they read it.

NE FLT VIC VS RYL FLT AT CLAW ISLE. STAG DLVRD TO STORM END

"Good to know Robert made it home," Ned said, getting a chorus of agreement before they rode on, not commenting on the expected news of the Eastern fleet's victory over the Royal fleet.

Ten days after they left White Harbor Ned beheld Winterfell for the first time in almost a decade. 

The second largest city of the North and the cultural, administrative, and religious center of the kingdom, and as the center of the kingdom's road network it saw a significant majority of the North's trade pass through it as well.

White Harbor may be the Gateway of the North, but Winterfell was its Heart.

The city was divided into three tiers, separated by curtain walls, in turn separated into eight wards divided by their own walls. The outermost ring was known as the Winter City, designed to house the hundreds of thousands who came to shelter in the city during winter for safety in numbers as their farmsteads, holdfasts, and minor settlements were completely buried beneath snow and ice, the outermost wall glittering in the sun like fresh snow thanks to the crushed quartz – of the non-gem/jewel grade – added to the cement casing on the concrete wall. 

The use of concrete in defensive fortifications was mildly controversial. Concrete walls were weaker than walls built in a more traditional style – assuming local geology provided decently tough rock – but it was cheap enough that you could build a significantly thicker wall for the same price. Whether the increased thickness offset the inferior material used… well the rebellion would probably answer that one way or another. Admittedly even an anemic concrete wall built on a budget was still indisputably superior to one made of wood and packed earth, while being much more affordable to smaller settlements and nobles.

Case in point, while the outer wall was forty feet high – a respectable size for the main wall of any castle – it was twenty feet thick, twice as thick as most conventionally built walls, with eighty-foot-tall towers every hundred-fifty yards and six gatehouses, one for each of the major roads of the North.

The middle ring was the city proper, designed to house a hundred-fifty thousand – though it only had two-thirds of that number of permanent residents at most – with Winterfell University taking up an entire sector between the university proper and all the associated administrative and research buildings, another sector being entirely dedicated to enormous glass houses, and a third was a public godswood complete with numerous weirwood and heart trees. It was also a very open city, with wide concrete paved streets flanked with trees, which was a major boon when dealing with snow management as it gave locations to pile it without unduly obstructing travel. Its wall was an unusual hybrid of a traditionally built core of granite blocks sheathed in several feet of concrete, sixty feet tall and twenty thick with hundred-foot-tall towers.

And in the center, the Citadel. The great fortress, thousands of years old, that the rest of the city was built around, a hundred yards of open-air markets and parks separating the innermost buildings of the city from the great monolithic gray granite walls of the third largest castle complex in Westeros after Harrenhall and Highgarden.

A castle was considered particularly large if it spanned more than three acres. Winterfell's godswood alone was larger than that, the whole complex spanning over twenty acres, built atop the remains of an ancient volcano whose dying heart powered the hot springs that heated the walls of the two keeps. As a child Ned had never thought much of Winterfell's size, but now, after living and traveling thought the Vale and the Riverlands, he realized that the citadel was enormously, ludicrously huge, until one remembered that Winterfell had been the capital of the North for thousands of years, and needed to house all the bureaucracy and administration of the largest kingdom of Westeros.

Ned and his party attracted a lot of attention, understandably so, as they rode their direwolves through churned and used snow into the city. Winter city was mostly empty despite it still being winter, a testament to how large it had been built as there were was twice the population of Winterfell working the surrounding lands, but future proofing was always worthwhile. 

Riding up to the main gates of the citadel Ned took a moment to observe the citadel guards that stood to attention as he approached, and the elderly direwolf that laboriously sat up from where she had been lying across the entryway as an effective furry barrier. The citadel guards were sworn directly to the Starks, as opposed to the Winterfell city watch who answered to the city council who in turn answered to the Starks, and thus were manned by Stark men-at-arms and other members of the family's retinue.

The most obvious aspect was that the guards were provided with semi-fitted (being made to one of several standardized sizes instead of being fitted to the commissioner) travel plate upon joining if they didn't have their own armor – and their pay would be cut until that cost was repaid – and armed with beaked-polehammers with bastard swords and rondel daggers at their hips. And that was ignoring the direwolves in their ranks, along with other beasts the wargs sworn to the Starks brought.

As direwolves aged only slightly faster than humans – the record for oldest direwolf was seven-and-eighty years though the average was five-and-sixty, five years less than the average human in good health – that by the time the wolves were old enough that it was inadvisable to send them on missions their human partners were old enough to prefer a sedimentary posting.

Case in point, both guards were old white-beards, the one on the left with a weirwood-red half-cape, held in place by a chain with a break-away clasp that prevented it being used by an enemy to strangle, that marked him as a warg, skinchangers having a red-and-weirwood-white cape. 

"Lord Stark," the guards saluted as the direwolf sat back on her haunches behind her warg and howled to let Winterfell know that Lord Stark had returned.

Ned nodded in tired greeting as he rode past them. He'd barely managed to dismount from Grey Frost once they were past the inner gatehouse when a black-and-grey direwolf tore into the entry courtyard, howling happily and tail a blur as he crashed into, and toppled, Frost.

"Looks like Lord Benjen's here," Ser Cassel commented as Ned watched the wrestling direwolf brothers with fond exasperation.

Sure enough Benjen jogged into the courtyard a few minutes later, unbuttoned winter coat testament to having come from the Great Keep in a hurry.

"Ned!"

"Benjen!"

Ned embraced his brother, relieved to see him again after what had happened to their father and Brandon, only for their hug to get a lot tighter than either liked when their direwolves decided to join in. As Ned was still wearing his travel plate he was merely uncomfortable, but poor Benjen was squished.

"Frost. Blackwind," Ned rebuked, as his brother made a noise like a tea kettle as the air was forced from his lungs.

Whining the two wolves disengaged, allowing Benjen to slide to the ground, making an alarming wheezing sound as he drew air back into his lungs. 

"Shall we head inside?" Ned asked, offering his hand to Benjen to help him up.

"Aye," his brother answered, taking his hand.

The brothers took their dinner in what had once been their father's solar, Ned sitting in their Father's chair and feeling more like a child than the Lord he now was.

"Hard to believe they're gone," Benjen said quietly, looking at the massive desk, still cluttered with books, reports, and writing supplies like their father had just stepped out, "I haven't had the heart to clean this or Father's bedroom yet."

Ned nodded solemnly.

"I thought my heart was going to stop when Jon told me," he replied, "but I knew, when Mad King Aerys summoned Father and Brandon, I knew it wasn't going to end well."

"Do you have any idea why he summoned Brandon as well?'

"Best guess is that Aerys noticed him spending a lot of time with Rheagar at Harrenhall after the tournament."

"What was he doing with the prince?"

"I don't know. He didn't tell me and I didn't ask. I assumed that he was trying to charm Rheagar so that the future king would be more favorably inclined towards the North."

"Think it was to do with the whole… thing with Lyanna?"

"Probably."

Benjen chased the last of his meal with the last of his watered wine before leaning back and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Father was always a bit too clever for his own good but I don't think anyone could have predicted his final scheme to have blown up on him like this," he sighed.

Ned shot him a confused look that Benjen missed before internally shrugging and deciding it didn't matter. Whatever scheme Father had been planning it had died with him.

Once he finished his meal he inquired as to the status of the North's army.

"Everyone's already south of Winterfell, heading to Moat Cailin, including Winterfell's men. The Karstarks were the last and they passed through Winterfell two days ago. The mountain and giant clans have also sent men. The Skagosi haven't, but they did declare that they will help guard the North from banditry or Wildling raiders. All told, about thirty-thousand men."

Ned frowned.

"That's low. Surely we can raise ten to twenty thousand more men?"

Benjen grimaced.

"If this was spring or summer, aye, but with the winter snows and cold our logistics are stretched to the limit. Once you pass south of the Neck the North won't be able to send supplies until you can take Seagard, so we also had to factor in what the Riverlands could support."

At his brother's grimace Benjen added

"Everyone is bringing their best Ned, don't worry. I checked when they passed through Winterfell."

After a long moment of contemplative silence Ned said

"I'm going to have to leave in the morning."

Benjen startled.

"So soon?"

"Aye. The Admiralty don't think the fleets will be able to hold. Oh, they'll make the Southerners pay heavily in men and ships," he added at Benjen's shocked look, "but the South has the numbers to pay that price and press on. We have to take ports as soon as possible to get as many supplies South as we can before the Royalist fleets cut us off. And for that the army has to march." Ned grimaced as he remembered "And I need to finalize the marriage with the Tullys."

Benjen winced in sympathy.

"Aye, you're right. But Ned? Promise me you'll come back."

"I promise."

Ten days later Ned and his guard arrived at Moat Cailin, the twenty towers and keep standing strong and tall, the great stronghold of the Neck having been rebuilt in concrete rather than quarried stone during the reign of Balor the Oathbreaker, in case the North would find itself at war with the South again.

That day had come, and the stronghold was filled beyond capacity, tents scattered everywhere there was a dry spot of land, though the great causeway traveling through the neck, built out of concrete and gravel and wide enough for six wagons to travel abreast, remained clear. 

As they rode into the Moat Ned could see that Benjen had spoken truly, there wasn't a single peasant levy in sight, every single fighting man standing to in parade to greet their liege lord in either travel or full plate except for the North's crossbowmen, armed with the North's iconic long-draw crossbows, longbowmen, and scouts who were clad in heavy gambesons. A full quarter of the muster was also mounted, split evenly between horse and direwolf though the latter almost universally had better equipment.

And standing before the open door to the keep were the great lords of the North, except for the maritime focused houses of Manderly, Seastark, and Mormont who manned the North's fleets.

Lords Karstark, Flint, and Dustin had direwolves sitting next to them, Glover a shadowcat, Tallheart his eagle, Bolton a particularly large stallion, Ryswell had a direwolf, hawk, and an extremely fluffy orange fox, Reed – Howland's father – had a lizard-lion that was probably going to be left behind when the host passed Greywater Watch, and behind them stood Greatjon Umber.

Unlike the other Northern lords, the Umbers did not produce wargs – or skinchangers in the case of the current Lord Ryswell – as the magic in their blood manifested in a different way. Turns out that the longstanding rumor about the Umbers having giant blood had some truth to it, shown by Greatjon's eight-foot-tall frame being only somewhat above the average for his house.

"Moat Cailin is yours, Lord Stark," Lord Karstark greeted, leading the other lords in bending knee in fealty, "The North stands ready to extract our vengeance upon Aerys Targaryen."

"Rise, my lords," Ned replied, "we have a war to win.

Chapter Text

…The Northern Army's arrival in the Riverlands spelled doom for the Loyalist forces in the kingdom, especially after the Twins and Seagard, which had remained neutral up to this point, joined the Rebels in exchange for a sizeable share of the loot seized in any action their forces take part in for the Freys and several trade agreements for the Mallisters. Over the course of the next several months, as Lord Baratheon rampaged in the south after the battles at Summerhall, every loyalist force and keep west of Darry and east of the Westerlands fell to the combined might of the North and Riverlands. 

Extensive use of wargs to scout and infiltrate allowed the North's forces to defeat the Loyalists in detail with ruthless efficiency, often with ambushes at night with the wargs' bonded animals slaughtering guards, and opening gates, allowing the army to take their foes while they slept, and due to the scattered nature of the Loyalists in the Riverlands those that fell were unable to warn their fellows. While effective in keeping the North's casualties down – crucial given that they could only get small numbers of reinforcements intermittently from the supply chain stretching from Seagard to Dragon Harbor – it greatly disquieted the Riverlanders fighting with them, both the "dishonorable" tactics and, for those that held to the Seven, the extensive use of magic…

…Contrary to the fears of the North's Admiralty, the fleets of Dorne and the Westerlands remained firmly in port, allowing the North uncontested dominance over the sea north of the Feastfires in the west and Crackclaw Point in the east. Having lost his arm in the Battle of Claw Isle Lord Velaryon had no interest in engaging the Northern fleet in another decisive action, even after the remnants of the Stormland's fleet joined the Royal Fleet, which would lead to him being stripped of his titles and exiled with John Connington by King Aerys. 

This was a boon for the North, as it allowed them to get enough ships that had been damaged in battle back into service that when Lord Bywater, whose abilities lay in political intrigue not military matters, took the Royal Fleet out he was pincered in the Battle of Crackclaw Bay, destroying the Loyalist fleet as a fighting force. Had Lord Velaryon decided to attack with the Royal and Stormland fleets he likely would have sighted White Harbor before both fleets were ground to nothing, due to his greater numbers and the latest generation of warships to leave the Royal slipways proving themselves equal to older Northern built ships as the Southern shipwrights had finally discovered the techniques that had allowed the North unquestioned superiority on the seas for a hundred and fifty years.

And yet the North's victory was pyrrhic. After Crackclaw Point only one in four ships were listed as combat capable compared to their pre-war numbers, all damaged, and three in five were either sunk or constructive losses. In truth, the number was likely closer to one in eight and two in three, something that kept many a captain and admiral up at night as many believed that King Aerys would be able to force the Martells to join him due to Elia Martell being a hostage in the Red Keep. And the ravaged fleet would not survive that.

A crash building program was authorized, but it would be a year before the first light galleons hit the water, five for full galleons, and any not yet laid down would be cancelled with the end of the Rebellion. Considering most drydocks were occupied repairing damaged ships the total number of new ships produced wasn't that many all told. By the time of this writing, 288AC, the eastern fleet is only at two-thirds its pre-rebellion strength…

…After the Battles of Summerhall Robert Baratheon solidified his control over the Stormlands, the remaining Loyalists joining the remnants of the Stormlands fleet in fleeing to the Crownlands. He then gambled that Lord Tyrell would be sending most of his men north towards the Riverlands, an understandable assumption given the long enmity between the devout Reach and the Old Gods. 

Unfortunately, this assumption was in error, for Mace Tyrell had decided to secure his flank first, and the full might of the Reach bore down on the Stormlands. Lord Baratheon discovered this at the Battle of Ashford, and while he was able to retreat in good order when he received word of the impending arrival, and size of, the Reach's main force, he did so in the knowledge that the Stormlands were effectively lost.

In light of that, Lord Baratheon split his force in two. Half headed back to the Stormlands with orders to make the Reach's inevitable conquest as long and painful as possible. The other half accompanied the Lord of the Stormlands as he hurried north, desperate to link up with Lords Stark and Tully. That this involved crossing through the entirety of the Crownlands, which was staunchly Loyalist, reportedly didn't even faze him.

By any reasonable metric, the decision was madness. While not as densely populated as the Reach, the Crownlands was still one of the most populated regions in Westeros. This meant that there were countless castles, holdfasts, towns, and other settlements and fortifications that Lord Baratheon would have to bypass or conquer in the roughly four-hundred miles separating him from friendly lines, and that was ignoring the very real possibility of interception by the Royal Army.

And yet, impossibly, Lord Baratheon managed to do just that, reaching Stony Sept with six-thousand exhausted and half-starved men, a mere quarter of the number he had taken into battle at Ashford. The only reason he succeeded was that the Royal Army, under Lord Jon Connington, had thought that Lord Baratheon was trying to steal a march on King's Landing and deployed to intercept him at Raven's Rest, a small town on the Rose Road south of Tumbletown. Lord Connington realized Lord Baratheon's real destination quickly, but by that point the Royal Army was out of position to intercept him.

Lord Tyrell also decided to split his army. Thirty thousand under Lord Tarly proceeded into the Stormlands, eventually putting Storm's End under siege though lacking the manpower to storm it after pacifying all of the other castles on the way and dealing with the constant skirmishing from the remnants of the Stormland's army. The other fifty-thousand joined up with the Royal Army's forty-thousand at Bitterbridge, and then the entire ninety-thousand strong force ponderously marched north, Lord Tyrell pulling rank as a Lord Paramount to be placed in overall command.

At the same time the North and Riverland armies were regrouping at High Heart, initially in preparation for a push against Darry, but upon receiving a raven from Lord Baratheon the force made its way to the Stony Sept…

-Robert's Rebellion, by Historian Rickard Mullen, 288AC

…The Battle of the Bells they called it. The largest battle since… well, before Valeria's fall. Neither the Conquest nor the Dance had so many men involved in a single battle.

Fifty-thousand Reachers and forty-thousand Crownlanders met eight-and-twenty-thousand Northmen, Six-thousand Stormlanders, and eight-and-ten-thousand Riverlanders. 

Ninety-thousand against two-and-fifty-thousand sounds like a foregone conclusion, doesn't it?

Thing was, of that ninety-thousand about fifty-thousand were unblooded levies, most equipped with just a short spear and large shield, though I saw some with farming tools instead of spears and some of the shields looked like someone had repurposed the side of a wagon.

In comparison we only had ten-thousand levies, all from the Riverlands, and they were well blooded. Many had looted so many arms and armor from previous battles that it could be difficult to tell the difference between one of our veteran levies and a poor man-at-arms.

They outnumbered us heavily in cavalry too, two-and-ten thousand to our seven, but no one was particularly concerned about that.

We had direwolves after all. Just writing that makes me grin in schadenfreude all over again. Anyone who had ever witnessed a horse meeting a direwolf for the first time could predict what was going to happen….

…The Loyalists reached the Stony Sept first, only a few days ahead of us, and put it under siege. I, and the other wargs and skinchangers with bird familiars, had them under constant surveillance ever since we got within three day's march of the town.

That gave us plenty of time to come up with a plan. See, we had a bunch of Seven worshipers in the Riverlands contingent, and they knew what the Reach's Septons like to portray the North as: a land of heathens, barbarians, and monsters, and guess what we had with us? Giants, direwolves, shadowcats, even a few Singers, and more. A lot of planning was put into figuring out how to maximize that psychological shock, only possible thanks to extensive reconnaissance by my flock and several greenseers investigating the past and parsing future possibilities.

Supposedly there's countermeasures to block them from looking through time to see what you're doing, but either the Seven don't know them or can't cast them without mage-priests of their own, though those with magic in our blood can definitely feel when a bunch of them are observing us from the past or future.

They also aren't omniscient in spite of their temporal abilities, as when I brought word that Loyalist sympathizers or infiltrators managed to open the Stony Septs' west gate so that the Loyalist army could storm in when we were just a few hours away they were caught completely off guard.

I am still baffled as to why they did that. They had to know we were coming. Mace Tyrell is no great thinker, to put it politely, but he isn't that stupid. The only rationalization that makes sense to me is that they thought we were farther away than we were, and could eliminate then-Lord Baratheon and his remaining Stormlanders before we could arrive.

Whatever their reasoning, their actions surprised us, and we had to quickly adjust our plans. 

There was concern that Lord Baratheon would be overwhelmed before we could arrive, but thankfully there was only so many men that could be shoved through a gatehouse at a time. The Stormlanders were slowing being pushed back towards the small holdfast at the center of the town, but when one of my fellow wargs sent her eagle to Lord Baratheon with a message he confirmed that they would hold long enough for us to arrive.

Still, we had to rethink our plan. Them being up against the Stony Sept's walls left them with limited ability to maneuver, and it would be easy for us to pin them against it.

Which was the one thing we absolutely could not afford to do. If we cornered them, they'd fight to the death like cornered rats. And there was ninety-thousand of them.

Our plan hinged on shock causing a significant portion of the army to break and run. If they didn't… well, the war would have gone on for a lot longer.

When we arrived Lord Tyrell had gotten fed up with trickling men in for Lord Baratheon to smash with his hammer and sent his cavalry under Lord Connington to circle around and take the Sept's northern gatehouse.

A word about the terrain around the Stony Sept for those who have never been there. The town is located in a valley with large hills to the north and west and one of the Blackwater Rush's tributaries to the south. The tributary was a ways from the town with a fair amount of farmland between it and the Sept's walls, and would play no part in the battle other than historians using it to mark the southern edge of the battlefield, but the hills were rather close, just a few hundred yards from the walls and completely blocked line of sight for anyone who wasn't in one of the Sept's corner towers, and that was the direction we came from.

Now, the Loyalists weren't incompetent. They had posted scouts in the hills to warn of anyone approaching from that way, but one of our druids temporally "sat in" on that meeting, so we knew where they were. And our outriders had gotten very good at eliminating enemy pickets when we mopped up the Riverlands. None got a warning out.

So the Loyalists had no idea we were there until we effectively ambushed them. And, thanks to a hell of a lot of stressful work, we got our timings near perfect.

First the direwolves under the command of Lord Stark crested the northern hill and immediately charged at the Loyalist cavalry, howling the whole way in terrifying synchronicity. The result was predictable. 

Horses are herd animals. If part of the herd panics and bolts, the rest will follow. And that's exactly what happened, undoubtedly with several shinchangers and greenseers helping the panic propagate through the cavalry.

We later estimated about a third of the enemy knights were unhorsed and trampled to death in the stampede, though a few hundred managed to maintain control of their mounts and not join in. Unfortunately, their reward for such an impressive display of horsemanship was to be flattened by the charging direwolf cavalry as they pursued the fleeing Loyalist cavalry. 

The thing about direwolves is that like mundane wolves they are endurance focused pursuit hunters, meaning they pursue their prey until it drops from exhaustion.

And horses are natural prey for direwolves.

This had been intellectually known for over a century by this point, but this was the first time that fact would be applied at scale. By the time the sun set and the pursuit was called off, less than a third of the loyalist cavalry managed to escape, and many lost their mounts to exhaustion or laming during the night.

Only one in ten would make their way back to friendly line with their mounts still combat capable, though a great many more would join the ranks of the infantry.

We later discovered that Jon Connington was in command of the cavalry, and though he lost his horse he managed to escape and make his way back to King's Landing, much to his regret.

The main army had just enough time to witness their prized heavy cavalry be effortlessly routed by howling men riding giant armored howling wolves when our main force crested the western hills behind them, with giants and the Umbers leading the charge.

Now, Lord Tyrell was sending his men-at-arms into the Sept, correctly reasoning that his peasant levies, while expendable, would be unable to make or maintain a beachhead against the Stormlanders. But this meant that all of his professional soldiers were clustered against the walls, so when our army slammed into his rear we were met with nothing but peasant levies.

The giants hit the line first. With steel protecting their lower halves and hands, and triple thickness gambesons elsewhere for arrow protection, they were functionally immune to the short spears and mid-power crossbows the levies used, and their war clubs sent men flying with each hit. And I do mean flying, as they went over the heads of those behind them before crashing into those in the rear ranks.

Greatjon Umber led the North's elite heavy infantry into the chaos the giants had opened, and while they didn't send men flying the Umbers, and those descended from them, were more than large and strong enough to reliably kill foes in even the heaviest armor with a single hit from their beak-hammers. Against the levies each swing downed multiple men, the one hit with the hammer and several men behind him who his body crashed into.

The few officers in the levies' ranks tried to organize a coherent defense, mainly by organizing the levy archers and crossbowmen into a single unit to fire on the giants, but that just made them sitting targets for our longbowmen and long-draw crossbowmen, thanks to my Silverwing providing accurate direction and range to them. 

The first volley fell a bit short, but the next three were on target. The poor sods didn't even have gambesons to protect them. They broke after the fourth volley, leaving a third of their number dead or dying.

The archers opened up on the rear ranks of the levy infantry at the same time our artillery began to fire at the men-at-arms by the wall, and those of us bonded to larger birds began to drop incendiary grenades – little clay pots filled with pitch, tar, or oil and a lit slow-burning wick – on anyone who tried to rally the wavering lines.

Our horse cavalry, under Lord Tully, slamming into their northern flank was the final blow, and the Loyalists shattered. The levies broke and ran almost as one, and they took a sizeable number of the men-at-arms with them.

In the space of about half-an-hour, a ninety-thousand strong army was reduced to under twenty-thousand, and most of the remainder was desperately trying to get the Stony Sept's walls between us and them.

'Course, we didn't exactly have our full strength either. Lord Baratheon was down to about four-thousand men by this point, and all of our cavalry and a sizable portion of our infantry was occupied with ensuring the routing Loyalists continued to route and didn't rally to hit us in the rear.

But thirty-thousand was more than enough to deal with the remainder, and we had control of the Sept's three other gates.

It took four hours before the last of the Loyalists surrendered. There weren't any fancy tactics here, just a long, brutal, grinding, slog of a city fight. The Loyalists weren't able to hide from us in the sky, but that didn't make running them down any easier, and the septons continued to ring those damned bells the whole time…

…We captured a lot of nobles from the Crownlands and the Reach, but the prize was undoubtedly Mace Tyrell himself…

…If only the Battle of Brindlewood went as well. But Prince Rhegar proved more than capable of learning from this disastrous defeat, and had developed counters…

-By Raven's Sight, A Chronicle of Robert's Rebellion, by Skinchanger Vallerie Blackbird, 284AC

…The Battle of the Bells was an unmitigated disaster for the Loyalists. It took Prince Rhegar three months to rally the scattered survivors of the host to Tumbletown, and he had barely thirty-thousand men by the end of it.

But the consequences were far more severe than mere casualties. Darry, which had been put under siege by the Vale army, decided to negotiate a surrender when word of the battle reached them, along with all the remaining loyalist holdouts in the Vale and Riverlands.

In addition, Lord Lannister began to quietly sound out the Rebels, and Lord Martell also sent a raven stating that if the Rebels could get Elia Martell and her children out of the Red Keep and safely to Sunspear Dorne would side with them, though these only came out after the rebellion was over.

Jon Connington, as the sole surviving commander of the force, was brought before the Mad King in chains, and while he was able to deflect enough blame onto Lord Tyrell to walk out with his head still attached, it wasn't enough to save his titles and he was attainted and banished.

That said, not everything went the Rebels' way. They lost eight-thousand men to death or permanent injury, and those losses could not be replaced. In addition Lord Arryn was only able to contribute two-and-ten thousand, having taken heavy casualties reunifying his kingdom, which did not have a particularly large population to call upon in the first place…

…With the Loyalist threat temporally neutralized it was decided that now was the best time for the marriages of the Tully daughters to Lords Stark and Arryn to go ahead, as there were still many loyalist castles between the rebel lines and King's Landing that needed to be sieged down, and that would take months even without the rebels choosing to starve them out. They also needed to spend several weeks integrating the Valemen into their order of battle, their horse in particular needed to be acclimatized to the presence of direwolves….

…Four months after the Battle of the Bells, Prince Rhegar had formed a new army from the remnants of the Reach and Crownlands, ten-thousand men from Dorne – consisting of those Lord Martell believed would side with the Targaryens no matter what and those who were a regular thorn in his side – the garrisons of every castle in the Crownlands that wasn't in the path of the Rebel advance, the Royal Marines from the remnants of the fleet, and tens of thousands of more levies. All told, about nine-and-sixty thousand men, of which seven-and-thirty were levies and three were cavalry.

Prince Rhegar also sacrificed numerous castles and land to the rebels in exchange for time, constantly drilling and training his men in the hope that he could avoid the fate of the Loyalists at the Stony Sept, though it has to be said that the Prince was not optimistic about his chances in the upcoming battle, as he had little faith that the levies would hold and he could find no more men-at-arms or knights. 

Eventually the rebels began to get too close to the capital for his comfort and he faced them just outside of Brindlewood…

-Robert's Rebellion, by Historian Rickard Mullen, 288AC

Chapter Text

Ned stared across the fallow farmland outside Brindlewood at the Loyalist army, the last obstacle before King's Landing. Specifically, at Prince Rhaegar standing ahead of the army under a flag of parley, comfortably out of bowshot from either side, Ser Barristan and Ser Darry of the Kingsguard standing beside him, the latter holding the flag.

"He can't possibly think that we will turn aside now," Jon said incredulously, "We've come too far and spilled too much blood to just turn around."

"Aye," Robert agreed, "This war won't end until we have his father's and his heads on a spike, and if he thinks otherwise he's an idiot."

"Given we're still waiting for the Freys to catch up with us we lose nothing talking with him," Ned pointed out.

Robert grunted.

"They were supposed to be back two days ago." He scowled, "If he's late because he decided to keep looting I'm going to be pissed at him."

"I don't like how we're outnumbered by half again," Lord Tully said.

It was a valid worry. Between casualties and having to dispatch forces to secure their flanks the Rebel army had been reduced to about four-and-forty thousand, less if you didn't count the currently absent five-and-ten hundred Frey men that were supposed to be with the army.

Robert scoffed.

"We were outnumbered two-to-one at Stony Sept too," he dismissed, "And we won that handily."

"We won't be able to repeat that here," Jon countered, "It's all flat farmland. There's no cover."

"Their levies will route like the last time."

"Rhaegar is not Tyrell," Ned responded, "He's spent the last several months training and equipping his levies, and has made them into a decent pike phalanx. No one wants to charge into a pike wall, no matter if the pikes are held by peasants or not."

Robert gave a grudging nod at that.

After a long moment of silence, Jon sighed.

"Well, let's see what the Prince wants."

"Lord Stark, Lord Baratheon, Lord Arryn, Lord Tully," Prince Rhaegar greeted with tired solemnity as they dismounted their horses and Grey Frost and approached on foot.

"Prince Rhaegar," Ned responded with the rest.

The prince sighed.

"Let's… not mince words. My father is insane, and deserves to die in a manner every bit as horrible as the deaths he has inflicted. He… must die. For his crimes and the good of the realm. I would like to hear your terms."

"After all we have done," Robert growled, "All we have been through, you seriously think we would surrender to you?"

"No! No, my apologies, I phrased that poorly. I meant your terms to support me against my Father. House Targaryen has wronged you severely, and upon taking the throne I will see you restituted for those wrongs. Lord Arryn, Lord Baratheon, I offer wergild, favorable and exclusive trading rights, greater autonomy, even Royal marriages, all details negotiable. 

"Lord Stark, House Targaryen has dealt you an unforgivable wrong with the murder of your father and brother. Name your price. I will accept anything, up to… and including complete independence from the Iron Throne."

Rhaegar looked pained as he finished speaking. Silence hung heavily over the group. Ned struggled to keep his shock to raised eyebrows, because this… Prince Rhaegar was willingly crippling not only his own authority should he become king, but that of any king that would succeed him. And he knew it. 

The urge to ask why was almost overwhelming, but Ned couldn't get the words out, couldn't muster the will to break the silence.

"…You… have a way with words," Robert slowly said, "And you must be truly desperate to offer such. But there's just one problem."

Rhaegar motioned for Robert to continue.

"How can we trust you to uphold your word?" The Stormlord demanded, "You forsook your wedding vows to kidnap Ned's sister and force her into a sham marriage, starting this whole mess!"

"I did no such thing!" Rhaegar angrily retorted, "Elia cannot survive another pregnancy! Yes, legally I could keep impregnating her until she died from a miscarriage and then take another wife, but I do not want that! The entire meeting between me, Elia, Lord Martell, Lyanna, and Lord Stark at Harrenhall was about this, and I had everyone's approval to set her aside and take Lyanna as my wife. Elia would be given the position of Royal Mother and placed in charge of childrearing for all royal children."

"So you claim," Robert said skeptical derisiveness, "Yet there are none who can verify that. Rickard Stark is dead by your father's hand and Lord Martell's sister is being held hostage in the Red Keep. He'll say whatever you want him to."

When the prince turned hopeful eyes to him Ned said "All Father told me was that it was a trade deal. Nothing more."

Life seemed to leave Rhaegar at that.

"Do you have any proof?" Jon asked.

"None with me. All the documents are with Lyanna."

"How convenient," Robert snorted.

"Where is Lyanna?" Ned demanded, "Where is my sister?"

"Safe," Rhaegar replied, "She has my kingsguard with her. Few know where she is and obscurity is her best defense. Ser Hightower may be more loyal to my father than me but between him, Ser Whent, and Ser Dayne no harm will come to her or…" He trailed off before visibly deciding to not finish whatever he'd been about to say, "She'll be safe."

Ned had a sinking suspicion about what the prince had been about to say, and judging by the ugly look on Robert's face so did he. 

"Where is she?"

"Safe. Is there nothing I can do to convince you to help me take the throne?"

"No," Jon and Robert answered.

Rhaegar sighed and turned to leave before pausing.

"Lord Stark, find me after the battle and I'll send you to her, win or lose. And please stay alive, I don't want to tell Lyanna that her brother died fighting me."

Ned nodded, and everyone turned to head back to their armies.

…The battle opened up with an artillery duel. Despite the wargs providing perfect range and distance, the ballista were not accurate enough to reliably score hits at range, and often a single hit wasn't enough to destroy a ballista. It took three hours for the Loyalist artillery to be satisfactorily silenced and the Rebels began to close. 

Prince Rhaegar placed his pike levies in the center of the army, keeping his crossbowmen and archers behind them in an attempt to turn them into a deadly combination where the pikemen pinned the rebels in place even as they got pounded by the skirmishers behind them. It would also prevent a repeat of when the North's giants smashed the levy lines at the Stony Sept, as any attempt would see the giants downed by a withering barrage of arrowfire and skewered on the pikes. With the Rebel infantry pinned in place by the pikes, he would then leverage his superior numbers to wrap around the Rebel flanks with his men-at-arms while his few cavalry remained in reserve with ten-thousand men-at-arms to plug any holes that would open in the lines.

It was a good plan. It would have worked too, had the levies been better equipped. Their arms were paid for by Prince Rhaegar, but while the Prince's coffers were deep, they were not bottomless. With King Aerys denying him access to the Royal Treasury, the Prince had to choose between providing good quality arms or good quality armor for almost forty thousand men. He chose the former, under the almost certainly correct belief that better armor would not be able to bridge the gulf of experience between the loyalist levies and rebel men-at-arms like a pike-and-shot wall would.

As such, while the officers had metal breastplates in addition to the metal nasal helms that were issued to all of the levies, most only had gambeson to protect themselves….

-Robert's Rebellion, by Historian Rickard Mullen, 288AC

…Morris Coke did not rise when I entered his home, understandable given the twisted ruin of his legs, apparent even through his trousers.

"I heard you wanted to hear of my role in the Battle of Brindlewood," he said without preamble, scowling.

I nodded and explained that I was collecting tales of what happened during the Rebellion, not from the great lords, who I admittedly did not have access to, but from the men who marched through the mud and stood in the lines. 

Morris was still reluctant to speak to me, but relented after I offered him a silver stag for his time.

"Fine," he grumbled, "I'll tell you what I did.

"I wasn't part of the first round of drafts, so I wasn't at the Battle of the Bells, and thank the Seven for that. It was four months after that when the Prince's men came here and conscripted me. I don't think anyone would be surprised to know that my initial thoughts were that I was going to be killed the moment we encountered Rebels. 

"I remain so thankful that the Prince didn't throw us away like chaff like so many other lords would have. None of us would have lived if he did that. Still, it was quite the surprise to be handed a pike, gambeson, and a nasal helm before being drilled by knights. It wasn't anything complex, just how to march, how to hold the pike, how to remain in formation, maintain your equipment, things like that. We didn't have time to learn anything truly advanced. 

"When we weren't drilling on in the yards or fields, we were having hammered into our heads that if we broke and ran, we were dead men. Not because the Loyalists would kill us, but because the Rebels would. They pointed out, with practical demonstrations, how keeping the pike wall up and intact was our best hope to survive. No one wanted to charge into a hedge of pikes if there was any other option. So when we marched onto the fields outside Brindlewood, we knew that the line had to hold, or we'd all die…

"…I was on the left flank in the rearmost line. Didn't have much to do at the start of the battle other than watch, though I couldn't see the rebels over the heads of everyone in front of me. When the Rebel artillery finished shooting up ours, they switched targets to the cavalry reserve where the Prince was, forcing him to scatter his forces so they wouldn't be shredded. When our crossbowmen, stationed about, oh, fifty feet or so behind our center began to fire I remember hearing someone from the front ranks say that our bolts were bouncing off the rebel's armor plates. 'Course several sergeants promptly yelled at him to shut up so he would stop hurting morale.

"Then the rebel archers fired back. Their accuracy…" he shook his head, "There was no fucking way they had line of sight. No way they could have known exactly where our crossbowmen were. Yet not one arrow landed more than five-and-twenty feet in front or behind our men on their first volley regardless."

"Wargs," I supplied, gesturing vaguely towards the sky, "one was watching you from a bird in the sky and relaying distance and direction."

"Fucking magic," Morris spat, "were their fucking bows bespelled as well to be so accurate?"

"No, that was high quality equipment combined with sheer skill."

He sighed. 

"Our men didn't last long regardless. I'd say… six in ten arrows found their mark in that first volley. Seven or eight in the second volley that came half a minute later. They broke after the fourth." He shook his head. "I can't blame them. They left a quarter of their men dead or dying on the ground, and I'd say three-fifths of those who fled were too wounded to fight. Standard thickness gambesons, like the ones we had, could turn a fatal hit to a wounding one, but there's no way you're going to fight with an arrow imbedded in your chest, even if it hasn't pierced your lung or heart. If we had double or triple-thickness…" He shook his head again, "Wasn't to be. The Prince nearly bankrupted himself getting us what we had.

"Unfortunately, seeing how quickly they routed, and how many casualties they took, gave the rebels an idea, and all of their skirmishers let loose on our center. I remember seeing a part of the sky turn dark from the arrows as they hammered our pike line with rapid fire volleys. Not one man fled in the face of that," Morris said proudly, with a hint of a smile, "Not one. They held the line." Melancholy filled him. "They died holding the line. None survived. Within the span of a few minutes our center was gone, and now-King Baratheon immediately exploited it, leading his surviving Stormlanders into the gap, and the Prince committed our reserves in a counter charge that met him head-on. 

He sighed. "We know how that ended."

I nodded. The Stag and the Dragon sought each other out, and Prince Rhaegar fell with his helm caved in from King Baratheon's warhammer.

"And then came the flanking charge," I prompted.

"And then came the flanking charge," he agreed, sighing, "I still don't know how the direwolves managed to get behind us, the men-at-arms were deployed at the ends of the pike line precisely to prevent that."

"They were occupied dealing with the giants and the Umbers," I supplied, "Inflicted heavy casualties on them too." Mainly thanks to their local numerical superiority. 

"Ah. I'd wondered where those were. Anyways, I'd been watching the fighting in the center so the only warning I had was when the damned wolves howled as they began their charge. As I said, I wasn't expecting it, but we had drilled on what to do if this happened. I, and the rest of the back row, turned and presented our pikes. The rows behind us were supposed to do the same, but I don't think they had the time. 

"And yeah, I was terrified, but all I could think was 'get the pike in position to receive cavalry' as a fucking wall of gleaming steel and fur came barreling down on me. In those last few seconds I noticed that the direwolf heading at me was wearing mail, not plate like all of the rest. John and Harry, who were standing on either side of me – they didn't survive by the way – noticed as well, I could see their pikes angling towards that wolf like I was. 

"We had no idea if our pikes would pierce plate barding, especially since the wolves were angling themselves so that the pikes would impact on the large and heavily angled plates protecting their shoulders and the back of the neck rather than rearing away like we were told cavalry would do when faced with a pike wall, but mail? We knew we could pierce mail. We'd been taught to aim for it.

"I remember my pike's haft shattering in my hands as the head punched into the direwolf's shoulder, and then its body slammed into me, trapping me beneath it and shattering my legs. I don't know if it was the pain or the impact with the ground that knocked me out, but when I woke up the battle was over, and we had lost. If some Northerners hadn't come to collect the direwolf's body, I probably would have died there."

"I'm surprised they let you live."

"They did ask if I killed the wolf, but I lied. Said it was Harry. I was just unlucky enough to have the beast land on me."

"Did any other direwolves die in the charge?"

"Some. Not a lot. By the look of things most of the pikes had their shafts splinter like mine on contact with the armor, but some got through, either hitting a small gap between the plates or more often managing to hit a leg and bringing the wolf down that way.…"

…As I was preparing to leave I had one last question that had been burning in my head ever since I heard the description of the direwolf Morris had taken down.

"Do you know who it was you… unhorsed is obviously the wrong term. Unwolfed? Dismounted is probably the best."

Morris shook his head.

"He was wearing the Stark direwolf but other than that? No. Figured he was from one of the cadet branches, or was a mounted man-at-arms directly sworn to the house."

"I'm pretty sure that was Lord Stark himself," I replied.

"…Huh."

Seeing that I would not get anything else from him, I left.

-Tales from the Rebellion, by Samuel Puckett, 292AC

Brindlewood surrendered after the Loyalist army broke and fled. Unsurprisingly, given that the Rebel army outnumbered their total population by an order of magnitude even with the heavy casualties they had taken. While the army had their victory feast where they were camped around the palisade walls, Ned was with the other high nobles in Brindlewood's market square, where large tables had been set up for their own feast.

Ned sat at the table reserved for the Lord Paramounts, listlessly staring at nothing and ignoring the festive atmosphere of the other nobles.

Grey Frost was dead. His soul-bonded companion, the symbol of his house, dead because Ned hadn't bothered to get him proper armor. 

And with Prince Rhaegar dead, he had no leads as to where his sister was. Ser Barristan, the sole surviving Kingsguard, hadn't been with Rhaegar when he absconded with her, and had no idea where she could be.

He grunted as Robert greeted him by clapping on the shoulder.

"Cheer up Ned," he said jovially, a goblet of wine already in hand, "The war's all but won, the Targs are finished!"

Ned just gave a morose grunt in response, causing Robert to peer at him, slightly flushed.

"Don't tell me you're still moping about that oversized dog of yours. You can easily get another."

By the time the words penetrated Ned's brooding Robert was moving on, which meant he didn't see the incredulous look Ned gave his back. Did he not know just how callous – no, no he obviously didn't. To suggest that a warg just replace a soul-bonded companion like a cheap mule was an incredible insult, especially if the companion had just died. It wasn't on the level of telling a widower to remarry before their spouse was cremated or buried, but it was close.

It was also something that southerners were chronically unaware of, given they didn't have wargs.

Jon sat next to him a few minutes later.

"How are you doing Ned?"

"…We took a lot of casualties," he replied.

"We did. I just got the most recent count."

Ned looked at his foster father and gestured for him to continue.

"Six thousand dead or expected to die, eight thousand too injured to fight again. Two-and-ten injured but expected to recover, with another seven thousand with minor injuries that won't prevent them from fighting."

"If they throw another army at us we won't be able to do anything other than a fighting retreat until spring," Ned said.

Jon nodded.

"Aye. Thankfully they don't have another army, and the one we just fought is well and truly shattered. A few thousand are making their way back to King's Landing, but the rest have dispersed and won't rally. We have, effectively, won the war. Though that reminds me, we need to ask those druids of yours what Rhaegar did with his levies. The men-at-arms broke before they did."

Ned nodded at that. 

"Aye. And many tried to retreat in good order even as the rest of the army broke and ran." A lot of those had chosen to surrender rather than run when it became clear they couldn't escape too. "Unfortunately the area he did most of his training is very sparse on weirwoods, so they can't give us more than they have. We'll have to figure it out from interrogating prisoners."

"Aye…. I'm sorry about Grey Frost."

"…Thank you," Ned said quietly, "I heard about Elbert and Denys."

"Aye. Even two on one they couldn't take Ser Barristan…"

"ATTENTION!" Robert bellowed from the middle of the square, waiting for everyone to quiet down and turn to him before continuing, "Before we begin our well-deserved feast, I have something to say. For almost three hundred years we have bent the knee to the Targaryens. Aye, they conquered us all through fire, blood, and the might of their dragons. But dragons have been dead for over a hundred years, and since then we have had bad king after bad king after bad king! 

"I say enough! Enough of these foreign kings from a dead land! Enough of these horrid Targaryen kings! I say it is time for a new dynasty to rule from the Iron Throne! Here and now, I submit that I, Robert Baratheon, should be our next king! What say you?"

Almost as one, the lords turned to face Ned and Jon, waiting for their response. Ned realized that with Hoster already abed with a broken clavicle, he and Jon were the only other Lords Paramount present. If they both supported Robert's claim, then his ascension would be all but assured. Likewise, they were the only ones with the clout to possibly put forward a rival claim or claimant with any chance of success.

As Ned looked at Jon, he realized that his foster father would never have the support to make his own claim to the Iron Throne as he was too old and had no heirs with the death of Elbert and Denys. Hoster meanwhile straight up did not have the political clout to put forward a successful candidacy – he was barely able to keep his own kingdom in line as it was!

As for Ned himself… he just wanted to go home. Back to Winterfell with Benjen and Lyanna. To grieve in peace. Let someone else rule the realm, he did not want it.

With Jon nn-verbally signaling for Ned to go first the Lord of the North slowly stood.

He took a deep breath, and spoke.

"Hail, King Robert Baratheon."

"Aye," Jon said, "Hail King Baratheon, first of his dynasty."

"HAIL, KING BARATHEON!" The nobles collectively cheered, "LONG MAY HE REIGN!"

As Ned sat back down, absently listening to the chatter starting back up and signaling a servant to bring him a glass of wine, he failed to notice that not a single noble of the North had joined in.

Chapter Text

Ned had barely sat down behind the folding table in his tent, intent on finishing the last of the post-battle reports, when the high lords of the North (minus Manderly, Seastark, and Mormont, as they were still at sea with the fleets) stormed in.

"Eddard Stark," Greatjon Umber rumbled dangerously, glaring, "What the fuck was that?"

"I – I beg your pardon?" Ned asked, startled.

"We went to war to avenge Rickard and Brandon," Lord Bolton said sharply, "Not to put Robert Baratheon on the Iron Throne!"

"The only reason we haven't already called a Conclave and put your brother on your throne is because that would tear the rebellion apart," Lord Glover growled, "And depending on how you answer we might do that anyway."

Ned slipped his hand below the table to comb his fingers through Grey Frost's fur, only to meet empty air. After a few moments of futile grasping he glanced over to see where his bonded companion was, before he remembered.

Grey Frost was dead.

As he looked at the empty floor by his leg where his direwolf usually lay Ned's hand and breath shook slightly. 

He took a deep breath and pushed aside the impending breakdown. It made him feel horrible and guilty, like he was just dismissing Frost's death, but he couldn't allow himself to be emotionally compromised. Not now, no matter how sacrilegious that felt.

Refocusing on his lords he saw that they were either politely ignoring his slip or giving him looks of sympathy, but all were clearly waiting for his answer.

"What about my sister?" Ned asked, mainly to buy himself some time to think.

"What about her?" Lord Dustin asked, "She was safe with the Prince when this all kicked off. Though I know your father told them to hold off on finalizing the arraignment until after Princess Martell and her children were evacuated from the Red Keep so they couldn't be used as hostages against Dorne when we invoked the Contingency to remove Areys." He shook his head. "I'm not surprised that Lady Lyanna didn't listen, but Rheagar really should have known better."

A pit of lead formed in Ned's stomach.

"He was telling the truth?"

"Who was?" Lord Glover asked.

Ned explained what the Prince had told him at the pre-battle meeting.

"That was the plan, though I know your father would have stressed holding off implementing it until after Elia and her children were evacuated from the Red Keep and Areys' grasp. Obviously they didn't listen," The Greatjon rumbled, scrutinizing him, "You didn't know?"

"No," Ned said, "Father never told me."

"Did he… not have the opportunity too?" Lord Glover asked delicately.

Ned thought back to what he remembered of Harrenhall. He knew that the Spider had all the major lords under observation, a list that definitely included Father, Robert, and himself. Had Father not been able to slip the spies on them long enough to tell Ned what was going on with his sister… or had he not trusted Ned to keep his mouth shut?

"I don't know," Ned answered.

There was a grim silence at that.

"We've strayed," Lord Bolton said, "Stark. Why are you supporting Baratheon's desire to overthrow the Targaryen dynasty, not just Areys? We'll need them for the Long Night."

Ned gave him a confused look.

"The Long Night ended thousands of years ago."

"The Second Long Night," Lord Bolton said, tone clearly indicating he thought Ned was being deliberately obtuse and did not appreciate it.

"That's just a story told to scare children," Ned dismissed.

The way his lords froze and stared at him in shock made him add "Right?"

"…No, Ned, it's not," Greatjon said heavily, "What do you know about the Black Books and Idgra's Prophecies?"

"…Greatjon, I left for the Eyrie when I was nine."

The lords grimly looked at each other and leaned together, muttering. Ned caught a few words.

"Benjen would know-" "-he's rather young-" "-did he have lordly training?" "-issues with the South-"

"My lords," Ned interrupted, causing them to look at him, "Please. I am willing to learn. Teach me what I need to know."

The lords considered him for a long moment before looking at each other and, one my one, nodding.

"Very well," Lord Glover said, "But you have until we return to the North after the war's end to prove to us that you are worthy for the Lordship you hold. Even if you do, you will still be on notice. Another screw up, and we will call a Conclave to put your brother on your seat."

"I understand, my lord," Ned said solemnly, "and my first question: why are the Targaryens so important to the North."

"We will need them when the Second Long Night arrives," Greatjon said, "Them and their dragons."

"Dragons are extinct," Ned pointed out.

Lord Glover leaned over the table till his mouth was next to Ned's ear.

"Not on Skagos," he whispered.

Ned stared as the Deepwood Lord retook his position, stunned. Dragons. In the North. And no one south of the Neck had any idea. Aerys definitely didn't know. If he had, he would have spent his rule currying favor with the North. Or moved against them far sooner. The thought of that madman with a dragon made Ned shudder.

"I… see. I see. Do we…. Are there any clues as to when the Long Night will start?"

"Lady Idgra was quite specific on that," Lord Bolton said, "300AC, give or take a few years depending on how much of a fight the Thenn, Wildings, and FreeFolk settlements put up against the Others and their wights."

Ned felt another pit open up under him, and had to stop himself from instinctively reaching for Frost to steady himself.

"That's seven-and-ten years from now!"

"Aye, seven-and-ten years," Lord Dustin said severely, "You understand why we're pissed about Baratheon? And why your father arraigned for Brandon to marry a Tully, sent you to foster under Lord Arryn alongside the Lord of the Stormlands, married your sister to the Crown Prince, and was considering marrying Benjen to a Lannister?"

"Aye. Though that last one is news to me."

"That I'm not surprised by. He decided to start sounding out the Lannisters just before Harrenhall."

Ned took a deep breath and slowly let it out.

"Okay. If we want… to see if the Targaryens can be… pyromancers by the time the Long Night starts we need to send the Targaryen children to Skagos now. I'm sure I can convince Robert that we'd be exiling them to 'a cold, bleak, wasteland of an island that is nigh impossible to get to by boat and I can easily keep an eye on them'."

That got a few brief smirks and Ned continued

"First thing we do once we breach the Red Keep is kill Aerys – we cannot afford to allow him to be a dagger in our collective backs – but then we need to get Elia, Rhaella, and the children out lest they suffer an 'accident'. Greatjon, can you…"

"Aye," he rumbled, "I'll get them to Skagos."

"Thank you. Hopefully one of the servants will know where Lyanna is."

"Given how long Rheagar spent with her she's almost certainly with child," Lord Ryswell said, which was something Ned had been trying not to think about, "What are you going to do if Baratheon demands that she become his wife?"

Ned thought about it. He thought about how Robert remained ignorant of nearly all Northern customs and culture despite growing up with him. He thought about the whores constantly traipsing in and out of Robert's tent even as he proclaimed his love for Lyanna. He thought about the bastards he knew Robert had sired, and how the Lord hadn't seemed to care a whit about them.

He thought about Lyanna's fiery and impulsive spirit, able and willing to go toe-to-toe and blow for blow with anyone who looked down on her. 

"If Robert thinks he can bed an unwilling Lyanna we'd better have another candidate for the throne waiting."

That caused a few chuckles and Ned briefly grinned as well before sobering.

"More seriously can I refuse the King? I know the North's relationship with the Iron Throne is complicated because while Torrhen bent the knee, it was a conditional surrender, but I'm not sure what that means in practice beyond greater autonomy for the North."

"Aye, the King can't demand the hand of a Stark for marriage without the approval of Lord Stark," Lord Ryswell said, "Admittedly that wouldn't prevent the Iron Throne from making things difficult for the North, but the law's on our side here."

Ned nodded. 

"If Lyanna says no, then Robert has his answer."

The lords gave him approving looks.

"Keep that up, and you might just make it as Lord Stark," Greatjon said.

Ned led the North's forces he as rode through the northern gates of King's Landing, fuming as he sat uncomfortably astride a horse, guilt at taking another mount – no matter that he had no intention to bond with it – so soon after losing Frost looming in the back of his mind. It had taken a month for the army to recover enough to march on the capital, which was fortunate because it had allowed them to strike a secret deal with Lord Lannister where he would open the city gates for them.

Sacking the city was not part of the plan.

Passing through the inner gates Ned and the vanguard – consisting of the major lords and their retinues – came to an abrupt stop in surprise as the men waiting for him were not wearing the Lannister Lion as expected.

They were wearing the Stark Direwolf.

Their armor and clothing battered, tattered, and stained with dirt and blood, but it was clearly the Stark Direwolf over Northern-style travel plate.

One of the men, tall enough for one to suspect Umber ancestry and with an unkempt beard and mane, stepped forward.

"Good to see you, Lord Stark. I'm Sargent Hernin, the senior-most surviving member of your father's guard."

"I wasn't aware any of you survived," Ned said, surprised.

The sergeant grinned.

"Officially, we're 'unaffiliated' rebels taking advantage of the chaos according to the Mad King. Can't go admitting that while he got most of us, he didn't get us all. Even if we have decimated the goldcloaks and especially that we managed to get into the Red Keep several times."

"You managed to get into the Red Keep?"

"Aye, through the hidden tunnels. Varys put a stop to that after we managed to turn Kingsguard Martell, but," he carelessly gestured towards the pillars of smoke and sounds of the ongoing sacking, "I think he's a bit preoccupied right now."

"You managed to turn Prince Lewyn Martell?" Greatjon asked as the group moved out of the way of the rest of the army entering the city.

"Aye, though Varys put a stop to it when he tattled to Aerys. You can guess his response."

"How?" 

"Rather easily once we made contact. We both wanted to get Elia and her children out of heer and to Dorne. Unfortunately we haven't been able to find any passages that lead to Maegor's Holdfast, just to the servants' section in the keep proper." He paused and eyed them. "You want me to lead you there?"

Ned dismounted and drew Ice.

"Yes. Lead on Sargent."

Jamie Lannister lounged on the Iron Throne, his exhausted gaze flickering between the corpses of Aerys and Rossart and the gibbet where Lewyn's charred corpse hung. It had been hours since he had broken his oaths and killed his king, and he was a bit confused as to why his father hadn't come yet. The sacking had begun hours ago. 

He was pretty sure word of what he had done had gotten out by now, several guards and servants had entered the throne room, seen the dead king and him on the throne, and promptly fled while he waited. 

At least Princess Elia, Queen Rheana, and the children were safe. The Queen and Viserys had left for Dragonstone yesterday, and Father had sent an advance guard, which included the Mountain, with his message that he had arrived to secure the city – and Jamie only now realized the message had neglected to say who Father was securing the city for – to secure the Martell Princess and her children. Aerys hadn't let them into the Red Keep, but by now they should have managed to make their way through the secret passages Father knew about from his time as Hand into the Holdfast, and while the remaining Targaryen guards might delay them, they wouldn't be able to stop the Mountain. So at least they were safe. They were valuable hostages after all.

Finally he heard armored footsteps approaching from the open door leading to the servant's quarters and, after a second's thought, he slouched until he was sprawled across the throne, knowing it would irritate his father. It also wasn't something he would do if he wasn't wearing armor, otherwise the throne's blades would have torn him up like they did to the now late King Scab.

Absently staring at the ceiling he waited for the footsteps to come to a halt before speaking.

"You took your sweet time, didn't you?" He drawled.

When there was no response he lazily glanced down.

It was not his father that had come through the doorway.

Lord Stark, flanked by a dozen of his men-at-arms, all clad in full painted plate with their visors raised, glared at him.

"At least we know where your loyalties lie," the Lord of the North said derisively, "Kingslayer."

Jamie sat up straight and barely refrained from glaring back. 

"Get off the throne."

"Do you want my sword too?" he asked, bitter sharpness leaking through as he complied.

The Wolf Lord considered it for a second.

"No. Where's my sister?"

"I don't know. I haven't left the capital since Aerys went to Harrenhall. Varys would know."

"And where's Varys?"

"If he's not in his office then he's made a run for it."

Lord Stark looked at two of his retinue, one in painted gold-green and the other orange-blue, and they nod back.

"Where is his office?" one asks.

Jamie explained but rather than leave like he expected the pair sat at the base of the throne's dais, two other members of Lord Stark's men standing guard over them. 

Then their eyes rolled into the backs of their heads and their bodies went limp against the side of the throne.

Jamie froze, hand clenched tight over the hilt of his sword, but he retained enough presence of mind not to draw it even as goosebumps went up and down his arms.

He'd heard of wargs. Until that moment, he'd believed the Maesters and Septons that insisted that they weren't real. That magic wasn't real.

Clearly, they were wrong.

He watched in morbid fascination for several minutes until the one on the left abruptly stirred.

"He's running, but we have his scent."

Jamie watched for a few minutes longer before he decided to seclude himself in a corner as Lord Stark wandered the throne room, inspecting anything that took his fancy. 

"Kingslayer."

Jamie looked over. Lord Stark pointed at the gibbet.

"Who's this?"

"Lewyn Martell. Formerly of the Kingsguard. Aerys had him killed after he started conspiring with the remaining guards your father brought." And that he and the Goldcloaks had failed to kill.

Lord Stark grunted and moved on.

A while later Jamie startled when one of the servant's entrances was abruptly shouldered open by a gold-green armored direwolf, the great beast filling the entire doorway until it barely fit through, followed by Varys, who was doing that no-expression-watch-the-doorways thing he did when he got really nervous. The Spider paused in the doorway, spying Lord Stark waiting for him, then staggered into the room when the orange-blue armored direwolf behind him shoved him forwards with its' head.

"Ah, Varys," Lord Stark said with fake cheerfulness that didn't hide the menace in his words, "So good of you to join us. I've got a question for you." He dropped the cheerfulness. "Where. Is. My. Sister?"

"…Tower of Joy, my lord," the overweight man admitted.

"And where is that?"

Varys gestured to a map of Westeros that was hanging from a nearby wall.

"I can show you, my lord."

Jamie tuned them out, giving a longing look to the throne room's still sealed main doors. What was taking Father so long? His time in the Kingsguard had made him good at being able to stand around with nothing to occupy his mind, but even he had his limits. Especially when he had had less than six hours of sleep in the past two days.

Lord Stark had progressed to interrogating Varys about some house in the Reach a good hour later when the main doors slammed open and now-King Baratheon strode in, his plate armor splattered with blood (which made Jamie realize the Stark men's armor was still immaculate), and Father striding in beside him.

Figures. Of course Father would prioritize ingratiating himself with the new king rather than check on his eldest son. 

King Baratheon laughed at the sighed of Aerys' corpse still sprawled on the floor in front of the throne.

"And so the Mad King dines in the hells where he belongs!" He crowed, "Who was it that struck the blow Ned?"

"Jamie Lannister is the Kingslayer," Lord Stark said, pointing at him, "On the orders of his father no doubt."

It took a lot for Jamie to refrain from glaring. Father hadn't given him such orders, but he knew that was because Father lacked the means to slip him said orders without Varys finding out rather than being unwilling to do so. 

"Indeed," Father said, "I am pleased that he was able to accomplish it without issue."

Jamie clenched his jaw tightly to refrain from saying anything. There was no arguing with Father. Even when he took credit for things he had no right to.

King Baratheon laughed.

"Well, Kingslayer, I dare say you've earned a royal boon. What do you wish?"

He could feel his Father's gaze boring a hole in the side of his head. He knew what he wanted, for his Golden Heir to be released from the Kingsguard oaths so that he could eventually take the mantel of Lord Lannister. 

Well fuck him, Jamie thought with a surge of spite, stepping forward to kneel in front of the new king.

"Your Grace, my wish is to join your Kingsguard, so that I may serve a king worthy of the title."

The king laughed, and effortlessly hauled him to his feet.

"Then a member of my Kingsguard you shall be."

Jamie looked at his Father, who was turning an alarming shade of red, but before he could say anything everyone was distracted by the squealing of a stuck pig. At least everyone thought it was a stuck pig until the squealing morphed into begging before descending back into squealing. The orange armored direwolf moved to sniff at the door the sounds were coming from.

"Lord Stark," the orange direwolf knight called, "The Greatjon's approaching."

"Shit," Lord Stark said, looking worried.

"Problem?" King Baratheon asked, stepping to stand next to his friend, hand dropping to the head of his warhammer that was sheathed on his belt, Jamie shadowing him.

"I sent Greatjon to secure the Holdfast. If he's here something's gone badly wrong."

It didn't take long for the Giant of the North to arrive. The man had to stoop to fit through the doorframe but when he straightened Jamie found himself looking up and up and up. The Mountain that Rides was almost unnaturally large. The Greatjon had almost two feet on him, and was half a foot wider in the shoulders.

Jamie fancied he could feel the vibrations of the giant's footsteps though the flagstones of the room, and wasn't entirely sure that was his imagination.

Then he noticed that the squealing was coming from a somewhat small blood-soaked Lannister man-at-arms whose helmetless head was almost buried beneath Greatjon's massive paw, and the Northern Lord's other hand was dragging an unconscious Mountain by the foot.

And following them were Northern knights carrying three bodies wrapped in bloodstained Targaryen banners.

Two were far too small to be adults.

Jamie's heart dropped to his boots as he listened to Greatjon Umber explain what had happened. How they had found the Lannister man repeatedly stabbing the corpse of Princess Rhaenys, how the Mountain smashed the head of little Prince Aegon, then killed his mother even as he raped her, and was found still defiling her corpse.

He listened absently, numb to the world, as Lord Stark immediately began to demand that the Lannister man – Ser Armory Loch apparently – and Ser Clegane face some sort of punishment for their actions. Father immediately objected of course. They were his men, supposedly acting on his orders.

He was brought back to the world when King Baratheon began to laugh.

"Don't you see Ned? This is justice! The Targaryens took your father, brother, and sister, and now they have reaped what they have sown! Once the ex-queen and her spawn are dealt with, our vengeance will be complete."

"Rhaenys, Aegon, and Viserys are children Robert! They don't deserve this!"

"All I see are Dragonspawn."

Dead silence, so complete not even the flames in the torches seemed to make a sound. It was as though the world itself was holding its breath.

Then the room seemed to darken, winds from the lowest hells stirred, gathering around the Heir to the Kings of Winter, who was so far past enraged that, even through his gleaming plate, he seemed…. Not. Quite. Human. 

Jamie swallowed nervously as the direwolf crammed into human form turned a baleful gaze onto the king.

And the Quiet Wolf bared his fangs at the newly Crowned Stag.

…The argument – though calling it a mere argument greatly downplays it – between Lord Stark and King Baratheon at the end of the Sack after the latter's infamous and callous statement – "All I see are Dragonspawn" – in response to being presented the bodies of the Targaryen children was legendary. None who were there have spoken of just what was said between the two beyond the most general of terms, lest they anger either the Crown or the Lord of the North.

But the brotherhood between Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon was shattered that day, and any loyalty Dorne or the North may have had towards the Stormlord on the Iron Throne died with Princess Elia Martell, Princess Rhaenys, and Prince Aegon when their murderers went free without even a slap on the wrist. 

Officially, according to Royal Proclamation, the ones responsible were never identified and remain unknown, and Lords Lannister and Arryn would very much like to keep it that way…

…While the Rebel army, newly reinforced with Lannister men, marched south to relieve the Stormlands, which held the last Loyalist army under Lord Tarly – who would eventually surrender without a fight – Lord Stark took his personal guard and struck out for the Tower of Joy to retrieve his sister…

- Robert's Rebellion, by Historian Rickard Mullen, 288AC

Even in the depths of winter, the Dornish Marches and Prince's Pass were hot enough that the Northmen had to travel by night to prevent the direwolves and Ned's Northern-breed warhorse, natives of the frozen north, from collapsing from heat exhaustion. They'd also switched to partial plate for the same reason.

It was just before dawn when they reached the Tower of Joy, a solitary tower that was once the center of an outpost Dorne had used to monitor the pass before being converted into a retreat by the late Prince Rheagar. Firelight flickering through the arrowslits of the tower revealed that someone was awake.

The two horses stabled in front of the door began to panic at the sight and smell of the direwolves as they rode up. Cover blown the group leapt off their mounts and rushed the door, Ned in the lead with Ice in hand.

The door opened and Ser Oswell Whent stepped out, clad in only light mail over light clothing in deference to the local climate.

"'Bout time you got back Art-"

Light-blinded from going from a lit room into the dark night, it took the kingsguard a moment too long to realize the man charging at him was not his fellow knight. He only had time to grab the hilt of his sheathed sword before Ice's crossguard cracked into his head.

Ned ignored the knight as he fell, trusting one of his guard to secure him before he recovered, and sprinted through the door, almost sliding on the stone floor as he abruptly changed direction towards the stairs. As his foot landed on the first stair, he noticed several things. First was the smell of putrefaction. Someone had a wound that had gone septic. The second was of a man shouting.

"Damn it woman! What did you do with him!"

Ned was halfway up the stairs to the third floor when he heard the sound of flesh on flesh as someone was slapped. He'd set foot on the stairs to the fourth, and top, floor when the now panicking man bellowed.

"ANSWER ME!"

Noticing that the door at the top of the stairs was unlatched Ned slammed into it shoulder first, causing it to explode open, already winding up for a massive strike as Ice cleared the doorway. Ser Gerold Hightower startled upright from where he had been looming over the occupied bed that dominated the middle of the room, hand immediately going to his sword, but between the bed, the curved walls of the tower, and the clutter in the room he was unable to dodge Ned's swing for there was nowhere for him to dodge to.

Ice slammed into Ser Hightower's side and while his mail held, his chest did not. The knight crunched against the tower wall and fell, blood falling from his mouth as his lungs collapsed. Ned spun his ancestral blade and sliced the tip through the downed kingsguard's neck in a mercy stroke.

Then he looked at the bed. Lyanna lay on her back, a light blanket covering her torso and legs, face and arms swollen and discolored. A hand print marred her cheek. Ned rested Ice against the bed and dropped to his knees and took her cold, clammy hand in his own.

"Lyanna?"

She stirred, feverish, glassy eyes turning towards him.

"Ned?" Her voice was rasping and weak.

"I'm here Lyanna."

"Ned! Did you find him?"

"Him who?"

This was apparently the wrong thing to say as Lyanna started to panic.

"You have to find him! He'll kill him! Please, you have find him, have to protect him!"

"Him, who? Lyanna, please…"

"He is…. He is…." Lyanna's face went slack for a long, terrifying moment before she stirred again. "Ned, is that you?"

Ned kept the horror creeping down his spine off his face as he realized just how far gone his sister was. 

"Yes, Lyanna, I'm here."

"Did you find him?"

"Not yet, but I will."

"Please Ned, promise me that you'll find him, that you'll protect him."

"I promise Lyanna." It was the only thing he could say.

"Thank… you…" Her eyes went white as she warged, and bereft of a mind to drive it onward, her body died.

"…Though I don't know who 'he' is…" Ned said quietly, sadly.

A hand on his shoulder caused him to look up. Ser Cassel looked back at him solemnly. 

"There's a crib over there," the knight said, pointing.

Ned looked. There was. Decorated with carvings of dragons and direwolves playing. Lifting the sheet he discovered that his sister was nude under it, allowing him to easily locate the festering wounds that had claimed her life, located in a very intimate place.

"I have a nephew," Ned realized as he tucked the sheet around the body of his sister to preserve her modesty.

"There's no sign of an infant anywhere else in the tower," the head of his personal guard said, "and Ser Dayne is also missing. Judging from his quarters he left in a hurry."

Ned stood as he considered that.

"Either Ser Dayne went to fetch a maester for her," he said, "or Lyanna told him to take the babe and run. They must have heard what happened to his half-siblings."

"Or Lady Lyanna gave him to someone else and Ser Dayne is in pursuit."

"We'll have to interview Ser Oswell when he wakes up."

Ser Cassel grimaced.

"About that. You hit him a bit too hard and cracked his skull open. He's dead."

"Shit," Ned sighed as he starred out a nearby arrowslit into the pass.

After a long moment he sighed again, feeling horribly guilty at the realization he came to.

"There's no way we can find them with Ser Whent and Ser Hightower dead. We don't know where they went, how long ago, where they want to go, anything. They'll have to find us." He rubbed his forehead and looked back at Ser Cassel. "Let's see if there's enough wood for a pyre. And we need to dig two graves."

…After retrieving his sister's bones Lord Stark rejoined the Northern Army as it made its way back north. He has never spoken about what he found in the Tower of Joy, save that Lady Lyanna had died of an infection because the kingsguard assigned to her never sent for a maester….

…Almost four months after the crowning of King Baratheon, and nearly two years from the start of the Rebellion, Lord Stark arrived at Winterfell. And at the feast to celebrate his return and the end of the Robert's Rebellion, with Lords Karstark and Umber deciding to attend before proceeding onwards to their holds, the last, surprising act of the Rebellion played out…

- Robert's Rebellion, by Historian Rickard Mullen, 288AC

Ned sat at the head of Winterfell's high table in the castle's great hall, nursing a glass of wine, letting the happy cacophony of the pre-feast wash over him, but not partaking. Catilyn sat to his right, his newborn son, Robb, in her lap, watching the rowdy room with wide eyes. Benjen sat to his left, deep in conversation with Lord Karstark on his other side. He knew this should be a happy time, but right now all he could think of was what he had lost.

Father. Brandon. Lyanna. Frost. His unnamed nephew.

Catching the signal from the head cook that the feast was ready to be served he stood and rang his glass. He waited for the room to quiet, but before he could start his pre-feast speech the main doors opened, letting in several snow flurries from a late winter snowfall, a light brown – almost tawny – direwolf in a battered and filthy travel harness, and several guards escorting the 'wolf.

"Lord Stark, Seraphina has returned," one of the guards announced.

"Sera…?" Benjen asked in a strangled voice.

Ned didn't say anything, instead putting down his glass and hurrying around the table with unseemly haste. Seraphina was Lyanna's direwolf, and Ned now knew where Lyanna's consciousness went when she warged just before she died. Nothing could support two minds long term, but it had only been a few months. Lyanna and Seraphina wouldn't have fully merged yet.

Lyanna might yet live, in a fashion.

Blackwind reached their sister first, going in for one of his signature tackle-hugs, only to slide to a stop in an uncoordinated heap when she gave him a warning growl. Ned wasn't far behind, and he slipped around his brother's playfully whining direwolf to stand in front of the she-wolf.

"Sister?" he whispered.

Seraphina met his gaze, and gently headbutted his chest. Ned wrapped his arms around as much of her as he could reach and lowered his face into fur as her tail wagged rapidly.

"You're home," he whispered, trying not to cry, "you're home."

In the near silence of the hall, he heard an infant gurgle. Blinking in confusion he raised his head and leaned over to look at her mid-section. Attached to Seraphina's tattered harness was a large blanket that stretched under her belly, so filthy and travel stained it was impossible to tell what it had been originally, and there was a lump in it that faintly moved.

She didn't.

Ned met the direwolf's knowing gaze.

She did.

"May I?"

Seraphina nodded.

Ned carefully stepped around to her flank and, with another glance at the direwolf who had turned her head to watch him, reached into the blanket, past milk-filled teats, and brought out the infant that she had borne from the Sands of Dorne to the Heart of the North.

The child let out a surprised squeal, and instinctively fisted one hand in Ned's clothing as he brought the babe to his chest, Lyanna's son looking around the room curiously as the whispers started. Seraphina leaned in so that the infant could place his other hand against her snout. Blackwind stretched his neck across his sister's back to eagerly sniff the boy, and a quick glance at the head table revealed that Benjen had decided to ride along in his direwolf's mind rather than crowd them in person. That said Greatjon was approaching with surprising quietness. 

The giant of a man dropped down to one knee when he reached them so that he wasn't towering over them.

"So, Ned," he whispered, which was still loud enough for the hall to hear him, as he looked at the babe in Ned's arms, "what's his name?"

Ned and Seraphina looked at each other.

"Jon?" he offered.

She considered that for a moment before slowly nodding. He turned back to the Greatjon.

"His name is Jon Targaryen."