Chapter Text
When the conqueror and his sister-wives planned their takeover of Westeros' seven kingdoms from the painted table in Dragonstone, they did not anticipate much resistance. Three large, fire-breathing dragons could do more harm than the largest army any king possessed, and even the stoutest keep could burn, as some would soon learn to their detriment.
The Targaryens’ invasion strategy was simple: offer each lord and king two options – burn or kneel.
Parts of the Stormlands were eager to call Aegon their liege: Houses Rosby and Stokeworth, Massey, Celitgar, and Velaryon. Lords Darklyn and Mooton put up a piddling resistance that the Conqueror easily quashed with the help of his bastard brother, Orys Baratheon. The Gulltown fleet burned, and the Tullys turned against their River King and were rewarded generously.
The Stormlands was next to be submitted. After their king fell in battle, his daughter barred the gates of Storm’s End and laid on her own head a crown. But dragonfire is a frightening thing, and her own men delivered her to the Conqueror’s bastard brother, who took her house words and sigil along with her maidenhead.
Loren Lannister, King of the Rock, and Mern IX Gardener, King of the Reach, raised the most impressive army Westeros had ever seen. They managed to break the Targaryen force’s lines, but what good does armor do against flames hot enough to make glass of sand? By the time the Conqueror marched on Highgarden, the castle was promptly surrendered by its steward, Harlan Tyrell, who was hence known as Lord of Highgarden and Lord Paramount of the Mander.
Next to submit was the Vale, after its Queen Regent looked out her window to find the dragon Vhagar had landed in her courtyard.
And so, with armies falling and lords kneeling, Aegon the Conqueror and his sister-wives felt invincible. Only two kingdoms remained independent, representing the polar ends of the continent. Hot, arid Dorne with its brutal deserts in which an unprepared man could die of thirst or heat exhaustion within a matter of hours, and the cold, snowy North, with its vast forests, frozen lakes, and impassable mountain chains, nearly matching the rest of Westeros in area.
The Conqueror’s favorite sister, Rhaenys, set off on the back of Meraxes, boasting that she’d be back before supper with Meria Martell’s fealty signed and stamped.
Instead, Rhaenys Targaryen returned with only a promise: that Dorne may burn, but it would never bend nor break nor bow.
Busy with the Faith in Oldtown and the Ironborn off the west coast, Dorne and the North were left alone for a time, but not forgotten.
The conquest resumed in 4 AC, with the Conqueror-turned-king launching a bloody invasion on Dorne. They believed the war won when they arrived at Sunspear to find Meria Martell had fled, but they discovered it to be a ruse nearly the moment their dragons alighted in King’s Landing. The war waged on, with acts of savagery committed on both sides, until few men remembered what they were fighting for. Hate festered and vengeance reigned, but the Conqueror himself experienced more insult than injury, safe as he was atop the largest dragon ever known…
Until his beloved Queen Rhaenys and her dragon Meraxes fell from the sky above Hellholt, a massive scorpion bolt having found its target: one of the dragon’s golden eyes.
Blinded by sorrow and fueled by rage, the Conqueror burned as much of Dorne as he could, from the Red Mountains to the mouth of the Greenblood, and yet the men and women of Dorne continued to resist, using their knowledge of the mountainous land to their advantage.
In the end, a decade after the resumed conquest of Dorne, the war was settled not with a decided victory or loss, but with the passing of the prideful matriarch, Meria Martell. Her son, an old man in his own right, sent his daughter Deria to King Aegon’s court with a letter in her hand. The contents of the letter remain unknown to this day, but they managed to convince the conqueror to let Dorne keep its independence so that both factions could keep their peace.
Enraged by the contents of the letter and by whatever presumed leverage Prince Martell had used to stay his hand, Aegon set his sights on the last unconquered kingdom. The forgotten kingdom, some would say. It was isolated from everything that sat below the swamplands known as the Neck. Its people worshipped – individually and silently – some rustic gods that demanded no tributes, no songs, no statues, and no holy buildings. Northerners were considered savage or queer, depending on who was offering his opinion. Their climate and terrain made them hardy, but they could not raise large armies or navies, nor feed enough warhorses to have much of a cavalry. The King of Winter was the title the ruling man enjoyed, but to the rest of the realm Torrhen Stark was merely The King in the North. Rumored to be stern but fair, quiet but thoughtful. He had a couple of sons, a daughter, and a bastard brother that some considered to be Torrhen’s version of Orys Baratheon: capable, brave, and deadly.
But Winterfell would burn just like Harrenhal did. As would White Harbor. As would Last Hearth and Karhold and even the mysterious, floating Greywater Watch. The North’s forests would burn. Its fields would burn. Its livestock, its granaries, its siloes, and, of course, its soldiers.
To give Torrhen Stark a chance to kneel (after seeing what he would face if he chose the alternative), a parlay was held at White Harbor. The King in the North and the man who had already presumed to call himself King of the Seven Kingdoms met in the great hall of New Castle, shared bread and salt, meat and mead. And when Torrhen Stark politely informed Aegon Targaryen that “wolves don’t bow”, the Conqueror stomped out after issuing a loud threat: White Harbor would be the first to burn, crippling the North’s ability to trade with Pentos and the southern parts of Westeros. But the Conqueror would not waste time going castle by castle accepting surrenders. He would turn Balerion and Vhagar loose on Winterfell, commanded to burn until there was naught of the North’s seat but ash. He’d name the first Northern man to kneel to him as Warden and award him the funds to build a new seat or to expand his own keep for the purpose.
“Our parlay will expire the moment I mount my dragon, so I suggest you think quickly,” the conqueror sneered at the placid face of Torrhen Stark.
True to the terms of Guest Right, no one so much as gave the Conqueror a dirty look as he stomped out of the hall and out of the keep, needing no guards as no one would dare harm him when Balerion rested on the nearby beach. But many minutes later when the king took to the sky with intent to return to King’s Landing only long enough to invite his sister to join him and to command his men to prepare an army to march north, he learned that hubris would be his downfall. He’d barely begun his ascent when he noticed a lone ship adrift a little way out toward the Narrow Sea. It was no warship, no galley, just a merchant cog with no one at the helm.
By the time three large tarps were yanked off the three large weapons they’d hid, it was too late.
Three scorpion bolts were released at once.
The one that entered through Balerion’s mouth and exited through the top of the dragon’s skull was shot by a man named Brandon Snow, bastard brother to the King in the North.
The height was not enough for Aegon to die on impact, and he was fished out of the frigid sea by Brandon Snow himself. King Torrhen sent a letter to Queen Visenya in King’s Landing. “Try to make us kneel, and we will send a piece of your brother to each Warden who so recently surrendered to House Targaryen out of fear for what three dragons could do. Is their loyalty strong enough to endure such a test, your grace, when only one dragon remains?”
Three days later, with clenched teeth and fists, Aegon and Visenya signed a peace accord much like the one they’d permitted Dorne, but that Torrhen Stark retained the title of King, as would his heir, and his heir’s heir, and so on...
Aegon and Visenya begrudgingly honored the agreement, knowing they’d lose the faith of all the kingdoms if they broke their word, but some of their successors were less concerned. New dragons were born, and new dragonriders, refreshing the arrogance and covetousness that had led to House Targaryen’s original conquest. Vhagar was considered too valuable to be risked in a war of conquest over one kingdom that few south of the Neck cared about, not when she may someday be needed to put down a rebellion or thwart an Essosi invasion, but other dragons were used as weapons against the North over the decades. Some kings were even bold enough to try to march armies through the Neck, but none succeeded in making it past Moat Cailin – wherein the roofs of each tower held four scorpions eternally aimed skyward. Through the boglands their armies were thinned by archers who shot from the trees. When foot soldiers tried to pursue them, they only succumbed to more arrows, a terrible substance called quicksand, or poisonous snakes, spiders, lizards, and even vines.
Still, there were some Targaryen kings who managed to make the North bleed, but more who managed to make it burn. The latter, however, was not nearly so easy as it had been in other kingdoms. The North was massive and difficult to navigate even by air. Settlements and even castles were hard to spot from a distance as within and beyond their walls stood ancient trees a hundred or more feet high. Roads and paths that were spotted led to nothing but some old hunter’s outpost or small farmstead ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
Like Dorne, the North burned but did not break or bow, and most of the kings were content to let it be left in peace, or perhaps too uncertain in their abilities to risk being yet another man who failed to conquer the North.
…
Now, three hundred and five years after Aegon the First launched his invasion of Westeros, House Targaryen is at its strongest and – for the first time ever – the Iron Throne is occupied not by a king but by a queen. Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, First of her Name, ascended the throne upon the death of her father, King Viserys. With three younger half-brothers born of her father’s loins, all of court and much of the realm had been holding its breath, anticipating a war within House Targaryen that would see the Crown Princess, the king’s proclaimed heir, pitted against her eldest half-brother, Aegon, the legal heir by the inheritance laws observed everywhere north of Dorne.
Instead, someone whispered in the ears of the Crown Princess and her potential rival. Why fight over that which already belongs to the House of the Dragon, when half the continent remains unconquered? Let us extend our claim and our influence, gain enough for every child of Viserys Targaryen to have a kingdom to pass down to his heirs, if not to rule in his own lifetime.
And so it was decided, after King Viserys took his last breath, that the final bastions of Westerosi independence would finally be brought to kneel.
Dorne, the far south, would be set upon by the largest host the Crown had ever assembled, while Queen Rhaenyra on Syrax, Prince Aegon on Sunfyre, Princess Rhaenys on Meleys, and Crown Prince Jacaerys Velaryon on Vermax would lend support by air. It was expected to be a long, fiery, and bloody affair, unless Prince Doran Martell had the good sense to kneel and offer his daughter and heir to Prince Daeron, the queen’s youngest half-brother, and his younger son to Princess Rhaena, the queen’s stepdaughter through her husband and uncle, Prince Daemon. If a quick surrender was not obtained, then House Martell and its allies would be eradicated and Prince Aegon would take Sunspear then install friends and family at other key castles within Dorne.
The North was expected to be a much simpler conquest, because House Stark was the weakest it had ever been. The previous King, Eddard, had been a capable administrator but not exactly one to invoke fear. A humble second son, he’d had to step into his older brother’s shoes after the man was killed in a duel over the honor of their little sister, who had run away to escape marriage to some boorish widower known for drinking and whoring.
King Eddard, the so-called Quiet Wolf, had stepped in and married his brother’s betrothed, one of Lord Tully’s daughters, to ensure the North’s trade agreement with the Riverlands would not be rescinded. He got three sons and two daughters off his Tully wife before she perished birthing what would’ve been a fourth son. He also had a bastard son by some unknown wench, but the boy had enlisted in the Night’s Watch at his earliest opportunity, much like his uncle Benjen Stark, Eddard’s younger brother.
Viewing the Quiet Wolf as vulnerable, a civil war broke out in the North. Rumor was Lord Bolton had been waiting for such an opportunity for years, along with his kin-by-law, Lord Dustin and Lady Ryswell. House Hornwood joined them, having taken insult when King Stark denied Lord Hornwood’s thirty-year-old heir the hand of his teenage daughter. Similarly, House Karstark turned against their distant kin when Prince Robb – King Eddard’s heir – snubbed his nose at Lady Alys Karstark in favor of one of the Mormont girls of Bear Island.
The rebels were outnumbered but Lord Bolton’s cruelty toward his captured enemies encouraged some men to defect to his side and inspired some of the lords who could’ve easily tipped the scales in favor of House Stark to commit to neutrality.
The Starks and their allies eventually emerged victorious, but at great loss. King Eddard lost his life. Robb wore the crown of the winter kings for a mere month before following his father. The next oldest trueborn son, Bran, was crippled in a sneak attack, and the youngest son was said to have become half-feral after spending years on some remote island, having been sent there to ensure the Stark line would not be completely lost even if their kingship was.
For reasons unknown to anyone outside of House Stark and its closest friends and retainers, neither surviving son of King Eddard took the Winter Crown. Rather, with the kingdom still at war, the bastard, Jon Snow, temporarily set aside his vows at the Wall and fell upon those sieging his sisters and crippled brother in their home with an army of loyalists and – allegedly – wildlings from beyond the Wall. Outnumbered, out-trained, and out-armed his side was, but they fought like rabid animals in the field while Winterfell’s garrison pelted the rebel soldiers from above with arrows and rocks, boiled water and steaming pitch. Still, the Bolton-led host was winning a battle of attrition until, through means unknown, Lord Bolton himself was captured and dragged behind the walls of Winterfell. Some say he was strapped to a cross on the parapets and skinned alive by the younger Stark sister. Others say the younger Stark sister was in the field, fighting alongside her half-brother’s men, so it must’ve been the eldest girl.
And some say he was not skinned, but slowly eaten alive by a pair of gray direwolves, similar in size to the white wolf, black wolf, and gray wolf that were fighting in the thick of the battle, ever covering the bastard’s flanks. Lord Bolton’s screams were said to be so loud, the sister’s eyes so cold, that some of the rebel soldiers dropped to their knees in surrender at the sight, hoping to avoid such a fate.
More fought on, but the Stark coalition seemed to have nature itself on their side. Giant brown bears, falcons and eagles, snow leopards, wild wolves – creatures of sky and wood and cave, predators all of them, fell upon the rebels, each killing a handful, a dozen, two dozen, or more before being killed. But for each that fell, another would rise in its place. The old gods are angry, the rebel soldiers realized. More fell to their knees. And more. And more.
The ground north of Winterfell was more blood than mud, by the end – on that, everyone agreed. That, and the name given to the battle that ended the Northern Civil War: The Battle of the Bastards. Because in the end, when no more swords were swinging, when all rebels were either dead or on their knees, a particularly vile man was caught by the direwolves trying to sneak away toward the northeast: Ramsay Snow. Lord Bolton’s bastard was known for cruelty against women and cowardice against men, while King Eddard’s bastard, Jon Snow, was known for being fair and principled even if not soft. Though the bastards’ swords never clashed during the battle, their fists met in the aftermath.
Or, at least, Jon Snow’s fists met Ramsay Snow’s face.
Yet more rumors surrounded the Bolton bastard. That he had infiltrated Winterfell early in the rebellion, posing as a servant or guard and earning a trusted place in the Stark household. That he had taken the virtue of one of King Eddard’s daughters and pushed the middle son, Bran, down a flight of stairs when the youth tried to stop the attack. That he fled then, knowing his cover was shot, but kept some sort of memento that he later used to taunt Robb Stark and Jon Snow into making reckless mistakes – one that proved fatal, the other almost fatal. Yet another unknown to all but those most directly involved was what Ramsay Snow used to taunt the Stark brothers. It was a pair of ladies unders. No, it was a lock of auburn hair. No, a thin sword. No, a prayer bracelet. The most gruesome rumor speculated that it was the tip of the younger Stark girl’s pinkie finger, identifiable to the brothers due to a dark freckle just below the nailbed. The most lascivious rumor was that it was the dried petals of a blue winter rose that the elder was known to keep pressed between the pages of her favorite tome; a rose given to her the night Jon Snow took her maidenhead – hence the true reason he ended up in the Night’s Watch.
The latter rumor likely only circulated because the evening after the battle was won, after the fallen were burned and the injured tended, it was Jon Snow himself who placed the iron crown atop his sister’s auburn head, then kneeled before her, still muddied and bloodied, battered and bruised, and declared her his Queen.
The Queen in the North.
The Queen in the North
The Queen in the North.
What she’d done to earn the honor, none south of the Neck knew. By the gossip that reached King’s Landing, she was either the sweetest, most tender-hearted maiden in all the realm, or a woman so bitter and hateful that her gaze could freeze a man’s blood. She either had a spine of steel or skin as thin as silk. She was either so capable that the Northern lords accepted her rule without complaint, or so inept that she used her cunt to secure loyalty. The only rumor that did not possess an opposing version was that the girl was a beauty. Tully coloring paired with Stark-sharp features, her mother’s curves and her father’s height, and something uniquely her and entirely ineffable that the minstrels at court tried to capture when they sung their songs about the strange wolves of the North. The pack bound by blood, love, and grief. The pack that fought together and survived together, even when the odds were against them…
The bastard wolf, fierce and strong, dutiful and protective.
The she-wolf, feisty and sly, dangerous and daring.
The crippled wolf, wise and clever and gods-touched.
The wolf pup, wild and brave, loyal to a fault but to such a select few.
And the wolf queen, beautiful and poised, with fangs that were so well hidden, her prey never saw the attack coming, and so sharp that they didn’t even know it was happening until it was too late.
Together they’d fought and together they’d won, though to most in the South, the Starks were little more than novelty. A strange, mysterious family from a wild, unknown land.
Yet to the newly anointed Queen Rhaenyra, there was something of a challenge hidden in the lyrics of those songs, in the giggles that embellished seemingly idle gossip. Because novelty or not, there was a hint of something like admiration among those who sang or spoke about the wolves of Winterfell. And there was something a lot like jealousy in the eyes of the queen, even as she smiled along with those who rambled on about how the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives – a supposed favorite saying of the Starks.
What were dragons if not solitary creatures – lone wolves, so to speak?
What were Targaryens if not greedy, selfish, hungry creatures who’d tread on their own kin to reach whatever it was they coveted?
But also, what were dragons and Targaryens, if not destined to sit atop the food chain, bowed to but never kneeling, worshipped but never reverent?
So, while tens of thousands of men and four dragons prepare to venture south to conquer Dorne through fire and blood, it was a mere two men atop two dragons who set off to conquer the North, with a simple strategy: terrify the Queen in the North until she comes out of her castle and kneels on the slushy ground, begging for mercy and promising fealty. The terms of her surrender would be simple: wed Prince Aemond Targaryen and live with him in King’s Landing until two children have been born of the union, at which point Aemond and his Stark bride would return to Winterfell to rule the land and raise their heir while their spare remained a veritable hostage in the capital.
Given the mettle showed by Northmen in the past three centuries, it might seem a foolhardy plan, if not for the fear invoked by the two men sent on that mission to bring the wolves to heel: the Rogue Prince, Daemon Targaryen, and his nephew, Prince Aemond, better known as One-Eye. Together they were considered the Crown’s enforcers, sent wherever trouble was brewing to squash it through whatever means necessary. Daemon’s short temper and sharp sword preceded him wherever he went, though most in the capital loved him for that very fact, as his fearsome reputation kept crime as low as it had been in decades. And Aemond was known for being touchy, quick to take offense and merciless toward any who’d given it (wittingly or unwittingly). He was considered one of the finest swordsmen in the South yet had been known to kill men with his bare hands if they’d foolish enough to insult or threaten Aemond’s beloved mother or sister or little brother, or even the older brother he butted heads with more often than not.
Where Daemon wore his reputation like a badge of honor, smirking, bandying around quips, twirling his dagger, and swaggering like a Lorathi prince, Aemond preferred to blend into the shadows, to see without being seen, to be continually underestimated. Quiet and thoughtful and soft-spoken yet oh-so deadly, his mere presence had a way of discomforting others, though the prince would give all credit (or blame) to his scarred eye socket and the sapphire that blazed darkly from it.
But even if the men sent north had not garnered such reputations, it might be enough to bring Queen Sansa to her knees that one of the two dragons could burn Winterfell to the ground within minutes, all on her own.
The Queen of Dragons, Vhagar herself, had been chosen to face down the first Queen of Winter – a woman who, if Vhagar got her way, would also be the last Queen of Winter.
Princes Daemon and Aemond, atop the backs of Caraxes and Vhagar, alighted just beyond Winterfell’s southern gate on an unseasonably balmy winter day in the year 305 AC.
What followed would go down in history by a simple term that those directly involved in the events found overly simple, and not entirely accurate, but catchy, nonetheless.
The last stand of the North.