General Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Obviously. Have you seen the state of the Jorah/Dany ship lately? It's not great, dear friends. But hey, maybe GRRM or D&D will turn it around…in 2019.

CHAPTER ONE: WINTER ON BEAR ISLAND

I was born in the Long Winter. Our maester says that it's the darkest Winter our country has ever seen. I wouldn't know but I believe him.

In the bleakest days, the snows have piled up so high they cover the eaves of our wooden halls. The winter storms howl and moan against the black stones of the coast, spitting up ice from the sea that freezes in long strands against the ship rigging and decorates the evergreen trees with icy pearls and silver chains that have locked them in an iron freeze for years.

My mother says that I was born during a snowstorm that lasted three days and two nights. The blizzard sang with salted ice and the vicious spray off the coast made as if to swallow the island whole. She says it's right that it happened that way. Dragons and bears should be born under fierce weather. She says we're both stormborn and then kisses the top of my silver-blond head and says she's glad for it.

The storm nearly stole my father from us. Mother had given him up for dead the night before he made it home. He walked into their bedroom all covered in snow, ice and blood and she would have cursed him for making her fear the worst, but the look on his weathered face as he beheld my mother and I, the newborn infant cradled in her arms, calmed any fiery words between them.

I've seen the looks that pass between my mother and father sometimes, at quiet moments, and I swear they can speak to each other without words. Perhaps all men and women who have traversed hell and emerged alive are the same.

Once in a while, I wonder what it must have been like to live through those times before the Long Winter, when the meadows were green instead of white and the sun frolicked in the sky for more than an afternoon. When the frost gales came screaming out of the north, battles were still raging in open fields. And they froze. All those brave men and women froze, good and wicked together, with the stark, raw force of ice biting into flesh and tearing it from the bone.

If my father hadn't forced my mother away from her mad quest to conquer a doomed country, she would have died on those battlefields, same as the rest. But in the end, he seized her hand and dragged her North, across the channel and away from the dying embers of a lost war. In another time, she would have protested loudly. She would have told him that the Seven Kingdoms were hers to take. With fire and blood. But too much had happened and the news that Jon Snow, the last of her family, had fallen clutched her heart in an icy grip.

The names of the dead are spoken in hushed tones here but I hear them so often that they are as familiar to me as any who live in the halls of Bear Island. Jaime Lannister, who was named Kingslayer and Queenslayer both, before the end. Beric Donndarion, the man who died on his seventh try. Melisandre, the Red Priestess of Asshai, strangled by a one-handed smuggler at the Last Stand of Winterfell. Varys, the Spider, disappearing into the snow drifts after the battle turned grim.

And grim it turned. As Jon Snow, the Stark bastard, the Targaryen prince, the second most skilled dragon-rider in all the world, fell. Rhaegal and Viserion reached each other, talons outstretched, with both fire and ice burning the rafters of the sky. The dragons left their riders in freefall as they ripped each other to pieces.

Jon Snow killed the Night King in the descent, as both tumbled to the ground, wrestling mid-air, flickering light and darkness, plunging his Valyrian sword into the monster's heart in the moments before they both hit the ground. They say Sansa Stark, watching from the battlements, watched her cousin fall with tears freezing against her cheeks. She went below, into the castle, soon after. The battle was won but the war was lost. Winter came to claim the few survivors.

You've heard the story, I'm sure.

Who hasn't? Lyanna Mormont, our Liege Lady, my father's young she-bear cousin would meet my comment with a heavy side eye, never one to live in the past. Or revel in its stories. From where I sit here, writing these thoughts down, I see her at the frosted windows in the Great Hall, gaze on the Northern sea breeze. She is tall and straight, with one long braid of dark hair falling down her back. She is cold like winter and strong like oak and ash.

Father says she resembles her uncle, my grandfather, more than she'll ever know. She's a true Mormont, he says, daughter of bears and steadfast honor. When she paces the halls of Bear Island, he says her footfall is nearly the same as his father, Old Jeor Mormont, pacing the wall at Castle Black.

She delights in the comparison, though she'll never admit it.

I think Lyanna would have exiled my father a second time and sent him away with the shivering Targaryen girl standing crestfallen and world-weary beside him, if the dark-hearted sea and black sky had not started conspiring together to make any exile a death sentence. And for all Lyanna Mormont's honor and belief in the Old God's sense of justice, she couldn't murder her own kin so coldly.

Besides, it was hard to turn the last dragon away. And I don't mean my mother. Drogon, older and slower now, still lives in the massive sea caves under the cliffs on the Island's west side. He is my mother's first child and her favorite, despite the many kisses she presses to my forehead and despite the fervent love I know she has for all things that my father has given her.

My father's patience is legendary. His penchant for silence is deafening. After the last of the great squalls, after the longest, coldest, darkest days of Winter seemed to have finally passed away, Tyrion Lannister sent a raven from Winterfell to see if any still survived on Bear Island. I read the letter and memorized the last line:

I hope and pray that Ser Jorah's glower is still as morose and unchanging as ever.

But oh, how my mother can make him smile! And how he can still surprise her. As on this very morning, when he and some of the others returned from hunting in the woods, and brought her a bouquet of violet crocuses that he found peeking out from the snow.

The violet color matched her eyes exactly.

We were sitting near the crackling fireplace in the Great Hall, Mother, Lyanna and I. Mother tipped her head so slightly at the sight of the flowers.

"For you, Khaleesi," my father said softly as he handed the bouquet into her pale, waiting hands. She grinned on the tease of that foreign name. I still don't know what it means or why my father calls her by it so often. Lyanna might know but she's not one for sentimentality and would likely tell me it's just more nonsense between the bear lord ("most disgraceful Mormont in a hundred years," she'd mutter under her breath) and his dragon maid.

"Spring," my mother, Daenerys Stormborn, murmured over the word, almost afraid to say it out loud. She held the crocuses so gently, careful not to break their fragile, wet petals. "You've brought me spring, Jorah."

"Let's hope," he answered, with caution.

"It has to come sometime," Lyanna stated as she threw another log on the fire.

"I have one for you too, Jeorgianna," Father continued, in his musical timbre, turning to me and pulling a blue, frost-colored bud from the leather pouch on his belt.

I have never seen that color on a flower, not even brought by the Winterfell envoys when they crossed the channel last year, bringing with them a few blooms from the glass houses of Sansa Stark, the Queen in the North, who has kept color alive during the long years of white and grey.

"It's beautiful," I said, in awe, taking it from him and examining it more closely. The thorns were so small, the bud so perfectly encased in the outer petals, like a thin layer of ice holding it fast.

"Beautiful and deadly," Mother sighed, perhaps conjuring up an image of the brother she never met as he laid a crown of winter roses in Lyanna Stark's lap. We all were doing the same. It was an old story, but Winter is a time for old stories.

"She should have thrown them back at Rhaegar's feet," Lyanna's tone held no sympathy for the woman she was named after. "It would have saved Westeros the bloodbaths that followed."

"Perhaps," my father conceded, garnering a small frown from his cousin, who folded her arms over her chest and silently expressed her displeasure of uncertain answers. My father shrugged, claiming the seat beside Mother, taking her free hand between both his own and soaking in the warmth he found there. "Wars do not begin without underlying discontent. It can't be blamed on a crown of roses alone."

"I wonder what this bouquet of crocuses will be blamed for?" Mother mused, holding the violet flowers close to her breast.

"With any luck…," Father lifted Mother's hand, the one he held captive, to his lips and turning her wrist, pressed a kiss to the palm of her hand. Her delicate fingers curled around his bearded chin lovingly as he repeated her earlier hope, "Spring."

"Spring," Cousin Lyanna agreed, arms still crossed over her chest but that icy Mormont glower melting by a few degrees. She was not made of stone and ice, after all.

"Spring," I smiled on the pleasant melody of that unfamiliar word, tumbling off my tongue like beads of water melting off the snow drifts.

Even for a winter child, there's no better dream than spring.