Disclaimer: the setting & some of the characters belong to the illustrious George RR Martin. The rest is my own.
I suppose this isn't really 'fanfiction'... It's more of a story that I wrote based on the characters & places in ASOIAF. But it is inspired by my love of the books, so make what you will of it.
Disclaimer 2: I'm not a particularly good writer, but I love to write, so I hope you enjoy my ideas. Happy reading!
(this is more drama than romance.. I'm not the greatest at writing romance)
Her favourite time of day was night, when the sky was void of light and the world was quiet. She would stare up at the stars, imagining that she was a ship sailing in a great, vast ocean of nothingness, the tiny, flickering lights of a billion distant lighthouses her only source of guidance through the heavens. When the castle was quiet she would climb through her window and sit on the great stone sill, her legs curled underneath her. She would trace constellations for hours, until her limbs grew numb from the unforgiving cold of the stone beneath her and the sharp, dark air that rolls off the moors of the North.
To her, there was something wonderfully bleak about the world at night. During the day, there were warm fires, soft smiles, endless curtsies and frivolities, and the soothing peace of a bath as the sun sank in the sky outside. But at night, there was only stone, darkness, and the slow, steady movement of torches held in soldiers' hands on the ramparts.
All she knew of the world was from books, tutors, and the men who come to bow before her father. These men fascinated her. They wore boiled leather and steel, and had swords at their sides. Their faces were rough, their beards long and wild, their eyes sharp, as if they had seen everything. They spoke in barks and growls, never minding what they were saying, free to curse and laugh in great bellows. They drank deep from pitchers until their faces were red and their words slurred, and they clapped each other heartily on the back, happy to forget the harshness of the world.
She envied these men, though not the wars they had seen or the men they had killed. She envied their freedom, however hard and cold it may be. She envied the carelessness to their words and the easy camaraderie they held with their men. She watched them ride away on their horses, their banners held aloft before them by boys younger than her who would see more than she ever would, and she envied the way they were able to ride easily to places she had only dreamed of.
She knew that she was lucky. She was the daughter of the King in the North, a man who was not only loved and respected throughout the kingdom, but who was kind and thoughtful to his family. She had grown up with everything a girl could want: a horse, an airy chamber with a view of the godswood, and a dozen dresses of silk and lace and thick, soft wool. She lived in the most beautiful region of Westeros, in a place of cold wind and rolling hill. She was safe from the cruelty of men and the dangers of a country only recently brought to peace.
But she was not free. She was a woman in a land ruled by men. She would be married soon, to a boy she would most likely have never seen or talked to before in her life. She was restricted by the delicacy and elegance expected of a lady. She must ride her horse only in the company of guards. She was the oldest of her siblings, but was not her father's heir. She spent her days sewing and sipping tea in the company of her mother while her brothers practiced with their swords in the yard. And when she managed to convince her father to allow her to try her hand at sword and shield, she was only allowed to do so after much begging and pleading, and only when nobody was watching.
Up there, at night, she did not have to act according to the rules of generations of men. Up there, there was only her body, the pounding of her heart, and the cold wind of the world. Up there, she could hear the wind in the grass, could smell the peat of the godswood, and could believe that she was anybody else but Raya Stark, daughter of Eddard Stark, the King in the North.
She went inside only when the cold has become unbearable and her mind has been wiped blank by the night. She scrambled through the window, landing lightly on the rough stone floor of her chamber, and slammed it shut behind her. One last gust of air passed over her face before a pane of glass no thicker than her smallest finger locked the night away. She paced the length of her room, walking warmth into her legs, and the bare soles of her feet make quiet padding noises on the floor. The flames from the torches on either side of the door shed soft, flickering lights over the canopy bed, the thick fur carpet, the bindings of the books in the bookcase, the brown leather armchair, and the wide stone fireplace. Gale, the old family dog, was curled up in a grey heap at the foot of her bed, his twitching feet all she would ever see of what made him whimper and snort in his dreams.
Her skin stung as it grew accustomed to the warmth of her chambers, and with the gradual increase in body temperature came a sudden tiredness. Stifling a yawn, she made her way towards the bed. Gale jerked awake as she pulled the hangings back and he raised his shaggy grey head towards her, blinking.
"Sorry boy," she murmured, pulling back the soft linen blankets covering her bed so that she could scramble into their gentle embrace. Earlier in the night, the blankets would have been soothingly warm from a bed warmer. But now, hours since a servant had come to take the warmer away, they were cool, and only heated up once she had been under them for a few minutes. Gale rose to his feet, stretched, and lumbered over to curl up beside her with his nose grazing her hip. She smiled to herself, and soon the warmth of his furry body had seeped through the many layers between them.
For a long while, she stared at the hangings that surrounded her, tracing patterns in the rich embroidery that filled the fabric from top to bottom, the soft, trailing lines of silver thread. Every piece of cloth or upholstery in the room was of the finest linen, and was beautifully embroidered in the colours of winter. Her chambers were a walking testament to her title, to the place she held in society as the daughter of the King in the North. The feet of each of the wooden posts that rose from the four corners of her bed were hand crafted to look like wolf's claws, and the headboard behind her had the sigil of House Stark, a direwolf, carved deeply into its dark wooden surface. The room, like the castle itself and the people inside it, carried the essence of the rolling moors of the North and of winter itself.
She could never fall asleep without reading, and so she reached for the heavy, leather-bound book on her bedside table. It was a thick volume, dog-eared and stained from nearly seventy years of reading and rereading. Her great-grandfather, Wyman Manderly, was the author, and it was he who had passed the book down to her grandmother, Wylla, who passed it on to her mother, Ferrah, who passed it on to her. She had read the book a half a dozen times, and could recite passages from memory, but on nights like these, when the air was cold and carried with it a hint of the coming winter and the night was darker than usual, she only read the prologue. She turned to the first page.
Vengeance
A northerner's account of the Vengeful War, oft called the War of Ice and Fire, as told by Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbour and Hand to the King in the North, Rickon Stark.
Prologue
Those who came out of the first war victorious were lions and twin towers and flayed men. Men who tortured to the point of insanity, men who massacred their liege lords at wedding feasts, and men who raped, murdered, and pillaged the innocent. These were the men who won. To them, the war was practically easy.
And then there was us. The North. We were murdered and betrayed and destroyed, and for years after the war we sat under the pretence of a bent knee and suffered the presence of traitors and villains and godless men. We drank mead with the soldiers who had killed our sons; we sat council with the lords who had betrayed our king. We bowed low to the men who had painted the land red with our blood.
But we were never broken. Our enemies shoved a wolf's head onto our king's neck, and we began to whisper. The whispers started low... then they grew louder. The Boltons proclaimed themselves to be our lords, and we spat into our cups and called them scum. We reminded ourselves that we bow not to flayed men, but to direwolves. In private, we recited the words of the North like a mantra, over and over again. Winter is coming.
And it did. Winter came, but with ice came fire, and with fire came blood and dragons. An army returned to Westeros, an army of exiles and eunuchs, led by a young girl born of storm and smoke, and her prince nephew, returned from the dead. They came on the backs of dragons, and with the arrival of the blood of old Valyria came the banners of Dorne. A third, riderless dragon of green and bronze flew away and returned with a dark-haired bastard from the Wall. He had blacks on his back and a crow on his shoulder.
Jon Snow had blood of ice and of fire, and with this discovery came a new alliance. We who were loyal to ice followed the last remaining wolf, joined with those loyal to fire, and a vagabond army from the east transformed into a single unit hell-bent on revenge. For them, it was revenge for Rhaegar and Lyanna, Elia and Rhaenys, and the throne that was rightfully theirs. For us, it was revenge for Eddard, beheaded at the Sept of Baelor, for Catelyn and Robb, slain at the Red Wedding, and for our northern kin killed in the war. And as the loyal North swelled and turned on our betrayers, lone wolves returned from hiding to lead us. From the Vale came Alayne, her innocence long torn away by lions and hounds and mockingbirds. From Braavos came nothing, wielding sword and the smell of death. From the wilderness of the North came a lost boy and his black beast, fierce and alone. And from beyond the wall came the broken boy, blessed by the Old Gods.
Manderly, Flint, Glover, Dustin, Reed, Locke, Tallhart, Umber, Mormont, and Cerwyn. Martell, Blackmont, Dayne, Dalt, Yronwood, Santagar, Qorgoyle, and Uller. Sansa, Arya, Brandon, and Rickon of House Stark. Daenerys and Aegon of House Targaryen. Jon Snow. The Gold Company and the Unsullied. Viserion, Rhaegal, and Drogon. We waited for years, and once we got our army, we slew the traitors who had murdered our kings, our queens, our lords, and our kin.
Those from the South called it the War of Ice and Fire. But we of ice and fire called it something different.
We called it vengeance.
She set the book down, her ears ringing as they always did with the powerful words of her great-grandfather. She had been born seventy years after the war ended, but she had grown up learning of it, being made to read countless books and scrolls detailing the life of the victors: Aegon VI, who was killed in battle during the Vengeful War, and Daenerys, who reclaimed the iron throne at last – together, they were remembered as the Dragons Reborn; Jon Snow, who came to be known as the Lost Prince; the four remaining Starks, her blood, all of whom had been thought to be dead; the soldiers of the North, the Golden Company, and the Unsullied; and the three dragons, one black, one cream, one green and bronze. And she knew of the lives of those conquered: Walder Frey, who was executed for treason, having murdered his king and thousands of Stark men; Roose Bolton, who suffered the same fate for betraying the North; Cersei Lannister, who was imprisoned for countless crimes.
It was through all she'd been taught that she'd become a proud northerner, made even prouder by the family she came from: the Starks, the first to reclaim their title as the Kings of Winter since Torrhen Stark, and the Manderlys, who were said by many to have been the most loyal in the North, for it was her great-grandfather who had been true to the Starks until the very end. It was Wyman Manderly who had killed the three Freys that were sent to marry his granddaughters, and who fed them to the treacherous lords Bolton and Frey in the form of meat pie. It was Wyman Manderly who had sent Ser Davos Seaworth to find Rickon Stark, the very boy that would later become the King in the North and who would slice off Walder Frey's head. It had been on Wyman Manderly's orders that fifteen thousand soldiers from White Harbour, led by a vengeful Walden Manderly, had joined the battered yet determined army coming down from the North to fight a war with dragons thought dead.
She fell asleep with the memories of her long-dead relatives in her head, and she dreamt of wolves and screaming men.
