Chapter 25: Amidst the Dragonfall, Winter's Heirs Ascend
The Dance of the Dragons, when it finally erupted in full, consuming fury in the one hundred and twenty-ninth year After Aegon's Conquest, was a cataclysm that even Jon Stark's centuries of foresight and his darkest Greendreams had barely encompassed in its sheer, self-destructive horror. From their shielded North, the immortal Starks watched as the Targaryen dynasty, the undisputed masters of Westeros, tore itself apart, dragon against dragon, kin against kin, their fiery apocalypse painting the southern skies with shades of terror and ruin.
News, often fragmented and delayed, trickled north through Finnan's shaken network and the terrified whispers of traders daring the war-torn roads. They heard of the fall of King's Landing to Rhaenyra and her blacks, of the subsequent riots and the horrific Storming of the Dragonpit, where the smallfolk, driven mad by fear and hatred, slaughtered the captive dragons in their chains – Tyraxes, Shrykos, Morghul, Dreamfyre. Jon, listening to these reports in his Frostfangs sanctum, felt a cold, clinical detachment mixed with a profound sense of Valyria's tragic legacy repeating itself. The creatures of magic, when yoked solely to ambition and passion, inevitably became instruments of their own destruction.
"They are burning their own future," Beron, his true age now exceeding two centuries, observed from his hidden retreat within Wyvern's Eyrie, his voice heavy in the obsidian mirror. "Each dead dragon is a nail in the coffin of their unquestioned supremacy."
"And a lesson for us," Jon replied, his ancient eyes reflecting the distant, imagined fires. "Power, especially draconic power, must be wielded with a discipline bordering on the monastic. Their folly will serve as a perpetual reminder to our future generations."
Amidst this southern maelstrom, the Starks continued their own quiet, multi-generational work. The time had come for Cregan Stark, Rickard's eldest son, now a man of thirty-one, to fully embrace his destiny. His mundane life had been exemplary: a skilled warrior, a keen student of Northern law and custom, and recently married to a Northern lady of good standing, Arra Norrey, ensuring the continuation of the public Stark line. His magical training under his father Rickard, great-grandfather Brandon, and the remote tutelage of Jon himself, had been equally arduous, his strength in combat enchantments and strategic magical applications proving exceptional.
His final trial was a perilous solo reconnaissance mission – not into the heart of the southern war, but far beyond the Wall. Guided by Noctua's visions relayed through Arya, Cregan, cloaked in advanced illusionary charms and bearing a Starksteel blade, ventured into the fringes of the Lands of Always Winter. He was tasked with observing the activity of the Others' outposts, testing their awareness, and verifying the effectiveness of the newly developed "Sunstones" against lesser wights. He returned weeks later, frost-rimed and gaunt but successful, his reports confirming the silent, patient menace of the true enemy and the vital necessity of their preparations.
His worth proven beyond doubt, Cregan Stark stood before the assembled immortal council in Wyvern's Eyrie – Jon, Beron, Edric, Torrhen, his great-grandfather Brandon, and his own father Rickard. He accepted the True Elixir of Life, its liquid light searing away the last vestiges of his mortality, anchoring him to their eternal vigil. He became the seventh immortal Stark, a sentinel against the Long Night.
For his dragon, Jon had a surprise. Some twenty years prior, Finnan's network, in a daring raid on a long-forgotten, crumbling Valyrian outpost in the most hazardous, magically tainted ruins of the Smoking Sea, had recovered a clutch of three obsidian-black eggs, their surfaces strangely warm. They had hatched in the deepest, most intensely heated chambers of Wyvern's Eyrie, yielding three fierce, unusually volatile young dragons. The largest and most formidable of these, a male with scales like jagged volcanic glass and eyes like burning coals, Jon had named Obsidian. Now a young adult, fiercely intelligent and possessing a uniquely concentrated, almost explosive fire, Obsidian had resisted bonding with any other. But in Cregan, with his disciplined warrior spirit and potent magic, the dark dragon found its match. Their bonding was a tempestuous affair, a battle of wills that culminated in a pact of fire and shadow. Cregan Stark, atop the fearsome Obsidian, became a formidable new weapon in the Starks' hidden arsenal, bringing their active dragonrider count to seven, and their total flock to eleven.
As the Dance of the Dragons reached its nadir – Rhaenyra's brief, bloody reign in King's Landing ending with her horrific death, fed to her half-brother Aegon II's dragon Sunfyre; Aegon II himself a broken, maimed wreck; both sides decimated – the pressure on the North to abandon its neutrality intensified. Desperate envoys from both the dwindling green and black factions again sought out Warden Brandon Stark. They offered lands, titles, promises of immense influence if only the "unblooded North" would commit its strength.
Brandon, his public persona that of a wise, cautious Warden in his prime (his true age now well over a century), met these pleas with steadfast resolve, his course guided by the hidden council. "The North bleeds for no southern king's ambition," he declared to a desperate green envoy. "We mourn the tragedy that has befallen House Targaryen and the realm, but our swords are pledged to protect our own people from the true winter, which draws nearer with every passing year. We have no quarrel with either Queen Rhaenyra's memory or King Aegon's claim, beyond the sorrow of this war."
He offered carefully measured humanitarian aid – grain shipments to alleviate the famine now gripping the war-torn Riverlands, furs and timber to help rebuild shattered holdfasts – sent impartially to regions controlled by both blacks and greens, a gesture of Northern compassion that also served to gather intelligence and subtly enhance Stark influence without direct military involvement. This careful diplomacy, combined with the North's formidable, if largely unappreciated, natural defenses and the sheer distance from the main theaters of war, kept their kingdom an island of troubled peace in a sea of fire.
While the South burned, Arya Stark, her connection to the ancient magic of Westeros now almost symbiotic, decided the time was ripe for her long-planned expedition to the Nightfort. The chaos of the Dance provided perfect cover; the realm's attention was entirely consumed by the Targaryen conflict. Accompanied by her niece Lyarra Stark (Brandon's sister, a powerful Greenspeaker) and her great-great-niece Serena Stark (Torrhen's sister, also a skilled nature warden), and with the silent, formidable Terrax as their guardian and Noctua providing aerial reconnaissance and preternatural foresight, Arya ventured to the most ancient and dreaded castle on the Wall.
Guided by the visions from the Children's spirits and Noctua's unsettling ability to perceive hidden pathways and dormant magic, they located the secret chamber deep beneath the Nightfort's foundations, its entrance sealed by powerful, interwoven spells of ice and shadow, keyed to the magic of the First Men and the Children. Arya, drawing upon her own immense reserves of nature magic, the knowledge gleaned from the Children's tablets, and a specific resonant chant Jon had taught her (derived from his research into disrupting ancient wards), painstakingly unwove the seals.
Within the chamber, untouched for millennia, they found not gold or jewels, but something far more precious: an arsenal of weapons crafted from dragonglass (obsidian) in quantities far exceeding anything known to the current Night's Watch; ancient scrolls detailing the Others' weaknesses, their patterns of attack, and the specific rituals used by the First Men and the Children to defeat them during the first Long Night; and, most astonishingly, several dormant "Heart Seeds" – fist-sized, pulsating weirwood seeds, radiating a faint, cold magic, which the scrolls claimed could be used to grow new Heart Trees in key locations, strengthening the magical defenses of the land or even creating new nexuses of weirwood power. They also found star-charts detailing the long astronomical cycles that seemed to correlate with the Others' return, and warnings about a "Great Shepherd" of the dead who would one day arise.
This discovery was a monumental breakthrough in their Long Night preparations. The dragonglass weapons would be invaluable. The scrolls offered knowledge lost for eight thousand years. The Heart Seeds held the potential to re-weave the magical fabric of the North itself. Arya and her companions carefully transported these treasures back to their hidden sanctuaries, their contents to be studied and integrated into Jon Stark's grand strategy.
The catastrophic loss of Targaryen dragons during the Dance was observed by Jon and his council with grim satisfaction, despite a shared pang of sorrow among the dragonriders for the magnificent creatures themselves. From nearly twenty dragons at the start of the conflict, fewer than four adults were rumored to have survived by its end, with many of the remaining hatchlings and young dragons also perishing in the chaos of the Dragonpit or the subsequent instability. This self-inflicted decimation of Targaryen air power dramatically shifted the strategic balance in Westeros. The Starks, with their eleven mature, hidden dragons – including the now partially Starksteel-armored Adamas and Boreas – possessed an aerial deterrent far exceeding anything remaining in the South.
The project to armor their own dragons saw a major milestone. The first full suit of articulated Starksteel plate, designed for Brandon's swift ice-blue dragon Boreas, was completed. It was a marvel of magical engineering, each plate imbued with runes of resilience and cryo-resistance, the entire suit surprisingly light yet offering near-total protection from conventional weaponry and significant defense against dragonfire. When Boreas took to the skies above Wyvern's Eyrie clad in his gleaming, rune-etched armor, he was a terrifying, almost invulnerable war machine. The council resolved to accelerate the production of similar armor for their other primary fighting dragons.
As the Dance of the Dragons finally sputtered towards its bloody, tragic conclusion – with Rhaenyra dead, Aegon II briefly reigning as a broken king before his own suspicious death, and the realm ultimately settling on Rhaenyra's young son, Aegon III, as the consensus monarch to end the bloodshed – the immortal Starks began to position themselves for the new era. The Targaryen dynasty was shattered, its dragon power decimated, its authority severely weakened. The regency established for the young Aegon III would be fraught with political infighting.
"A long, cold peace will settle over the South," Jon predicted to his council. "A peace born of exhaustion and fear. They will be too busy rebuilding, too wary of their own shadows, to trouble the North for generations, provided we remain discreet and offer no provocation."
Warden Brandon Stark, guided by this foresight, prepared to offer his fealty to the young Aegon III, his terms even more favorable to Northern autonomy than those Beron had negotiated with Aegon the Conqueror. The North would be a loyal, but distant and self-governing, part of the realm, its true strength and its immortal guardians remaining a deeply buried secret.
Cregan Stark, the newest immortal, now fully integrated into the council, his youthful energy (despite his Elixir-perfected age) a valuable counterpoint to the ancient wisdom of his kin, watched the unfolding history with keen eyes. He understood the immense responsibility he now shared. His own children, still young, would one day be assessed for the Spark, for their worthiness to join this eternal vigil. The Starks were playing a game that transcended lifetimes, their pieces moving slowly, patiently, across a board that encompassed the fate of the world. The Dance of Dragons was but a single, violent move by a reckless opponent. The true game, the one against the Great Other, required a different kind of strategy, a different kind of strength – the enduring, hidden fire of Winter.