chapter I: Remember - Chronicles of the North

King’s Landing slept beneath a shroud of ash and sea-mist.

Lanterns trembled on the riverfront, their reflections smearing the Blackwater’s dark skin.

The Red Keep rose above it all, pale in the moonlight, its towers blind and watchful as old sentinels.

Only the crows moved — a scatter of black wings circling the highest spire where a single window glowed faintly red.

 Inside that chamber, the king who never walked sat motionless in his wheeled chair, surrounded by silence.Bran’s eyes were open, but the pupils had gone to milk.
A candle guttered beside him, throwing long shadows across the weirwood staff resting in his hand.Beyond the glass, thunder murmured from the east.
The city slept, unaware that its king was already elsewhere.Bran’s fingers tightened on the carved wood.
His breath slowed until it matched the rhythm of distant wings.Somewhere beyond stone and storm, the trees began to whisper, and the windowpanes fogged with cold from another realm entirely.
He was gone — drawn through the roots of the world.

The night Bran called the ravens was not a night at all, but a silence between storms.He sat beneath the heart-tree, eyes white, breath shallow, and the snows around him stirred like feathers.
Above, the black flock gathered — thousands, maybe more — filling the branches until the godswood looked alive with shadow.
He felt them through the net: each mind a spark, each spark a memory of flight.Through them he saw the North — Frosthome’s fires, the frozen coasts, the long rivers shining like veins under the moon.
And beyond them, he saw it — the cold shape crawling across the unseen horizon, unraveling what he had mended.
The Wanderer did not march. It unwrote.
Every vision it touched turned white and empty, as if winter itself had forgotten what it meant.Bran reached deeper.
He wove the ravens together — not as soldiers, but as story.
“Remember,” he whispered through a thousand beaks. “Remember who we are.”
The flock answered, a roar of wings that broke the sky. They dove into the void, each carrying a fragment of light — the glow of birthfires, of faces, of the old songs. Where they struck, the whiteness cracked and memory poured back through the seams.
The Wanderer struck back in silence. Every lost raven became a mirror — their eyes turning blue, their cries repeating Bran’s own voice against him.
You are the first wrong, they hissed.
He faltered. The web shook. The loom threatened to fold. Then came another sound: a horn, faint and distant, echoing through the lattice of time — Jon’s horn, blown years before at the Wall.Its echo became the pulse of every living heart north of the Neck.
Bran caught the sound and sent it through the weirwoods, through the wings of every bird still loyal.
The sky itself seemed to take breath.He released his hold — not commanding but allowing.The ravens moved as one mind unowned; their flight no longer bound to Bran’s will.They tore through the storm, a tide of black memory, scattering the Wanderer’s mist until only still air remained.
When he opened his eyes, dawn had come.The godswood was quiet, the snow unbroken save for a single feather resting on his knee — white tipped with soot.
Bran smiled faintly. “Witness,” he said, the word now an oath rather than a title.
The feather stirred, caught by the wind, and vanished into the morning — bound for the North, for whatever wars of memory still waited beyond sight.

From this night forward, the world would remember Bran not as King, but as Keeper of the Loom — the silent guardian who no longer ruled men, but tended the threads of what they chose to remember.In the North, they would one day name it The War of the Ravens — when the skies turned black with wings, and winter itself was beaten not by fire, but by remembrance.

Snow fell in soft, whispering sheets across the roofs of Winterfell as a raven cut through the sky — its wings gliding over the nearly completed repair of the battlements, past the godswood, and down toward the rookery tower.
The message tied to its leg bore the black wax seal of Castle Black, though the ink beneath was written in a familiar, deliberate hand.
Moments later, in the Great Hall of Winterfell, torches hissed and crackled. The scent of pine smoke and boiled wine filled the air.
Queen Sansa Stark sat upon the high seat, her auburn hair braided with threads of white fur — not a symbol of vanity, but of winter’s endurance. At her side stood Ser Roderick Morningstar, Captain of the Winter Knights, his armor a mix of blackened steel and northern furs.
He bowed as he presented the sealed letter. “Your Grace,” he said, “a raven from Castle Black.”Sansa accepted it, her expression calm. She turned the black seal over once in her fingers before breaking it.As her eyes moved across the page, a small smile — almost wistful — touched her lips. “So,” she said quietly, “it’s done.”
Ser Roderick hesitated. “My Queen?” She folded the letter carefully and set it beside her goblet. “Jon has dissolved the Night’s Watch,” she said. “He’s claimed the Wall and all its castles for the North.”
The young knight frowned. “And you expected this?” Sansa looked toward the window, where snow drifted past the high glass. “I did. I told him the North and I would stand behind him — that he was free to forge his own path. Now he’s done just that. The Order of the Northern Guard is more than a dream now; it’s the shape of the world to come.”
She rose slowly, her eyes thoughtful. Jon never sought power. Yet power seeks him — as it did our father, and our brother Robb. But Jon… he understands peace as much as strength.” Roderick frowned slightly. “And the Free Folk follow him still?”
Sansa lifted her eyes from the parchment, calm but certain. “They follow him,” she said. “Not as wildlings, but as northerners — a people reborn.” Roderick hesitated. “Forgive me, Your Grace, but are they truly northern? They’ve never bent the knee, never—”
Sansa’s gaze shifted to him, sharp and thoughtful. “Are you a northerner, Ser Roderick?” The young knight straightened. “Of course, my queen. Born of Bear Island, blood of the First Men.”
“Then so is Sira,” Sansa replied evenly. “Jon’s wife — a chieftess of the Ice-River Clan. Her blood is as old as the stones beneath this castle. The First Men’s blood runs deeper in her veins than in half the noble houses who claim descent from them. Tell me, Ser Roderick — is she any less a northerner than you?”
He faltered, unsure how to answer. Sansa stepped down from the dais, her cloak trailing softly over the stone floor. “The Free Folk never bent, that much is true. But neither did they break. They endured — through winters that would have killed the South ten times over. And now they stand with us. That is what it means to be of the North.”
She paused at the window, snow swirling beyond the glass. “So who has claim?” she murmured. “All of them do. Every one who still remembers what it means to survive the cold.” Roderick bowed his head. “Then the North is larger than I ever imagined.”
“It always was,” Sansa said softly. “We just forgot how to see it.”
She glanced once more at the letter resting beside her cup and smiled faintly. “Hmm. The Wall now belongs to the north,” she added quietly. “I did not see that coming little brother.” With a smile.The firelight caught the edges of her hair, turning it briefly to gold as she turned back toward the hall. “We’ve outgrown our ghosts and myths, Ser Roderick. The realm will learn to do the same — or be left behind.”
Sansa had grown up on tales of the First Men — how their blood gave the North its right to rule, how the line of Stark had guarded that legacy through a thousand winters. Yet when she first beheld the Ice-River chiefess, the old lessons faltered. The woman before her was no story carved into stone, but the stone itself made flesh — a living shard of the age that birthed every house of the North. In Seri’s bearing she saw the origin of her own pride, and for the first time, she understood that Winterfell’s nobility had been an inheritance of memory, not mastery.
Men choose what to forget, she thought. And what they forget becomes lost or legend.

The candlelight in Winterfell guttered low as the storm deepened. Snow pressed against the windows like breath, and beyond the walls the world turned white. High above the courtyard, a single raven launched from the rookery tower — wings black against the gray morning — and vanished northward into the storm.
Its flight carried over frozen forests and half-buried keeps, past the ruins of Queens crown and the still waters of Long Lake, until at last the dark shape of Castle Black emerged from the veil of snow. Its towers leaned like old sentinels, the Wall behind it glimmering faintly — cracked, thawed, and breathing frost like some wounded god.
The raven spiraled down through the wind and landed upon a sill dusted with rime. Inside, Jon Snow sat alone in his quarters.
The chamber was small, warmed by a single brazier and the steady presence of Ghost, who lay near the hearth — white as the snow outside, his red eyes half-closed, always watching. On the table before Jon lay several sheets of parchment, their ink still glistening.
He read them once more slowly, deliberate — before rolling each tightly and pressing them with black wax. The sigil stamped upon them was no longer the crow of the Watch, but the arctic bear of the Northern Guard. When the last was sealed, he sat back in silence.
The wind clawed faintly at the shutters, carrying with it the echo of an age that was dying. For a long time he did not move. Then he rose.
He wore pale leather armor of a white and gray wash, bound with iron — not southern plate, but northern craft, supple and silent. Across his shoulders hung the great cloak of the arctic bear, its fur white as hoarfrost, its weight both mantle and memory.
At his belt he fastened a slim dagger of dragonglass, its hilt carved from pale weirwood — the gift of Gendry Baratheon, delivered by Tormund Giantsbane with a grin and a jest:“Heard you lost your last one down south. Figured this one won’t melt so easy.” Jon had only nodded, his thanks quiet but sincere.
Now, as he took Longclaw from the table and buckled it to his side, the steel gave a soft sigh against its scabbard — the sound of endings. He pulled on his gloves, heavy sealskin lined with wool and crossed to the door.
Ghost stirred, rising to follow. For a moment Jon paused, looking back at the brazier’s dying glow. The fire within the coals pulsed once — faint, then gone. He whispered something to himself that even Ghost did not hear and opened the door. Cold rushed in.

Snow drifted across the upper steps where the ramparts met the courtyard, painting the stones in shifting gray and white. Jon stood there for a while, silent, his cloak lifting in the wind like the wings of some great white bird. Below, the courtyard of Castle Black had changed beyond recognition: stalls of timber and hide lined the walls where once the Watch drilled.
Free Folk traders moved among soldiers of the Northern Guard, exchanging furs and iron in uneasy peace. And at the far end, near the broken gate, stood a small gathering — the last brothers of the Night’s Watch, their black cloaks tattered but their spines still straight.
Jon watched them for a long moment, his breath curling in the cold. Ghost pressed close beside his leg, ears pricked, the low wind whispering through his fur. Then Jon turned and descended the stairs. Each step echoed softly in the stillness.
When he reached the yard, the murmur of men fell away, leaving only the sound of wind against stone. Before him stood two lines: the Northern Guard, cloaked in gray and white, and the Crows, cloaked in black. The old and the new — facing each other across the frost. Jon stopped between them.
“You shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children…”
The words lingered in the frozen air like ghosts, brittle as the frost that clung to the black stones of Castle Black.
Before Jon Snow stood the last of the Night’s Watch — a handful of weary men, bound by oaths that no longer held meaning. Most had long fled south or joined the Northern Guard when the Watch began to rot from within. Now traders passed freely through the gate, southern gold and northern iron exchanging hands in the very yard where vows were once spoken.
Castle Black had become a relic — half-ruined, half-reborn. The walls sagged, the towers leaned, and in the courtyards where drills once rang, there now stood makeshift stalls of timber and hide. Free Folk women haggled with blacksmiths from Wintertown, and the air smelled faintly of pine resin and smoke. Wreaths of evergreen and bone hung from the old ramparts — not for the Watch, but for the winter festivals of the free north. It was no longer a fortress; it was a corridor of trade, a crossroads between worlds.
Jon’s breath misted before the scarred face of the Wall — a jagged monument to an age that had passed. In front of him, the last brothers of the Watch stood silent. Some wept. Others stared hollow-eyed at the man they had once called Lord Commander. He was no longer one of them.He drew his gloves tighter and turned to his captain — a nameless soldier of the North, face hidden beneath fur and frost.
“Seize it,” he said quietly. The man hesitated. “Commander?” Jon’s voice did not rise. “The Wall and all its castles — all of it. They belong to the North now.”
A ripple of motion followed. Boots crunched in the snow as Northern soldiers moved to take control of the gates, the towers, the armories, the stables. Black banners were lowered, their crow sigils falling into the frost. In their place rose white and gray — the banner of the Northern Guard: an arctic bear, its mouth froze half-open in a silent roar.
The traders and travelers fell still, watching from the edges of the yard. The old world was ending, though few could say what new one would rise in its place. Jon faced the last of the Watch. His voice carried across the courtyard, low but unyielding.
“The Night’s Watch is ended. Its watch is done.”
He paused. “As for you few who remain — thank you for your service. Your watch is over. You are free men now. You may take the pledge of the Northern Guard, and you will be treated as brothers still. But there is no longer need for the Watch. The North will guard its own.”
He looked once more toward the broken gate, the wind, and the endless white beyond. “You are released,” he said at last. “Choose freely.”
Ravens burst into the sky — black wings scattering against the dawn. By nightfall, every hall in the North would know: the Wall was unmanned, and the North stood guard over itself.