Chapter Text
Jon
Jon felt like crying. Lady Stark had forbidden him from playing with Robb again, but he knew that if he cried, she would only grow angrier. She would look at him with her pinched, sour expression, or worse, send him to the really mean septa.
Jon hated the septa. She spent all her time telling him how he was a burden, a shame on his father’s honor, a child who should never have existed.
Jon knew that if his father were here, Lady Stark and Septa Mordane wouldn’t dare to treat him so cruelly. But his father had been gone for what felt like forever, off to crush the squids with King Robert. Nobody seemed to care about how he was treated anymore. Even Robb, who Jon knew loved him, had called him a bastard while they were playing. Lately, Robb seemed to look down on him more and more.
When Jon felt like this—angry and sad all at once—he often escaped to the crypts. Though dark, the crypts beneath Winterfell were warm and dry, thanks to the hot springs below. The smooth stone, carved by Brandon the Builder’s magic millennia ago, brought him a sense of quiet comfort, watched over by the Starks of old.
He wasn’t supposed to be down there alone. His father often took him and Robb to pay their respects to their grandfather, uncle, and aunt, but Jon knew he was different. He was a Snow, not a Stark, and he would never rest here when he died. Worse, the crypts were enormous, and his father had strictly forbidden them from exploring alone, warning that even at six years old, it would be easy to get lost.
But Jon had learned how to be quiet, how to slip into shadows and keep his sobs to himself. He knew how to hide from Lady Stark’s servants, who were often too distracted to notice him anyway. He slipped away now, making his way down into the crypts, feeling a strange pull in his chest—a deep yearning that led him toward the statue of his aunt, Lyanna.
He placed the torch he had taken from the entrance against the wall, unable to reach the fixtures meant to hold it. In the flickering light, something caught his eye—a glint of metal behind Lyanna’s stone coffin. His heart raced as he moved closer, crouching to see an iron ring set into a stone slab between the wall and the sarcophagus.
It was a trapdoor.
The pull in his chest grew stronger, urging him forward. He grabbed the iron ring and pulled with all his might, expecting resistance, but the slab lifted easily, far lighter than the rest of the crypt’s stonework. Beneath it, he saw a chest of pale weirwood, its surface finely carved and decorated with a sigil of tarnished silver—a direwolf and a dragon chasing each other’s tails.
Curiosity burned within him. Jon opened the chest, only to feel a pang of disappointment. Inside were scrolls and papers, nothing more. He had just started learning his letters with Robb and Maester Luwin—a decision his father had insisted on before leaving to fight the Greyjoys, despite Lady Stark’s protests that a bastard should not receive lordly lessons alongside her trueborn son.
As he moved to close the chest, the feeling in his chest grew panicked, as if something or someone desperately wanted to be found. Mesmerized, he pushed aside the scrolls and papers, uncovering a small book and a piece of heavy black fabric with a red emblem embroidered on it. He didn’t linger on the fabric, his attention captured instead by what lay within its folds.
It was a stone.
The object was about a foot long, ovular, and white as snow, with rippling patterns of silver-blue carved into its surface like tiny scales. Jon gasped as he touched it. It was warm—alive—and the instant his fingers made contact, a flood of belonging and affection surged through his chest.
The feeling was so foreign, so intense, that Jon’s small frame curled around the stone as he began to sob, his tears spilling freely. For the first time in his life, he felt something like unadulterated love—deeper and purer than the distant affection of his lord father, who often looked at him with sadness and melancholy. This warmth filled the void left by Lady Stark’s cruelty and the cold indifference of Winterfell’s halls.
Exhausted by his tears and the overwhelming emotions coursing through him, Jon finally fell asleep, still curled around the warm stone. He could not know it yet, but this discovery would change his life forever.
Catelyn
Lady Catelyn Stark sat in her chambers overlooking the courtyard, nursing her three-moons-old daughter, Arya. From her high perch in the First Keep of Winterfell, she spotted the small, raven-haired figure of her lord husband’s bastard slipping unnoticed behind the heavy oak doors of the crypts. Even from this distance, she could see the boy’s shoulders curled inward, as though he were trying to shield himself from the world’s scorn.
Catelyn sighed quietly as she placed a now-sleeping Arya into her cradle. She knew she had been unreasonably harsh with the boy. She had seen the tears well up in his dark eyes earlier that day when she had sent him away after catching him playing with Robb.
The boys had been pretending to be knights, reenacting the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall and Aegon the Unlikely. Seeing her son, Robb, playing the role of Duncan, a noble Kingsguard knight, while the bastard played the part of a prince, had made her irrationally angry. She knew neither boy had intended any slight, and if anything, Jon’s role as a squire should have reassured her of his understanding of his place beneath his trueborn brother. Yet the sight had stirred something raw and irrational within her.
Catelyn knew she had long been unfair toward the boy. Raised in the Faith of the Seven, she had been taught from an early age that bastards were deceitful, unworthy creatures born outside the blessing of the Mother. That belief had been ingrained in her—an unshakable truth, she had once thought. Yet here, in the cold, harsh North, every teaching she had once held as absolute was questioned.
The North cared little for the moral rules written in the holy book. Their gods were silent, weeping trees, watching over a people who valued honor and courage above abstract codes of virtue. The first time Catelyn truly realized how foreign the North was—how different it was from all she had thought she knew of the Seven Kingdoms—had been a week after her arrival at Winterfell. Her lord husband was away, fighting in the Rebellion, and she had been a young mother left alone to discover the vast keep that would now be her home. Benjen Stark, the youngest Stark sibling and acting lord in his brother’s absence, had tried to make her comfortable, but it was clear they had little in common.
After just a week in Winterfell, Catelyn Stark had discovered that the North did not operate under the same rules or moral codes she had grown up with. One day, while crossing the courtyard, she had seen two stable hands—boys of fifteen or sixteen—kissing in a secluded corner. Appalled by the display, she had immediately called for guards to take them to the cells, only to be laughed off by the very men she summoned, who thought she was jesting.
Stunned by their response and realizing she was the only one repulsed by what she considered unnatural behavior, Catelyn could only watch as the stable master scolded the boys—not for their affections, but for slacking off and being so public about them. The boys blushed and stammered apologies, appearing more like enamored fools than the deviants she believed they were. In the South, such behavior would have earned them a hanging. Refusing to accept what she had seen as a sign of tolerance, she went to her good-brother, Benjen Stark, demanding that the boys be punished.
Benjen had looked at her as though she were mad. With the bluntness of the North, he explained that their gods took no offense at what was consensual and a source of comfort. “The North doesn’t share the South’s need to condemn,” he had said simply.
Still bewildered, she sought solace in the advice of the old governess everyone called Old Nan. But her words only deepened Catelyn’s confusion. “Here, gods do not judge, little fish,” Old Nan had said, using the childhood nickname her father had given her. “They listen to our woes and bring us comfort in their sacred coves. They act against those who harm their children, against true evil—not against those who love, whoever they may be. The gods of the trees know that winter is coming, that winter is harsh. Men and women must face the cold winds united if they hope to survive.”
Catelyn had been left shaken by the realization of just how different her new home was from everything she had known. That shock deepened when Eddard returned from the Rebellion with a bastard child. She had been bewildered by how readily the infant boy was accepted, treated by the household with the same warmth and respect as if he were a trueborn son. It was then she began to understand that, to Northerners, her marriage under the Seven in Riverrun held no weight. To them, a marriage was only binding if made before a weirwood tree. In their eyes, Jon and Robb were equals.
Catelyn learned that bastards were only scorned in the North if they were born of adultery during a marriage made under the Old Gods. Even then, the shame of their birth was carried more by the parents who had broken their vows than by the children themselves. Bastards could not inherit over trueborn heirs, but they were still accepted as family. When she asked Eddard to send the boy away, his fury had been like a storm, and he had remained cold to her for days.
She knew she had not treated the boy as she should. Her lord husband had asked her to care for Jon alongside Robb, and later with Sansa when she was born. She knew he hoped she would come to love the boy as her own. But Catelyn found herself perpetually torn between the faith and morals she had been raised with and the strange reality of life as a Northern lady.
Many times, she had prayed for guidance, for a way to satisfy her husband’s wishes while protecting her own children’s birthrights. The small sept Eddard had agreed to build for her, along with Septa Mordane, provided a measure of comfort—but also deepened her internal conflict. The presence of the sept kept her tethered to her old life and beliefs, preventing her from fully embracing the North as her new home or loving her husband as freely as she wished.
Many times now, Catelyn had seen the value and truth in the ways of the North, only to find herself conflicted by her own deeply held beliefs. In many ways, her treatment of Jon Snow was a direct consequence of this internal struggle. She had seen other bastards of Northern lords working within their households, offering advice and counsel to their trueborn siblings without deceit or bitterness. She couldn’t help but wonder if the South’s mistreatment of bastards was precisely what created the embittered and untrustworthy siblings who lusted after the birthrights of their betters.
When dinner came, and the boy still hadn’t reappeared—much to the distress of Robb and even Sansa, who, despite her influence and Septa Mordane’s teachings, still loved him dearly—Catelyn knew she needed to find him. She dreaded the thought of him wandering lost in the crypts or, worse, seeking comfort from the dead rather than the living. She resolved, if not to treat him as a mother should, then at least to be kinder, to offer him enough warmth that he wouldn’t feel the need to find solace among the ghosts of Winterfell.
Torch in hand, she made her way to the crypts. Goosebumps rose along her flesh as she passed the stern, unyielding stone eyes of generations of Stark lords and ladies. The flickering torchlight cast shadows that danced ominously on the ancient walls, deepening the eerie stillness of the place.
When she finally reached the resting place of Lyanna Stark, her husband’s sister, and the woman Eddard had spoken of with such reverence, she stopped short. Her heart broke at the sight before her. On the cold stone floor, next to an extinguished torch and a scattering of displaced papers, lay Jon Snow. He was curled in on himself, clutching something hidden to his chest. Tear tracks marked his pale, too-serious face, his expression one of exhaustion even in sleep.
Setting the torch in a nearby sconce, Catelyn knelt beside the boy. Her hand hesitated above his shoulder before gently shaking him awake. As she bent closer, her eyes fell to the papers strewn about him. Clearly, the child had displaced them while searching for something more interesting than old scrolls.
Her gaze flicked around the crypt and fell on the displaced stone slab and the chest hidden within. Unease prickled along her skin as she glanced back at the papers. Picking one up, she moved it closer to the torchlight. The red wax seal on the bottom of the document caught her eye—a three-headed dragon, unmistakable and undeniable.
Catelyn gasped, her fingers trembling as she held the scroll. The Targaryen sigil, hidden here beneath Winterfell, was shocking enough. But as she began to read the words, her breath caught in her throat. What she discovered in that moment was far more earth-shattering than she could have imagined.
To all subjects across the seven Kingdoms,
Be it known by this proclamation, on this day, that His Grace, Rhaegar Targaryen, heir to the Iron throne, has taken Her Grace, Lady Lyanna of House Stark, as his second wedded wife and queen. With great joy and the blessing of the old gods and the new, this union is hereby declared to strengthen the bonds of our realm and usher forth an era of unity, peace, and prosperity.
The wedding, was celebrated before the Seven who are one in the sept of Harrenhal, before the Old gods on the Isle of Faces, and in the Valyrian Rites before my great grand uncle Maester Aemon Targaryen of Castel black, it was witnessed by Ser Oswell Whent, Ser Arthur Dayne, and Lord Commander Gerold Hightower mine own kingsguards. The vows exchanged in the tradition of their birth and culture are a testament to their shared devotion and commitment to the service of their good people of the seven kingdom.
Henceforth, let it be known that Her Grace, Princess Lyanna, shall reign at the side of His grace Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and his first wife Princess Elia, offering her wisdom, grace, and kindness to the court and kingdoms alike. Let it also be known that the right of succession between the children of princess Elia and princess Lyanna both born and yet to be is to follow the Andal tradition of the oldest male heir.
Given at Harrenhall, in the year two hundred and eighty two after the conquest.
By the Prince’s own hand and seal,
Prince Rhaegar Targaryen , heir to the Iron Throne
Catelyn felt her throat tighten as her eyes lingered on the words before her. The Rebellion had been built on a lie. If this document was to be believed, Lyanna Stark had wedded Rhaegar Targaryen of her own free will.
Her hands trembled as she reached for another scroll, this one marked with both the Stark direwolf and the Targaryen three-headed dragon. Her breath caught as she read the words written within:
To all Lords of the Seven Kingdoms,
With hearts full of joy and the blessings of the gods, it is hereby declared that another prince is born unto the noble House Targaryen. On this day in the year 283 After the Conquest, Her grace princess Lyanna Stark, beloved wife of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, did bring forth a son into the world, strong and hale.
This blessed child, by name Jaehaerys, shall be known henceforth as a true scion of House Targaryen, heir to the legacy of Old Valyria and the blood of the dragon. His birth heralds the union of two great houses and the completion of the pact of ice and fire.
By the decree of Prince Rhaegar and under the sigil of the dragon, may this proclamation be read and celebrated in every holdfast and hall, that all may share in the glory and blessing of this birth.
Given at the Tower of Joy, this day in the year 283 AC.
By Princess Lyanna Targaryen’s hand, acting by the will of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne
The weight of the words crushed her. A new understanding bloomed in her mind, unraveling everything she had believed about the events of Robert’s Rebellion. Ned Stark had never fathered a bastard. What he found at the Tower of Joy wasn’t shame, but sorrow—a dying sister, lost to childbed fever, after giving birth to a Targaryen prince.
The implications spiraled in her thoughts. Ned must have learned the truth of the Rebellion in that moment. She was certain he would never have supported a lie or gone to war against his own kin if he had known the truth. Someone had conspired to use the North as a weapon against the Iron Throne.
Her head spun with the revelation, anger rising as she thought of her husband. How could he have kept this truth from her, his own wife? Why hadn’t he trusted her? Yet, before she could dwell further, the soft sound of quiet sobs reached her ears, breaking through her thoughts.
Catelyn turned slowly, and what she saw left her frozen in disbelief. Jon—no, not Jon, Jaehaerys Targaryen—was clutching a white-and-blue dragon egg to his chest. His small frame shook with sobs, and his tear-filled eyes brimmed with despair.
“Please, Lady Stark,” the boy whispered, his voice trembling with fear. “Please, I’ll be good. I’ll do everything you say. I’ll know my place as lesser than Robb and Sansa, like Septa Mordane told me. But please let me keep him. He needs me. He’s the only one who loves me.” His small hands clutched the egg tighter, as though afraid she might tear it away.
Catelyn’s heart shattered. How blind she had been, consumed by her faith and prejudices. How had her gods, who she believed to be good and just, allowed her to belittle and reject a trueborn prince of royal blood? How could they have let her pious beliefs lead her so astray?
But then another truth came to her, a truth that rose above her faith: family, duty, honor. She had been raised with these values, instilled in her as a child. Her family was Stark. Her duty was to the North, as Lady of Winterfell. And her honor demanded she right her wrongs and protect the boy in front of her. He was the son of her good sister. He was kin.
Catelyn fell to her knees, setting aside the scrolls and the revelations. She reached out and pulled the little boy into her arms. For the first time, Jaehaerys Targaryen felt the true embrace of a loving mother, and his sobs quieted as he clung to her, the dragon egg still cradled in his hands.