maddystark17

[maddystark17]

The Feast of Claw and Crown

There’s a story—old, but never told the same way twice—that says Winterfell and Casterly Rock were never just castles. 

That the direwolf and the lion were never just banners. They were alive, once. Not animals—entities. Spirits of House and blood, hungry for loyalty and war.

The story goes like this:

A thousand years ago, long before the Targaryens, before dragons burned maps into ash, the direwolves of the North roamed free in packs that stretched from sea to sea, and the lions of the Rock ruled golden hills that shimmered with sunlit bones.

But these beasts weren’t quite natural. They wore the shape of wolves and lions, yes—but they had too many eyes. Too many teeth. Some walked like men. Some spoke in dreams. They fed on bloodlines. And the more people worshipped them—sewed their likeness into cloth, bled for them in battle—the stronger they became.

The North and the West waged quiet war—not over gold or grain, but for dominance of memory. The beasts knew this: whoever is remembered, remains. So they used their chosen houses like puppets, drawing them into endless skirmishes.

Until one winter, the beasts tired of patience.

The direwolves descended from the woods as blizzards, not packs. They did not snarl. They sang—low, droning notes like mournful horns that made men stab themselves in the throat to silence it. The lions did not roar. They laughed—wet, choking giggles that made horses go mad and women claw their wombs out.

They met on the banks of the Blue Fork, in a valley no longer marked on any map. What happened there wasn’t a battle.

It was a mating.

A consumption.

The direwolves and lions didn’t just kill each other—they merged. Fused. Became one.

Witnesses say they saw a creature born from that union—just one—something tall and thin and crowned in antlers made of bone and torn banners. It walked upright, dragging two bodies behind it: a lion with a man’s face, a wolf with a woman’s voice. From its mouth hung red ribbons of skin and veins woven into house sigils.

It whispered two words: “No more.”

Then it vanished into the Dreadfort’s shadow.

Now, when the snows fall strangely late, or the gold mines yield only blood-wet rock, people say the creature—called The Herald of Claw and Crown—is near again. It comes not to kill, but to unravel. It will sit by your bed at night and whisper forgotten names into your ear. At first, it feels like a dream. But then you start forgetting your brother’s voice. Your father’s face. The words of the house you swore to.

Until all you remember is the Herald’s song:

“Lion’s heart and wolf’s cold breath, Trade names, trade bones, become one death. Crown of fur, cloak of gold, Lose your blood before you’re old.”

They say that’s how the lineages began to thin. Why great houses vanish. The Herald doesn’t kill them. It simply unties them from time.

And the real horror?

Both beasts are still inside it—still snarling and snapping behind its stitched-together ribs.

Still hungry for war.

Most Honored Archmaester,

Forgive the bluntness of this parchment, but I write not for courtesy, but compulsion. You charged me with the task of tracing the broken lineages of the lesser Lannett House of the Westerlands, whose banners were once gold with a lion devouring a lamb—if you recall.

I followed the trail from Crakehall to Silverhill, and eventually to the abandoned holdfast of Hollowmane Keep, where the records abruptly cease mid-winter, 102 AC. No letters, no deaths recorded, no signs of plague or siege. Simply... silence.

What I found there, Erymos, I hesitate to describe plainly.

The halls were intact—tables still set with rusted plates, goblets fused to wood by mold and time. But the walls were scraped clean of sigils. Tapestries cut down. Not by blade. By fingernails.

The raven roost bore one parchment still clutched in skeletal hands. What remained was a single phrase, written in dried blood and candle ash:

“Claw became Crown, and we remembered nothing.”

The townsfolk of nearby Sable Creek speak of no House Lannett. When I produced sketches of their crest, they recoiled—not in confusion, but in recognition they could not explain. One old shepherd wept and said, “I knew a girl with lion eyes once. She vanished in the snow and came back with none.”

At night, I heard something on the wind—not a wolf’s howl, not a lion’s roar. A sound like fabric tearing underwater, followed by footsteps that never quite reached the door.

I believe—no, I fear—the local legends of the Feast of Claw and Crown are not myth, but memory rot, a kind of historical consumption that leaves no bones. Something once born of the North and West has learned to eat not flesh, but heritage.

I returned to Winterfell under false pretenses and visited the crypts. Several statues bore no names. No record of which Stark they belonged to. And when I asked, the steward looked me dead in the eye and said, 

“They weren’t wolves. Not really. Not in the end.”

Erymos, there are gaps in the records we have always attributed to war, fire, or incompetence. I now believe these gaps may be intentional, or worse—alive. Feeding still. A slow banquet stretched over centuries.

I do not seek publication. I ask only this: do not send another maester north without knowing what waits between fang and fang, crown and claw.

Burn this letter after reading.

In dread service to knowledge,

Maester Lyle

Formerly of Goldengrove

A tale the wet nurses don’t tell, but all the cradlemaids know.

They say there was once a girl named Mira, born in the shadow of the Wolfswood, in a crooked house with no windows on the north wall.

She was a bright child, cheerful, with a voice like melted snow—clear, soft, and cold. But she had a habit of humming things she shouldn’t have known. Songs no one taught her. Rhymes that made the old women clutch their hearth-chains and whisper of the “deep blood” stirring.

The first time she sang the rhyme, she was just three.

Her father heard it echoing through the yard:

One paw golden, one paw red, It walks where wolves and lions bled…

He beat her for it—not out of cruelty, but fear. Said her grandmother vanished humming that same song, eyes all wrong and fingernails full of dirt.

But Mira just smiled and said, “It’s inside the snow. You just have to listen close.”

The next winter, the house goats were found dead—no wounds, just stiff as wood, their horns twisted into spirals. Mira was found curled beside them, whispering the song into their ears.

She had changed, just a little. Her voice no longer echoed properly. It came out flat, like it didn't belong in her throat. Her reflection in the well looked behind her, not at her. And sometimes, she would repeat verses no one had ever heard before:

Tail like thread and teeth like thorn, It eats the names we’re given, torn.

No one taught her that.

By age six, Mira couldn’t remember her mother’s name. By seven, she had no shadow when she walked east at dusk. By eight, she stopped blinking.

And the rhyme… it changed with her.

Her friends would hear her singing it, and forget how to tie their shoes. One boy forgot his own face—looked in a mirror and screamed for hours because the boy staring back had lion eyes and bleeding gums.

When the winter came heavy and hard, Mira walked into the forest wearing only a shift of linen and a crown she made from brittle pine branches. Her father ran after her. He followed her footprints as far as he could, until they stopped.

Not turned. Not wandered. Stopped.

Just a single paw print—half wolf, half lion—pressed into the snow where her bare feet should have been.

No one has seen her since.

But when the wind is right, and the snow comes sideways and sharp, some say you can hear her voice, small and far away, still singing:

Left foot North, right foot West, It wears a cloak of mother’s breast…

Say not “wolf,” say not “king,” Say no beast’s remembering…

And if a child hums it too often, forgets too many things, and starts smiling with too many teeth—

Burn the linens. Salt the doors.

Because Mira never died. She just became.

A Warning to Any Who Would Listen:

If you are reading this, you are either too bold or too late.

There exists in the North, and increasingly in the West, a pattern of child-speech that is not natural play nor innocent mimicry. These songs—nursery rhymes, chants, hand games—seem benign at first, passed from one child to another as though they’ve always been there. But I have studied them. I have charted their migrations. They spread like infection, but not through blood or touch.

They pass through attention.

A child hears the rhyme, repeats it. They hum it when alone. Then they begin to forget—small things, at first. The name of a pet. The way home. Their own middle name.

And then the shift begins.

The child’s reflection lags. Their voice takes on strange tonal flatness, as if echoing from a deeper place. Most chilling of all: they stop dreaming. Or rather, they start seeing only one dream—a thing with paws of gold and red, and a crown of tangled sigils gnawed through at the base.

The rhyme is not merely song. It is a seed. A mnemonic infection planted long ago during a blood-soaked convergence between the North and the West—a union of beasts made from heraldry and horror, myth and marrow. The Herald of Claw and Crown was not killed, not buried. It was broken into pieces, scattered into rhyme and riddle, so children would carry it unknowingly across generations.

Each child that sings it becomes a vessel, reshaped slowly into a forgetting machine, a mouthpiece with skin. Not all turn fully. Most simply vanish from record, absorbed into the folds of missing names, unspoken deaths. But some—a rare few—complete the transformation.

And when they do, they sing the rhyme backward. That is how you will know. When you hear a child alone in the snow, singing nonsense that feels familiar, that makes your own name feel slippery—

Run.

Do not write it down. Do not hum it, even in jest. The rhyme contains more than memory. It carries the shape of a creature that lives between lineages, in the cracks where history bleeds.

And each time it is spoken, it grows closer to being whole.

Let this be your only warning.

Let this page be your only record.

And if you value your name—never say the words:

One paw golden, one paw red...

[maddystark17]

⊹ ࣪ ˖ The Queen Beyond the Wall: the Bloodline Reclaimed ⊹ ࣪ ˖

⊹ ࣪ ˖ Summary ⊹ ࣪ ˖

Robert Baratheon always knew the truth about his children—Joffrey, Tommen, Myrcella—and the truth about his beloved youngest daughter, Orlaena.

She was his only trueborn child, conceived in force, yet cherished above all. Looking into her eyes reminded him of his mother, of a better time. She was his sun and stars, his anchor in a world gone mad. Though the realm expected him to name Joffrey as heir, Robert never intended to give the throne to a boy he saw as a monster—and the living proof of Cersei’s betrayal. Instead, he married Orlaena to a wildling, Tormund Giantsbane: a good-hearted man who would never try to rule in her place. But after Robert’s death, his plans unravel. Cersei, grasping for power, seizes the Iron Throne for Joffrey while Orlaena remains exiled beyond the Wall. Now, the true heir must fight her way back through ice, blood, and betrayal—to claim the crown that was always hers.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ Chapter 1: When the Realm Still Breathed ⊹ ࣪ ˖

Watching his perfect girl tend to Tommen warmed Robert’s heart. He’d only recently noticed the pattern: whenever Joffrey tormented the boy, Orlaena was there, soothing him. Of course she was. How had he not seen it before? His sweet, steady Princess—always knowing who needed her most. She would make a queen the realm had never seen. A true queen. The kind they wrote songs about.

Sooner rather than later, he thought, a bitter grin pulling at his lips.

He hadn’t told Cersei yet. There would be a fight—a draining, vile fight. But he would name Orlaena his heir—and no lioness, not even Cersei, would stop him.

What confused him most was that Cersei wasn’t proud. A daughter on the Iron Throne—shouldn’t that delight her? But no. She wanted that little monster to rule. Robert’s lip curled at the thought. If he had even once felt something for her, it died the moment Joffrey was born. The realm waited for him to name the boy heir. He could feel it in the hallways of court. The whispers. The stares. But over his dead fucking body. That boy would bring the Seven Kingdoms to ruin. Dust. Ash. Bones beneath broken banners.

And what was a king, truly, if not a protector? A servant? A steward of the living? Joffrey was none of those things. Just a shrieking mirror of all the worst things in the world.

At least he still had Orlaena.

He knew there would be backlash. The Lords would scoff—a girl? On the throne? And for a moment, he almost felt tempted to give them what they asked for, just to spite them. Let Joffrey tear the kingdom to pieces. Let them choke on their mistake. But no. He couldn't let pettiness write the history of his bloodline. His daughter would soon be a married woman. He could only pray she'd be happy. The Gods likely weren’t listening—not to him. Not anymore. But at least he’d chosen the right man. Tormund Giantsbane. Loud, yes. A bit wild. But kind. And more importantly: not a man who hungered for crowns. Cersei thought the match was random—of course she did. She’d never understand what mattered. Robert had considered it all. How the man would treat Orlaena. Whether he would honor her claim. Whether he would try to take what wasn't his. Tormund would do none of that. He would love her, protect her—and leave the ruling to her.

Perfect, Robert thought. Just perfect.

He dipped the quill in ink. His hand shook slightly. One name. That was all it would take to end the lie.

Orlaena Baratheon.

It was time. At last, it was time. The lie ends now.