♔ → westeros presents meda stark, the princess of winterfell / the north a raven sent word that she bears the resemblance to adelaide kane. the twenty eight year old cis woman was astute & compassionate before the dawn of winter, but have now become proud & hot-tempered. when songs are sung, their verses speak of the regal tilt of a head born for glory; a long wooden map table strewn with sigils and banners; a she-wolf circling her pack, baring her teeth at intruders. whispers throughout the seven kingdoms claim that their allegiance lies with house stark / the north, where they conspire to end the war of the northern kingdom and unite the north under stark rule, and secure the safety and prosperity of the subjects of the northern kingdom but in the end, fealty means little when you play the game of thrones. ( hayley, 21, cst, she/her. )
She is born just before the worst winter in recent memory, and that is how they know she will have to be strong. She cries coming out of the womb, as all babes do, but soon quiets down, as if she already knows she is a princess and must present the proper decorum. From the moment she comes into the world, she is loved and doted on, as only the single daughter in a family of boys can be, and she wants for little in their close-knit little pack, but she is always reminded of what it means to be a Stark: honor, loyalty, duty; these above all else.
She takes it to heart, and learns her lessons well. Not just the lessons of how to be a lady, though she watches her mother closely and tries her best to emulate the older woman’s grace, but also the intricacies of running a kingdom, the nuances between the ruling houses and their vassels, and the needs of the people who are by right partly gets to protect. She will never be a Queen, unless (gods forbid) they send her South to marry, but she can do her duty to her people all the same, by learning enough to know how much grain will need to be stored for each upcoming winter, how much will need to be planted and harvested in the spring and summer, and how to distribute it all so that it benefits the largest number of people. They are hard decisions, but they need to be made, and she learns how to do so.
The truth is, the lesson she learns best is how to play the game. Though she doesn’t meet many outsiders, with the Stark-held North being cut off by the rebel Red Kings from most of Westeros, she practices on her family’s sworn Houses. She learns who resents whom over a trade dispute, or an inheritance claim, or an old slight that happened so many years ago that everyone has all but forgotten how it started. She learns which young lords and ladies have been betrothed, and which old ones must settle their affairs soon before they die. She learns how to show she cares, listening to the small folk who come to Winterfell to petition the King, or inquiring after an aging lord’s grandchildren by name. It’s important that others feel important, and Meda learns how to make them feel like the only person in the world.
She learns other lessons too, lessons of laughter and love and happiness. She learns of loss and grief and war, though these lessons she would rather forget. She learns how to climb trees and wield a sword and a bow, though she’s not nearly as sharp with those as she is with her mind. There are good and bad times, lightness and darkness, sorrow and joy.
There is light and dark in her too, though she’d be loath to admit it. She’s far too proud for her own good, rarely able to own up to her own faults and mistakes. She takes slights to herself or her family extremely seriously, and she’s quick to anger and slow to forgive. She believe in her perceived duty so much that she’s never bothered to ask if her goals are what’s best for the people she wants to see thrive, if a war to establish Stark control of the North is worth the amount of bloodshed it has cost. She knows the Stark’s to be the rightful rulers, just as she knows the sky is blue and the snow cold. She may very well be right, but the fact that she’s never bothered to even wonder is troubling.
She also may be too ambitious for her own good. While most of the North distrusts Southerner’s, and she does too to a certain extent, she’s eager to fashion alliances that she feels will benefit their people. She doesn’t want the North just to survive, she wants it to thrive, and she thinks she can play the game well enough to juggle the politics of all the other kingdoms in order to secure the North’s best interests. Perhaps she can, but it seems an awful lot to put on one mind, no matter how sharp it is. Learning to ask for help is the one lesson she never quite mastered.
Exploring the Eyrie had proved even more fun than Meda had expected. It was the smallest of the great castles and boasted no stables, smithys or kennels, it was still an impressive feat, and beautiful in its own right. The sound of the waters of Alyssa’s Tear’s could be heard pounding the ground below as they flowed over the side of the falls, and the sight of the falcons soaring overhead was magnificent.
She found herself now in a corridor in the upper levels of the castle, peeking through doors and browsing through books stacked high on shelves. She made her way to a door at the end of the hall, waiting until a familiar voice bid her enter before she opened it and made her way inside.
She smiled at her brother’s second in command. Nodding at the mug of ale in front of him, she asked, “Mind if I join you?” She took a seat across from him and sighed. “Are you as sick of all these false pleasantries as I am? I never thought I’d prefer war to this ceasefire, but I can hardly stomach watching the Bolton’s strut about like they own this place.”
the requiem. within the eyrie’s crypt. late afternoon. open ( 1/5 )
They had displayed their king’s body like one of their fancy cakes. He had been decorated, every last detail finely tended to, and placed in the center of the room for all those gathered in the Vale to politely gawk at. There was no pyre. No respect. Only this… spectacle of his death.
Yet, they still found the nerve to call her people the savage ones.
Sigyn had had quite enough of the shallow pleasantries and clandestine sneering in the days following the funeral. Her patience for them expired, a porcelain snarl and the giant man appointed to guard her clear her course from the clutch of women and their whispers of ‘wildlings roaming free’ and of The Vale’s succession. She finds herself wandered to where once a king’s corpse lay, and her fingers dote across the intricate carved stone, newly without purpose. A slight form such as her own is easily lifted to sit atop it, to lay back, arms outstretched beyond the slab — to get a feel for it.
If the red god’s followers had anything right at all, it was that even she would prefer flames to this brand of exhibition.
Footsteps interrupt solitude, then. Her man standing a ways off is stilled by a gesture of her hand as her face tilts to find their approach, lips curling into an amused, sideways grin.
“Were you hoping to have a turn up here? It’s not nearly as fun as I thought it’d be. It’s just cold.”
As a child, she had once loved to visit the crypts beneath Winterfell. They contained the history of her lineage, the noble men and women who had come before her and whose example she had always been eager to live by. After her uncle’s betrayal and her parents’ funeral, she clumsily bear to venture down there anymore, to see the statues that succeeded so well at displaying her mother and father’s visages, yet failed so drastically at capturing their vitality and strength.
She doesn’t know exactly what it is that brings her to the Eyrie’s place of the dead, except maybe that she’s longing for some quiet, and with the funeral over, the crypt is sure to have both in abundance. She doesn’t expect to find someone else stretched out on the late king’s funeral slab, and she barely resists the curl of her lip when she realizes who it is.
The Bolton’s wildling Queen-in-waiting, Sigyn. She has nothing against the Free Folk themselves, and under different circumstances she might enjoy talking to the other woman, but she has allied with Meda’s enemies, and is therefore an enemy in her own right.
She thinks of leaving without commenting, but decides against it. She will not retreat, nor on the battlefield and not here. “One would think,” she says icily, “that a woman who aspires to be Queen in the North would have a stronger tolerance for cold. Perhaps you aren’t made of stern enough stuff for the position.”
The weather is not as unbearable as she expected, but Meda still feels hot and uncomfortable. She’s used to being bundled up in at least three layers, and she feels exposed even in this conservatively fashioned dress, not used to showing even this much skin. Ignoring the weather, however, she feels a thrill of excitement run through her body, from her scalp to the tips of her toes. This is what she has waited for for years, a chance to meet the key players in the game, to forge alliances necessary to see the North thrive and united under the Stark banner once more.
The situation also possesses the unfortunate caveat of requiring her to share a roof with treacherous Bolton’s and Greystark’s, but she tells herself that she won’t let that get in the way of her duty. She can ignore the memories of being fourteen and terrified, locked in her chambers and clutching her little brother tightly in her arms, as the sound of screams and metal slamming against metal filtered into the room, of the look on Alaric’s face when he’d come to retrieve them and informed them that their parents were dead. No, she will not think of any of that now. The time for justice will come soon enough.
She finds herself in the High Hall, running a hand along the blue-veined white marble. The clearing of a throat signifies that she is not alone and she remarks without turning around, asking, “While one would hope we’ll have no cause for it to open during our time here, I must admit I have quite the urge to see the view from the Moon Door. Do you think it’s as impressive as they say?”
