#nedstarkedit

[avadcniels]

GAME OF THRONES

1x01 – "WINTER IS COMING"

[baelontargaryen]

The winters are hard, but the Starks will endure. We always have.

[stormborns]

GAME OF THRONES 6.03, Oathbreaker

[thenorthsource]

Winterfell's Heart Tree

Then somehow he was back at Winterfell again, in the godswood looking down upon his father. […] "… let them grow up close as brothers, with only love between them," he prayed, "and let my lady wife find it in her heart to forgive …".

[…] Bran felt his eyes fill up with tears. But were they his own tears, or the weirwood's? If I cry, will the tree begin to weep?

The rest of his father's words were drowned out by a sudden clatter of wood on wood. Eddard Stark dissolved, like mist in a morning sun. Now two children danced across the godswood, hooting at one another as they dueled with broken branches. […]

After that the glimpses came faster and faster, till Bran was feeling lost and dizzy. [...] a woman heavy with child emerged naked and dripping from the black pool, knelt before the tree, and begged the old gods for a son who would avenge her. Then there came a brown-haired girl slender as a spear who stood on the tips of her toes to kiss the lips of a young knight as tall as Hodor. A dark-eyed youth, pale and fierce, sliced three branches off the weirwood and shaped them into arrows. [...] And now the lords Bran glimpsed were tall and hard, stern men in fur and chain mail. Some wore faces he remembered from the statues in the crypts, but they were gone before he could put a name to them.

Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.

“No," said Bran, "no, don't," but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. [...] And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man's feet drummed against the earth … but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.

[despatu]

#sansaweek2025

Day 2: In Universe Parallels and Foils

Ned Stark

[gardens-of-babylonn]

⋆˙⟡ 𝐍𝐄𝐃𝐒𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐀; ned stark and vysella targaryen ⋆.˚

[thekenobee]

[palominojacoby]

AGOT, Eddard XV

Cersei Lannister's face seemed to float before him in the darkness. […] "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die," she whispered. Ned had played and lost, and his men had paid the price of his folly with their life's blood.

When he thought of his daughters, he would have wept gladly, but the tears would not come. Even now, he was a Stark of Winterfell, and his grief and his rage froze hard inside him.

[…]

"Surely you did not think I'd forgotten about your sweet innocent, my lord? The queen most certainly has not."

“No,” Ned pleaded, his voice cracking. “Varys, gods have mercy, do as you like with me, but leave my daughter out of your schemes. Sansa’s no more than a child.”

[…] Lord Eddard, tell me … why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones? Ponder it, if you would, while you wait upon the queen. And spare a thought for this as well: The next visitor who calls on you could bring you bread and cheese and the milk of the poppy for your pain … or he could bring you Sansa's head.”

AGOT, Sansa V

"Do you have some business for king and council, Sansa?" the queen asked from the council table.

"I do." She knelt on the cloak, so as not to spoil her gown, and looked up at her prince on his fearsome black throne. "As it please Your Grace, I ask mercy for my father, Lord Eddard Stark, who was the Hand of the King." She had practiced the words a hundred times.

AGOT, Sansa VI

Waking or sleeping, she saw him, saw the gold cloaks fling him down, saw Ser Ilyn striding forward, unsheathing Ice from the scabbard on his back, saw the moment … the moment when … she had wanted to look away, she had wanted to, her legs had gone out from under her and she had fallen to her knees, yet somehow she could not turn her head, and all the people were screaming and shouting, and her prince had smiled at her […].