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Published:
2021-12-21
Updated:
2025-08-27
Words:
143,994
Chapters:
24/?
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Winter Comes Again

Summary:

Two years after the Battle for the Living, the harshest winter in living memory still hasn’t ended. Sansa Stark is desperate to save what’s left of her people, but there’s nothing she can do except hope that they don’t all slowly starve before winter ends.

Well, nothing she can do until the Old Gods hear her desperate plea and send her back to Winterfell months before King Robert stepped foot in the North. Now all the “what ifs” she’s spent contemplating are possible and she’s promised the Old Gods she would do anything to save her family and the people of the North even if that meant staining her honor, allying with old enemies, or entering yet another unwanted marriage.

Or the one in which the Old Gods have zero tact and Sansa is determined to keep the game of thrones from ruining her family or the North.

Notes:

Completely self-indulgent nonsense. Sorry? Not sorry?

I wrote 100k words of this in November, unfortunately it's not all connected yet and needs editing, but the first several chapters are completed. And yeah, Jaime doesn't show up for a few chapters. I'm sad about it too.

Chapter 1: Down and Back

Chapter Text

The heat from the large funeral pyre was the only thing that made being outside the heated walls of Winterfell bearable even during the scant hours of daylight. The wind was frigid and strong enough that it had drifted piles of snow against the outside castle walls nearly to the top of the gates. It was only the daily traffic in and out of the East Gate that kept the pathway clear enough to use that particular gate. The Hunter’s Gate and the North Gate were impossible to use now with the snow and ice covering them and the only reason the South Gate remained semi-useable was that it was regularly cleared for safety purposes.

Sansa Stark flexed her fingers inside of her cloak to keep them from freezing even from her position in front of the pyre. After weeks and months, the smell of burning bodies was familiar to her and she no longer held her breath or gagged at the smell. The acrid scent of smoke and ash that permeated the stone walls and rooms of Winterfell these days was a far cry from the smells of her childhood. Her gaze rested on the fire where she could see the remains of the sick and starved.

In this particular fire there was the body of a maid that she had taken into her employ several months ago but had gotten a chill a week ago and then a fever and passed away just this morning. Then there was the toddler who used to run and giggle in the Great Hall as gleefully as her brother Rickon ever did. Even before they went up in flames their bodies were more skeleton than flesh from the rationing everyone had to follow.

There was a babe in the pyre too that Sansa suspected was smothered rather than slowly starved; at this point, she didn’t know if she thought the act was a kindness or a crime. Before she could decide the wind changed directions and smoke curled around in her direction stinging at her eyes and breaking her out of her thoughts, but she refused to stop watching the fire consume those she has failed today, so she stepped a few paces to the right and hoped the wind didn’t change again.

The guards who had set the fire had long since returned inside the walls of the castle on her order. Though she has but one and twenty namedays and less weight to her than she should, she’s been Queen in the North since shortly after the Night King was slain and her orders were respected by all that were left in the North. There is scarcely anyone left now though, the Night King had been defeated but at a high cost of human life and winter had not ended just because the Night King was destroyed. It had been two years since the Battle for the Living, but there was no end to winter in sight; neither the winds nor snows had lessened since then and with the conditions as bad as they were no ravens, riders, or traders had graced her halls in months.

When what little bit of the last weak rays of sunlight faded below the frozen, desolate horizon Sansa turned to make her way back into the courtyard of Winterfell, signaling the guards on duty at the East Gate to watch the fire die for the rest of the afternoon and the evening, if it even lasted that long before the wind and snow smothered it. Sansa skipped the Great Hall and its meager offerings to venture into the family crypt. She plucked a torch from the entrance and made her way down the darkened labyrinth. Her steps stop only for a few moments to pay her respects to her father’s and Rickon’s bones before continuing down to the older sections of the crypt.

None of the rest of her family’s bones had been returned to their proper resting place, not her mother’s that were lost to the rivers of her homeland or her brother Robb’s and his direwolf’s, Grey Wind, bones that had been gruesomely sewn together in death. She did not know if Arya was still alive, although she suspected that after this long without a visit or word from her that Arya’s ship had been lost at sea. Jon had gone North of the destroyed wall, never to return, but the last she had heard conditions were even worse there, so she did not dare hope that he still lived.

When she was a little girl, before she had gone south, she had found the crypts frightening and unsettling when her siblings played here. Perhaps she had always been the one more frightened of death than the rest of her family, perhaps that was why she was the only one left of them now, well except Bran, but Sansa wasn’t sure if what Bran was now could still be considered her brother. The Three-eyed Raven was a creature that had stolen the use of her brother’s body and although, he wore her brother’s face she recognized none of the sweet curious boy that had dreamed of being a knight and who had loved the scary tales of the North more than any southern tale. The Three-eyed Raven sat the Iron Throne in her brother’s body, though her brother Bran had never had any aspirations or dreams of being a king.

Sansa went down past Torrhen Stark, the last King of Winter before Robb, who had knelt to the Targaryens. Past Jon Stark, his son Rickard Stark, past even Rodrik and Theon Stark. Her steps echoed past hundreds of statues, names, and descriptions that had faded to illegibility, all her family though she did not know all their names or their stories. Lords and Ladies, Kings and Queens and Princes of Winter. Down and down, she went. Eight thousand years of her family history she passed all the way down to the time of Brandon the Builder.

The gray stone statue’s features had long been worn down. No one was sure if this truly was the tomb of the first Brandon Stark, but it is in the oldest part of the crypt and the farthest one from the entrance. Father had never let his children down this far, warning that it was too dangerous. Torch light flickered over the space though it did not penetrate far due to the thick steam that hung about the chamber. She placed the torch in an ancient looking holder to free her hands. It took only a moment to determine why her father had issued the warning. Here, nearest the oldest tombs was part of the massive underground hot spring that heated all of Winterfell’s walls.

While the springs in the Godswood were hot they were still cool enough for a child to soak or swim in. As a young girl, her father had often taken her and her siblings there to learn to swim or clean off some of the clinging mud before letting their mother see them or the maids sigh over them dirtying up the keep. Arya and Rickon had been the wildest of the bunch and had probably individually spent more time in the Godswood’s hot spring being rinsed off than the rest of her siblings combined.

The hot spring down here must be much hotter than the ones on the surface though, too hot for children and perhaps too hot for people at all, if the thickness of the steam and the way sweat gathered at the back of her neck and the small of her back was any indication. In the distance she could weakly see the way the water bubbled up and steam curled near what must be the source of the spring. Otherwise, the water of the spring was dark and fathomless and the way the torchlight reflected instead of penetrating the water was eerie. She had no idea how deep the water ran nor how far back the rest of the cavern goes. She wiped at the sweat at her hairline and removed her cloak. The warmth brought a flush to her face that had been missing for ages.

Between the boiling hot springs and what she can see of the crumbling rock walls it was treacherous down here. She glanced down at her feet and toed a rock on the floor to examine it. She cursed herself for being such a rule follower and for being so frightened of her family’s final resting place as a silly little girl. Clearly, none of her siblings, or at least not Jon, Arya, or Bran, had disobeyed Father in his command either, because the rocks scattered all over the floor and glittering darkly in thick veins in the walls were dragonglass. There were veins of other rocks that she didn’t recognize but Sansa only had eyes for the veins of dragonglass that she could see.

She pursed her lips as she tried to calculate if there would have been enough dragonglass for the Long Night, but without being able to see the rest of the cavernous space she couldn’t begin to guess. Was it possible that her ancestors had built Winterfell in this location less for the hot springs that warmed the walls and more for the dragonglass that would have been invaluable for killing wights? She wondered if she had known, if Jon would have ever had to bend the knee to the silver-haired Dragon Queen. If he hadn’t would he still be here at Winterfell? Would his help the last few years have made a difference or was this just the fate of the North no matter who led it?

Sansa turned back toward her ancestor’s tomb again and though the features hewn into the stone had long since worn away, it was apparent that like many Starks throughout the ages, the suspected Brandon the Builder, was broad and long of face. She can’t see any of herself in the remnants of the stone face. She was always the least Stark looking of her siblings, only the paleness of her face and her height did not come from the Tully features of her mother.

In the depth of the crypt, where none of the current inhabitants of Winterfell could hear or see her, where only her long dead ancestors lay, Sansa Stark let out a heartbroken little cry.

“How did you do it? How did you feed your people through a winter that lasted a generation?” she asked the worn statue.

 She continued on in a whisper, “I have failed everyone I ever set out to save. I failed Father, Rickon, Jon, even that fool Dontos, and many others over the years. Right now, I am failing all the people of the North. They have survived so much, but it will be hunger that kills us all in the end. A slow torturous death that I must watch my people endure. Truly I don’t think a single region in all of Westeros has enough food to last much longer than another year.”

Tears had blurred her vision and she swiped at them furiously. The weight of her failure sat heavily on her shoulders, and she slumped them where there was no one to see her falter. She traced her slim fingers over the features of this long-gone ancestor of hers. “I would do anything to spare my people of this now,” she said.

“Anything?” A voice whispered distorted oddly through the steam and cavernous space.

Sansa stepped back away from the statue and the direction of the entrance. She whipped her head around, but she couldn’t see any figures or hear any steps. “Who’s there?” she called out.

The voice whispered like wind through the leaves, “Who comes before the Gods?”

Sansa swallowed down her surprise and fear. The voice had no gender to it that she could determine. It seemed to whisper and rustle with a thousand different tones. She wet her cracked lips and answered, “Sansa Stark, Daughter of Winterfell and Queen in the North.”

“Stark, A Stark, The Last Stark in Winterfell, blood of the First Men,” echoed suddenly and at great volume with no discernible source. Sansa flinched and covered her ears with her hands.

When the echo ended and Sansa removed her hands from her ears, the voice whispered again, “Would you do it again?”

“Anything! Tell me what must I do?” she said desperately.

“Again, do it again,” the voice replied, but the answer was no help to her.

“Do what again?” she asked. She bit at her bottom lip in a display of nervousness she had thought had long been beaten out of her.

Behind her Sansa heard the hot springs begin to roil furiously. The ground began to rumble, the rock walls cracked, and stones began to fall. Sansa scurried backwards to avoid the falling debris. Her heart was pounding painfully in her chest and her breath quickened with fear. In her haste she slipped on the loose pieces of dragonglass scattered on the ground and tumbled backwards into the hot spring.

The heated water burned and blistered her skin the moment she fell into the water. The pain sizzled through her like nothing she’d ever experienced before. It was so excruciatingly hot that she felt it scorch through her veins and when it was done burning through her blood, the heat and the pain seared through her soul. She was incapable of distinct thoughts through the overwhelming pain that lanced through her. She did not know whether she screamed or not. Time was meaningless to her. It took only a brief few seconds for the water to burn through her body completely, but it felt like an extended lifetime of agony to her.

 Through the pain and above the rumbling of the ground she faintly heard the voice speak again, “Where death once walked, where winter was once felled, where First Men’s blood spilled, let the Last Stark walk once more.”

And then Sansa Stark, the Last Stark in Winterfell, sank into welcome blankness and neither saw nor heard any more.