Game of Thrones
Out of context: Reply #1535
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- mg333
This fan fiction on Reddit is getting a ton of love today, and it's well worth reading to have even an imagined "story after the story" to think about:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gameoft…
In the long years of his reign, King Brandon Stark was not loved by the smallfolk nearly so much as the quietude of his rule. Bran himself was a distant and near-silent king, with no taste for great celebrations or inspiring rhetoric. But when the Driftwood Queen demanded the independence of the Iron Islands in 313 AC, Bran granted it almost immediately; the expanded fleet that the Greyjoys had long laboured over had hardly left its harbours before the raven returned from King’s Landing. Dorne’s autonomy grew not with violence, but with carefully negotiated partnership, and though now Ornelia Martell is styled the Princess of Dorne, the Maesters of Oldtown would say that the lands beyond the Red Mountains are more closely entwined – through trade and goodwill – with the Five Kingdoms than ever before. It is said that, though the Seven Kingdoms became Six through the sacrifice of a million lives, the Six became Five without a single drop of spilt blood.
These years of calm saw the turn of seven long summers and seven mild winters. The external threats to Bran’s reign – the Braavosi blockade of 309, sponsored by the Iron Bank and facilitated by many mercenaries; the Second Crossing of the Dothraki Khalasar in 318; the Septons’ Rising of 331 or the coming of the Red Refugees in the decade afterward – seemed less desperate in comparison to the crises endured by King’s Landing in the warlike years before, as if an invisible hand were directing events, by slight nudges, toward the ends of stability and prosperity. Though terrible battles were rumoured in many parts of Essos, their effects were seldom felt in Westeros. One might also have expected some friction to arise from the King’s worship of the Old Gods, but Bran’s habits were so private, and his style of rule so tolerant, that for a time it seemed impossible that internal strife and religious discord could ever have been the hallmark of the Six – and then the Five – Kingdoms.Bran outlived every member of his original Small Council, and outlasted – as far as can be known for certain – every other Stark. Of his sister Arya, the Hero of Winterfell, little was ever heard again: she sailed West, beyond the reckoning and knowledge of all, within days of her brother’s coronation, leaving only the rumours that are shared and rendered into stories in every town of Westeros and Essos: of a single, ragged-looking Raven that flew out of a storm over the Western Sea decades later and on to the last high tower of the Red Keep, bearing a message whose contents were seen only by the King and his closest advisors. The tale that is most often told is that Arya reached the land that is West of West, and shared what details she could of the wonders there before meeting her own mysterious fate.
Sansa Stark, the Queen in the North, maintained strong relations with her brother’s kingdom and toward the end of her life was frequently to be found in the courts of King’s Landing or Dorne, having inherited from her mother a preference for the warmth. After her passing in 371 her bannermen selected Harrold Royce to rule the North.
Of the fate of Jon Snow – the Bastard of Winterfell, the Half-Stark, the Queenslayer, the Resurrected, the Friend of Wolves, twice named Lord Commander of Castle Black – very little is known. The Hand of the King, Tyrion Lannister, visited the North and the Wall in the first decade after Snow's return to the Night’s Watch. Of that visit he records that the Wall was all but unmanned, and that those who stood upon it were facing south, rather than north. The Hand was told that Jon Snow had, years earlier, gone forth with a great company of wildlings and northerners, disappearing into the dark forests of the Lands of Always Winter. Their exploration of those unmapped places are the subject of much conjecture: that Snow had been named the King Beyond the Wall, that he had made contact with the last enclaves of the Children of the Forest, that he was overseeing the settling of great underground cities among the twisting, interconnected roots of the Weirwood trees. It is said that the Greyjoys know something of those northernmost lands, and that Sansa Stark, before her death, knew more, but would not tell. The Lonely King, Bran the Broken, Bran the Bridgemaker, Bran the Wheelbreaker, surely knew more still – but in his quiet places and sanctuaries around King’s Landing, he seldom spoke a word, and to each successive Hand and Archmaester he entrusted fewer of his thoughts.
Finally, in 382 AC, at the start of his eighth winter, King Brandon embarked upon a final journey. He had aged but slowly in all the years of his reign, but age had come upon him nevertheless. His Kingsguard escorted him on the first leg of his journey – a secretive consultation followed by long weeks of contemplation or reading in Oldtown – and then took him as far as the Wall when at last he travelled North. After a night in the almost uninhabited Castle Black, Bran ordered the Kingsguard to return to Winterfell, and so on to the Five Kingdoms, where they were to supervise the selection of a new King of Westeros.
The last of the Starks then travelled North, beyond the wall, quite alone. The Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch reported that distant figures joined the King’s horse just before it disappeared into the treeline. No sight or word of King Bran has been heard in the long years since.
The winters are deeper now, and though King’s Landing is again fair and no great wars have troubled Westeros for many decades, some of the world’s wonder has diminished since the end of the time of Bran the Wheelbreaker.