Winterfell

The ancient stronghold of the Kings of Winter, built over hot springs ten thousand years ago. Its granite walls have never been taken by storm.

The fuller tale

Winterfell sits out the opening of the Dance the way it sits out most of the realm’s quarrels — at a healthy remove, behind the Neck, waiting to see which claim is worth northern blood. Its lord in these years is young Cregan Stark, who had sworn himself to Rhaenyra’s cause early and kept the oath quietly while the greens and blacks bled each other in the south. When the North finally moves, it moves as the North always does: slowly, and all at once.

Cregan’s host does not reach King’s Landing until the worst of the fighting is already history — Aegon II dead, a boy king crowned amid the wreckage — but its size is a argument all its own, and the small council makes Cregan Stark Hand of the King rather than test how far he is willing to press the point. His brief tenure, remembered afterward as the Hour of the Wolf, metes out judgment to the war’s survivors with a northern lack of patience for southern equivocation, and then he goes home, leaving the Iron Throne a lesson in what unspent strength is worth.

In the first season

Here the season begins: a deserter's execution, five direwolf pups, a king's visit — and a boy pushed from a tower window for what he saw.

The chronicle here

• Jacaerys flies for the Eyrie and Winterfell, Lucerys for Storm's End — envoys, not warriors. At Storm's End waits Vhagar. (S1·E10)

Born here

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.