House Stark

House Stark is the royal and ruling house of the Kingdom of the North and one of the great noble houses of the Empire of Westeros. According to its traditions, it was founded over eight thousand years ago by Brandon the Builder, a mythical warlord and ruler of the Age of Heroes, thereby making it into one of the oldest and most prestigious lineages of Westeros. In the past, they held dominion over all of the North as the Kings of Winter, ruling from their ancestral seat at Winterfell, until King Torrhen the Last bent the knee as a Lord Paramount and Warden of the North. Upon the establishment of the Empire, the ancient royal title was reclaimed, but the Starks still owe their fealty to House Targaryen.

Foundation
The origins of the Starks of Winterfell are submerged in a cloud of myths, ancient runes and stories that have been passed down generation by generation throughout the thousands of years. The Starks trace their descent to the First Men, long before the Andals invaded and settled Westeros, and there is a dearth of written records of the time. The oldest archives of the Citadel are those texts written by the septons who guided the Andals in their conquests, unreliable by nature when dealing with those who came before, which often do more harm than good in establishing the true happenings of House Stark's beginnings. As such, most of the knowledge regarding that time stems from runes and ancient artefacts, commonly more well regarded than songs and tales of old.

The age of the house is similarly murky. There is a consensus that the first Starks rose during the Age of Heroes, "in which kingdoms rose and fell, noble houses were founded and withered away and great deeds were accomplished", according to Maester Yandel. Whether the Age of Heroes lasted for thousands of years, however, is up for debate. Indeed, the very dating is controversial. Some argue that the Pact, which commonly signals the start of this new age, took place thirteen thousand years ago, an unlikely claim given the holiness of that number for those followers of the Old Gods. Others claim that the Starks came to being within the last thousand years, which is just as unlikely given the evidence and records there is about the age of the world in the Citadel. The widely accepted estimate is that the Age of Heroes reached its apogee eight thousand years ago, during the Long Night and the summers that followed.

Nevertheless, all records, written or not, agree that House Stark was founded in the aftermath of the Long Night by a warlord of chieftain of the First Men of that time, whose name entered the annals of history as Brandon the Builder, sometimes also known as Giantfriend, for his alliance with the giants for his great deeds and accomplishments.

According to the old tales, Brandon was a warrior of great fame and possessed a brilliant mind, particularly skilled in architecture. The great works of Winterfell and the Wall are credited to him, as well as Storm's End and the Hightower, although the latter two are less endorsed. Brandon the Builder lived throughout the Long Night and was one of the most prominent leaders of the First Men and the Children of the Forest in the war against the Others and their cold minions. Some tales speak of him as a kinsman to the Last Hero, and yet others boldly proclaim Brandon as the Last Hero himself, although the veracity of such claims cannot be verified. Other sources trace his lineage back to Brándûin the Child, a prince of noble heritage who took refugee with his blood kin the Children of the Forest when he was toppled from his kingdom, and, through him, to Brándûin the Green and the First King himself. In the it is said that Brandon the Builder sprung from the seed of Brandon of the Bloody Blade, one of Garth Greenhand's sons, although Northmen and their lore often mock that assumption. Whichever the truth of Brandon the Builder's lineage is, whether he is a cadet of Garth Greenhand or the offspring of Brándûin the Green and his spouse from the woodlands of the Children of the Forest, he is commonly regarded as the true founder of House Stark and the patriarch of every king and lord who bore his name that followed.

In spite of this, Brandon the Builder became the first Stark and took for himself the title of King of Winter following the defeat of the Others and the end of the Long Night. He would build his seat and home in the borderlands of the Wolfswood, to the north of the Snowbourn River and west of the White Knife, where a great green forest with a massive old weirwood flourished on top of hot springs. According to House Dayne's lores and traditions, this was also the location of the final battle against the Others, and from there stems the name that Brandon the Builder chose to give to his home; Winterfell. The castle, once a simple agglomeration of ringforts and towerhouses, grew around the forest and the hot springs, which would soon enough become a godswood and the heart of the North. Winterfell has been seat to the Starks ever since.

The ultimate fate of Brandon the Builder is as murky as the rest of his story. Ballads and runes of the time claim that he ruled wisely for over a century and finally passed away at age 169, surrounded by his thirteen sons, and interred in the Crypts of Winterfell. Others declare that he roamed the world, his hammer in hand, aiding the local chieftains and petty kings in their dealings with the giants and the Children, as well as with their buildings and keeps, only to fade away into dust as the ages passed and time went on. Yet others defend that he still roams the land as a silent vigilant, watching and warding his kinsmen and great works with unshattered zeal. Whatever the truth, it does seem certain that Brandon the Builder ruled as the King of Winter and Lord of Winterfell for decades, at the very least, and that his line still rules the North and often name their children after him.

Controversy
Among the Maesters of the Citadel, there is a heated, if hidden, debate regarding the true nature of the Stark line and name. There are those who advocate that the early Starks were not kin, although they all traced their descent back to Brandon the Builder. Instead, Stark would have been a title conferred to the petty king of Winterfell, one of the most powerful of the region and the prime patron of the Night's Watch. Hence the common saying that "there must always be a Stark in Winterfell", for if those lands were kingless, then evil could brew and grow Beyond-the-Wall. The defenders of this view point argue that the Mountain Clansmen do not style themselves as lords and ladies, but as the Norrey, the Flint, the Wull, and so on. Accordingly, the clansmen would be the nearest social and political organization to the petty kingdoms of the First Men of old, and therefore Stark being a title, rather than a family, would not only be possible, but likely. However, there is little and less concrete evidence to support this theory and, regardless, Winterfell nowadays is inherited following the customs and traditions of the land.

Rise and Consolidation
The Last Hero might have united the realms of men in dire times, to fight back their common enemy that would only bring doom and destruction to the lands of the living. However, once that the threat was gone and spring had finally come, and the Wall and the valiant Night's Watch stood between light and darkness, the petty rivalries and struggles of men resurfaced. Where once the First Men had been united to drive back their common foe, now chieftains and warlords carved out their own kingdoms for themselves, often coming to blows and war. Brandon the Builder's kingdom was no exception to this rule and, while the Starks prevailed in the end, their rule was far from uncontested. There had once been friendship and kinship between the peoples and races that dotted the North, but as the snows melted, crimson blood came to flood those hills and woods.

Little is known of the dawn of Brandon's folk, and what is regarded as known come to us through ancient ballads and songs, unreliable by nature, stored in the deepest vauls of the Citadel. These tell us of a great war that drew the giants from the North, and another when the King of Winter slew the fearsome skinchanger Gaven Greywolf in the savage War of the Wolves. The pact with the Children of the Forest would come to an early end too, when the Warg King rose his banners against the Starks of Winterfell and threatened to extinguish Brandon's line. The Kings of Winter fought him back, however, and the Warg King's last stand at Sea Dragon Point was so great that the ire of the Starks was awakened, for his people were put to the sword, his home to the torch and in the coming centuries Children of the Forest were deemed inhuman and treacherous. Nevertheless, the King of Winter's ire was accompanied by respect for his fallen foe, and he took the Warg King's daughter as his wedded wife, and many claim that the Starks' supposed skinchanging is a heritage of this union.

Much and more is known of the famed Thousand Years War, lasting close to two hundred years of fighting and rare peaces. The Barrow Kings, lords of Great Barrow and High Kings of the First Men, rose to the south of the domain of the Starks and posed a challenge to the King of Winters' domination. The war finally ended when the last Barrow King bent his knee and was allowed to take the black with his sons, extinguishing the line of the Barrowlys, even as his sole daughter was taken in marriage by the King of Winter. Stewardship of the Barrowlands was granted to the Dustins, distant cousins to the Barrow Kings, but not even this granted the Starks dominion over all of the North. The Glovers of Deepwood bent the knee and swore their swords to Winterfell, as did the Umbers of the Last Hearth, the Lockes of Oldcastle, the Fishers of the Stony Shore and the Ryders of the Rills. The Blackwoods of the Blackwood were driven away by the Kings of Winter, but others were not as lucky and met their end by the Starks' sword. Such were the fates of the Greenwoods, the Towers, the Ambers and the Frosts, of whom only memory and land survived the trials of time.

One of the greatest tests to the early Stark kings did not come from their neighbours, however, but from the Wall they had built to defend themselves from the Others and the wildlings that lurked beyond. It was so that the thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, whose very name was banished upon his death, crowned himself the Night's King and took an Other as his consort, giving her his seed and soul and making sacrifices to her kin. For thirteen years the Night's King ruled from the Nightfort, a time for darkness of which many horrifying stores are still told in the North, but his rule would be a short one. In alliance with the King-Beyond-the-Wall, Joramun, the King of Winter marched on the Wall and destroyed the Night's King, a deed which would name him King Brandon the Breaker for later generations. The walls of the Nightfort were torn down and the Night's Watch was forbidden from fortyfing their castles, for if another Night's King was to rise, he would need to be put down swiftly by the Starks of Winterfell. This was a trial that Brandon the Breaker and his son, King Eldarion the Elder, met and defeated, extending their rule as far as Brandon's Gift and the northern mountains, fuelled by the zealotry and chaos following the demise of the Night's King.

Nonetheless, the greatest foes of the Starks of Winterfell were undoubtedly the Boltons of the Weeping Water, those grim Red Kings of the Dreadfort, whose domains of old stretched from the White Knife to the Bay of Seals, from the Last River to the Sheepshead Hills. The rivalry between those two houses could be traced back to the Long Night, when Brandon the Builder and the Red King almost came to blows on several occasions. For generations they fought, long after the Night's King and the Barrow Kings had fallen, and the Starks could not claim to have been victorious in all. The Red King Royce Bolton, Second of his Name, sacked and burned Winterfell itself, while his descendant King Royce IV Redarm wreaked havok in the lnds of the Starks and did the same three centuries later. Uncountable Starks kings and princes would fall to Bolton arms, and the Red Kings would often flay their bodies, living or not, and wield their skin as cloaks. King Edderion the Bridegroom and King Brandon Stark, known as Bael's Bane, were among those who shared that gruesome fate. Eventually, however, even the Boltons were forced to bend the knee to the Starks; the last Red King Rogar the Huntsman was defeated and his sons sent to Winterfell as hostages just as the first Andal longships made landfall on the Fingers. Yet the bitter rivalry of Stark and Bolton would carry on through the ages, and to this date the Lords of the Dreadfort remain the foremost foes of the Starks in the North.

The efforts of the Kings of Winter had seen the borders and territories of Winterfell expanded from the Wall to the north to the swamps of the friendly Marsh Kingdom to the south, and the Starks ruled supreme in the continent. New threats would come from the seas, both Sunset and Shivering, for the North had a huge coastline which was only hardly defended. To the east, the Ironborn would feast upon the shores of the Rills, Cape Kraken, the Stony Shore and Bear Island, reaving as far as the lands of the Wulls, pillaging the country and abducting men into bondage and women as salt wives. To the east, the Andals and their longships would make hundreds of landfalls throughout their invasion, to spread the will and word of the Seven and claim new lands to their new realms.

It fell to King Theon Stark, First of his Name, to repel them, one of the greatest men to have ever worn Brandon's crown. The Hungry Wolf, as he became known to history, ruled his kingdom from horseback, for only rarely was he not fighting a war against those who would see Winterfell bow to their might. Wherever the Andals landed, the Starks and their bannermen fell on them like wolves on sheep. King Theon made common cause with the Boltons and crushed the Andal adventurer Argos Sevenstar at the Battle of the Weeping Water, killing the invasion in its infancy. He ordered a grand fleet built and, with Argos' corpse lashed to the prow of his longship, sailed to Essos with his men, where they would take a bloody and brutal revenge upon the home of the Andals. The heads of the slain were claimed as trophies and brought back to Westeros, where the Hungry Wolf had them planted on spikes as a warning to those who would dare to invade his lands. Unlike the southron realms, the North never fell to the Andal onslaught.

Once the Andals were crushed and routed, the Hungry Wolf turned his attention to other threatened parts of his realm. He brought his hosts to battle the Ironborn in the west, driving them from Cape Kraken, the Stony Shore and even Bear Island, where he slew King Harrag Hoare's son Ravos the Raper in single combat. For the rest of his lifetime, the Ironborn would be repelled from his coasts, and Bear Island was definitely added to the dominions of Winterfell by the Hungry Wolf's grandson, King Rodrik Stark, who won it in a wrestling match against the Ironborn king. Once the Andals and the Ironborn were dealt with, King Theon would concern himself with matters of his own lands, putting down a rebellion in the Rills and willingly joined the Night's Watch in an expedition into the Haunted Forest and beyond, which dethroned a King-Beyond-the-Wall and crippled the wildlings' power for a generation. In his old age, with his realm firmly under his grisp and his lands safe in all borders, the Hungry Wolf set his eyes to the south, taking the Three Sisters by conquest and landing hosts in the Fingers, although neither of these conquests would last.

The Hungry Wolf's long and bloody reign came to an end when he was lost to a sudden avalanche when campaigning among the clansmen, for only a mountain could bring down that man. King Theon's reign consolidated the Starks as the supreme and undisputed hegemon in the North, setting their borders, rooting out internal and external enemies and monopolizing lands, incomes and power at Winterfell. Thanks to his efforts, his descendants and successors would enjoy certain stability and safety in their dealings, whether they be with bannermen, Ironborn, Andals or wildlings. In many ways, Theon Stark was the first King of Winter to have truly been a King in the North.