A.N.: Literally just finished watching the finale…

Happily for us in the know, there is a fanfiction to soothe every ache and right every wrong. And there were oh, so many. Now I don't feel at all guilty writing my own version to correct the atrocities they bitch-slapped us with. I am most seriously displeased. Anyone wants an in-depth discussion re Game of Thrones, PM me, I'll be happy to email ad nauseum.

I've wanted to write a Game of Thrones Jon-has-a-twin-sister story for ages, and even started another (A Dance of Ice and Fire) but Larra appeared in my head, and she was so mentally tough and lonely and afraid, I thought…I need to write her: She needs a decent, fierce, clever man in her life to gentle her and help others see her true nature, which is fiercely maternal, nurturing, protective, and loyal.

Larra is inspired by watching Michonne's PTSD and Carol Peletier's strength in Walking Dead, Lagertha's fierce maternal instincts and warrior nature in Vikings, Demelza Poldark's tenacity, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and Ned Stark's quote that Robert never saw the "iron underneath" Lyanna's beauty. I was listening to The Hunger Games soundtrack, too, so there's a little of Katniss' distrust and a good deal more of her devotion to her sister.

I should probably point out from the beginning: Bran the Broken WILL NOT RULE THE SIX KINGDOMS.

Valyrian Steel

01

Beneath the Tree

It was warm, under the great weirwood. Warm, and musty; like living inside an acorn, tucked neatly under the earth. She was as blind as a buried acorn here, surrounded by ageless roots and the soft, relentless cawing of ravens; she didn't wonder why the gods wanted faces carved into the trees to look out over the world of Men. It was dull in here.

Dull, and timeless: The world went on without them. Days had bled into months: She wondered how many years they had wasted inside the hollow.

It was beautiful outside, in a starkly brutal sort of way. Here in the land of always-winter the winds howled, or whispered, and the snows buried the cave entrance, and melted in the glare of an impossible sun, and through it all, its great ivory trunk groaning in the wind, its fiery leaves like so many bloody hands, the weirwood endured.

Beneath it, impossibly, so did they.

Bran held onto the tangle of roots, the Three-Eyed Raven guiding him in his visions. Bran learned, and she waited.

She waited for Bran; and she waited for the dead. With every scream of the wind, every avalanche of snow roaring across the valleys, her heart leapt, anticipating hordes of the dead pouring through the caves, crashing over them like waves against the shore, destructive, unceasing, tireless.

She was utterly powerless.

And she knew it.

The longer they remained, the more Bran learned; and the weaker she became, waiting, wasting away. She could feel it. The long journey had strengthened her, every last ounce of fat lost as her muscles burned and her blisters turned to calluses and her bones ached and they struggled forever northward.

But with inaction, that hard-earned muscle was wasting away, leaving her emaciated. She saw it in Meera's face, in the hollowed cheeks and distracted brown eyes losing all hope. They tried to keep themselves busy; to distract them from the aching hunger, the desperation, from wondering…what happened next? How much time did they truly have? How long could they linger beneath the tree, waiting? In a barren wasteland of ice and snow, there was little to distract them: only the Children.

She wished she could tell Maester Luwin. While Brandon learned from the Three-Eyed Raven, she and Meera listened to stories from the last of the Children of the Forest. What she wouldn't have given to tell Maester Luwin a lot of things - and Old Nan: the Children were not gone, and dragons had come into the world again.

Bran had seen them.

While Bran was tutored by the Three-Eyed Raven in green-seeing, the Children trained her, and Meera, using staff and spear, using throwing-knives with lethal precision. Small, tactile blades of dragonglass. Maester Luwin had called it obsidian, and he had a link of it on his heavy chain. The frightened, brave Night's Watch boy Samwell Tarly had given Larra her first dagger; it had been left at the Fist of the First Men, the last place wights had been seen in vast numbers… She learned how it was that the White Walkers could be killed by it…the origins of the White Walkers themselves… A weapon, created by the Children…to wipe out the First Men.

The Long Night had broken into a new dawn, but the Night King had not died: He had slept.

And now he had awoken.

And they waited. Here, under the weirwood, where the ancient magic of the Children protected them. The Night King could not enter, and nor could his legions of wights.

As Bran learned to embrace his visions, even steer them, she and Meera sparred, and tried to forget their hunger, their dread. The helplessness. They tried to keep their spirits up, in this desolate place, for Hodor's sake, if not their own. All the way from Winterfell, she had carried the small doeskin pouch that opened into an embroidered game-board, which her twin-brother Jon had gifted her on their fourteenth name-day; they played the game with pieces made from carved bone, bear-fangs, polished conkers and interesting pebbles they had picked up along their journey.

It kept Hodor content: He played that game for hours on end, and she could believe he had no cares in the world, watching him play with the Children, Summer curled up beside him, his great head resting in Hodor's lap. Sometimes he let Hodor scratch behind his ears and pet his shaggy pelt.

Other times, like now, Summer stood at the entrance to the caves, his breath hot on her neck as she squatted in the snow and watched. They watched for his sister. Summer and Last Shadow: She had sent her dire-wolf into the wilderness… A wild thing should be free.

That was what the wildlings had told them. The small family, all that was left of a clan that descended from the First Men, too proud to unite with the crow who flew down from the wall and became King beyond it. They had tried to convince her, convince Bran and Jojen and Meera, even simple Hodor, that south was the only way: North was death.

Sometimes she wondered whether they had made it to the Wall, but couldn't bear to ask the Raven.

She knew she would never forget their faces. Nor their kindness, in this desolate place. What little they had, they had shared, against all their instincts for survival, contradicting every story she had ever heard growing up. She hoped they had opportunity to barter her brother's name for their passage south; it was all she could give them.

Because the Wall was all that stood between the living and the dead.

She wondered where Last Shadow was; and whether Jon had made it back to Castle Black.

Outside the eerie keep that echoed with the screams and whimpers of abused women, she had watched him fight as the snow fell - yards from him, she had almost bitten off her own tongue to stop from screaming for him.

Her Jon. Her twin-brother. The brother she never thought to see again, so close she could see the sweat blinding him as he fought Night's Watch mutineers. She'd thought, He needs a haircut. And he'd grown his whiskers out. He had looked exhausted, and older than she remembered - and so like Father and Uncle Benjen it made her heart ache.

Walking away from Jon was the hardest thing she had ever done.

But it was necessary. Whatever she had to do to keep her little brothers alive, she had done. Nothing else mattered. And that meant she had had to make some terrible decisions.

There was the softest rustle behind her, and her hand curled around the obsidian dagger tucked into her belt. The Children and Meera always left their weapons at the entrance to the caves, but she could not sleep without hers. If they had to move quickly, she wanted the assurance that she had something to defend herself or hunt with… She had been caught out before; and Maester Luwin always said she was a quick learner.

It was Leaf. Nut-brown skin dappled like a fawn, vines and leaves woven into her strange hair, nimble and elegant with three fingers tipped with claws black as her obsidian spear, with large ears that heard more than Summer's, and keen amber-green eyes that had watched the ages pass. One of the last of the Children of the Forest. Her songs in the True Tongue had made them weep, even though they couldn't understand the words. In translating, they discovered Larra's gift for languages; the Children had been teaching her words and phrases, songs.

"Are we to have another lesson?" she asked hopefully.

"The Three-Eyed Raven wishes to speak with you," said Leaf, in her gentle voice like a summer breeze soughing through fresh leaves. Behind her, Larra could see Meera, waiting patiently.

"Has Bran eaten anything?" Larra asked.

"More than you," Meera replied, and Larra gazed out over the brutal, unforgivingly beautiful landscape. She would never forget the awing beauty of the true North. She sighed. She was starting to forget what hunger was; she was clinging to the memories of what being warm felt like.

"More blood-stew," she sighed grimly, but not ungratefully. The stew the Children made was all that sustained them, thickened with barley and onions and chunks of meat. If not the stew, they subsisted on hundreds of kinds of mushrooms, or the blind white fish the Children plucked from the black river, with cheese and milk from the goats that shared the hidden cramped warrens.

What she wouldn't give for an apple. Blackberry and apple pie with buttery pastry and lashings of fresh custard.

They were not starved here, but it was not their home; and the Children were wary of her.

"I like to imagine I'm sitting at my Father's table, during a name-day feast, eating all my favourites," Meera smiled, though it barely touched her eyes. They kept up appearances for Hodor's sake, and because Bran needed no other excuses to be petulant and aggressive; together, they were allowed to be angry, to be frightened, and fraught. They didn't have to hide from each other. Meera could grieve Jojen; and she could fret for Rickon, leagues away with a wildling woman who looked upon him like a son. But she and Meera also buoyed each other; they stopped the other from sinking into melancholy, from drowning in her dread and despair.

How long before Bran became like the Three-Eyed Raven? Able to witness everything that happened in the world, and remain wholly disconnected from it. The Three-Eyed Raven saw every tragedy and yet felt no grief; witnessed delight, yet felt no joy.

The Three-Eyed Raven had been waiting for them. For Bran.

Larra had merely helped Bran get here.

She wondered what the Three-Eyed Raven wanted with her.

He was easy to find, of course; he never moved. He and the tree were one: The bleached roots spread and twisted from the cavern ceiling like an eerie chandelier, the cave larger than the Great Hall at Winterfell, and as cramped as a feast-day, murders of crows cawing incessantly, the uneven ground littered with the bones of the dead - animals, the Children, even giant's bones, the skeletons of monstrous bats draped from the ceiling… Had there been any natural light within the caves, it would have shed eerie shadows across the walls. But there was not: No starlight, nor daylight penetrated the caves. And nestled within the gnarled roots, on a throne of woven weirwood, was an old man, his vellum-brittle skin colourless, except for the mark on his face. His hair was pure white, and his one eye, when he was not greenseeing with Bran, was blood-red. An albino. And a Man. He was not one of the Children; but he had lived amongst and been attended to by them for years, here under the weirwood, waiting.

The Three-Eyed Raven raised his head slowly when she entered the cave. It was musty and close, ageless bones crunching underfoot, and she felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck prickle with awareness, sensing eyes on her. Not just the Three-Eyed Raven's, but the birds' and Hodor's.

Brandon was looking at her in a way he never had before.

"What has happened?" she asked, frowning, her hand immediately going to her belt, to her dagger. She had lost the one sword they had chanced to steal from Winterfell's forge, just before reaching the hollow: But she had her new obsidian weapons now, daggers and a hatchet, a double-ended staff, and arrows. As many as she could make, and carry; the Children had taught her. Dragonglass arrowheads; glossy black raven fletching; and shafts of bone-white weirwood.

"Alarra!" Bran panted, staring at her. She frowned, still grasping the dagger at her belt. "I saw."

She shot a glare at the Three-Eyed Raven. "Where did you take him this time?" Brandon always returned from his visions frothing with excitement - or dug into his resentment like a tick: The more the Raven showed him, the more he wanted to see. The more he saw, the longer he wanted to stay. She was losing him. Her brother Brandon Stark, the fearless boy who loved to climb and wanted to be a Kingsguard, he had died the day he fell from the tower; another, angrier boy had woken to find his back broken and his mother gone. And now Brandon Stark was changing once more; the longer he stayed locked inside his mind, inside his visions, the less he was like Bran when he woke.

Bran wanted to stay inside those visions.

At her darkest times, she believed she was here merely to stop Brandon from drowning in them.

And her dark times were dark. At her worst, she missed Jon so fiercely she thought her heart might burst: She resented Bran, for insisting they risk their lives to get here, for being a cripple, for being unable to help her keep Winterfell, or take it back. She hated Theon with a venomous passion that seemed to make her blood boil; and she was angry with her father, and tucked in her furs in this unyielding darkness she wept bitterly for him, and for the mother whose name he had denied her, forever lost - he had never given her a name, not once uttered it, not even to her own children, the only people who had any right to it.

Alarra had always dreaded being forgotten: It broke her heart to be left behind. Now she was the only one left to remember. She had to live with all that had happened to her family.

And she was ashamed to have let them down. She was supposed to look after them, after Brandon and Rickon. She was not a Stark; but Robb had entrusted Winterfell to her, to her and Luwin and Bran… She had sent Rickon off with Osha and Shaggydog and knew she would never see them again; she felt it in her marrow. She had Bran alone; and he was forgetting who he was.

"I have a gift for you," said the Three-Eyed Raven. For once, his one eye was red, not milky-white: And he reminded her of Ghost, her brother's albino direwolf.

"A gift, my lord?" she asked sceptically, and the Raven chuckled softly. He had a dry sense of humour, even in this forgotten place; perhaps he was just grateful for the company. His visions were all very well, and as he had told Bran, in them he was always with the brother he loved, the woman he desired - but they never heard him: They existed now only in memory. The world's memory; and he was its keeper.

Bran remained quiet, and she didn't understand the look on his face when she glanced at him: As if he did not know her. There was something like…awe. No, she did not understand it. And he did not speak, only watched, as several of the Children appeared. One approached Larra, carrying something bulky. In the flickering light of their torches, Larra discerned the shape. It could be only one thing: A sword, complete with scabbard and belt, both of leather, and glinting with the familiar sheen of obsidian.

But it was the pommel of the sword that drew her eye, the eerie light bringing to life a flower of flame crackling silently. A sense of something prickled in the pit of her stomach, recognition or dread or anticipation; it felt…momentous.

And she knew instantly…it was not just the sword the Raven was gifting her. The axe had to fall…

But she took the sword all the same, frowning at the pommel, and the fat ruby set into the cross-guard, etched…with a three-headed dragon. The Targaryen sigil.

Carefully, she unsheathed the sword a few inches, and in the torchlight, the ripples and folds of steel imbued with forgotten magic seemed to move like smoke in the shadows. Valyrian steel, bearing the Targaryen sigil.

"Dark Sister," she whispered. How many times had Arya asked her to read the Targaryen histories to her when she was little? A lost longsword, once wielded by Queen Visenya Targaryen, and with which she had founded the Kingsguard of legend when she cut the Conqueror's face with it before his protectors could react; wielded by the Dragonknight - always Larra's favourite; and by Jaehaerys the Wise; by the Spring Prince and the Rogue Prince; and by…

She raised her eyes to the weirwood sharply.

"You are Lord Rivers. Brynden the Bloodraven, Master of Whisperers. You were Hand to King Aerys the First and to King Maekar. You were Lord Commander of the Night's Watch," she whispered, stunned, and gasped, realising, "Lost beyond the Wall…"

"Once, I was Brynden Rivers," the Raven nodded sadly. "He dwells within me, but I am the Three-Eyed Raven now. There is little room for the Bloodraven." Her eyes slid to Bran, just for a second: Was that not Bran's fate? To become what the Three-Eyed Raven was? The apprentice must at some point become master. Would some fool boy one day seek this cave, and find an elderly cripple calling himself the Three-Eyed Raven, last of the great greenseers, to learn all that ever was and is, everything that might ever have been and never was, like stillborn babies?

We have to survive that long, she thought grimly, and her eyes flicked back to the Three-Eyed Raven.

"You cannot give me this sword," she whispered, wanting to pass it back to the Children; but they had melted into the shadows. She gazed at the Raven - Lord Rivers, the Bloodraven of her storybooks.

A thousand eyes, and one… The old nursery rhyme about the notorious Master of Whisperers…the Three-Eyed Raven… Rather, two-eyed… The Bloodraven had lost his eye to his half-brother Bittersteel…

"To my shame, I took the sword with me when I journeyed to the Wall, though it was not mine to keep," said the Raven. "My brother had bestowed it upon me, you see - I could not bear to part with it."

Lord Rivers, one of the legitimised Great Bastards of Aegon IV - the Unworthy…

"This is a Targaryen sword - a king's sword," Larra said, shaking her head. "I cannot take it."

"Once, Dark Sister was wielded by a firstborn Targaryen daughter, older sister to a king…now it shall be again," said the Raven. Larra blinked at him, waiting…the churning sensation in her stomach, the veiled hint… "Dark Sister is yours by birth-right."

Larra went cold, refusing to listen to what the Bloodraven hadn't said, but had implied.

"I have no birth-right," said Larra crisply, honestly. One bastard to another, he should remember… Bastards lived half-lives, no true place in the world except one they managed to carve out for themselves. She had been left behind at Winterfell because she had no place in the world: She could not join the Night's Watch and earn the honour her birth had denied her due to her gender - nor could she be used by Father to secure the allegiance of his bannermen. They would consider any proposal to wed her an insult, when he had two lawful daughters. She had no place, and no value, and so had been left behind, to raise the children and aid Maester Luwin. And she knew it.

"You do." It was Bran who spoke, quietly, and it was the gentleness in his tone that made her wary. Brandon was rarely gentle anymore, reminding her more and more of Rickon, the wildest of them all. "Larra…I've seen. The Three-Eyed Raven has shown me…so many things - things about the Rebellion, and Father…and your mother. I've seen your mother, Larra."

Her heart stopped, and resentment coiled like a volcanic beast in the pit of her stomach, a baby dragon writhing and clawing and burning her insides. All she had ever wanted, for as long as she could remember wanting anything at all, was her mother's name.

And Bran had seen her.

All her life, she had wanted to know, ached to learn her name, and whether she had curly hair like theirs or pretty eyes or liked to dance…she had wanted to know if Ned Stark had loved her; she had wanted to know her mother was beautiful, and kind, and clever, and had loved Father. Growing up, it was all she had: That Ned Stark had loved her mother more than he had ever loved Catelyn Tully, that nothing his wife could say or do would ever provoke him to send them away, because he had loved her so very much, and loved her still. It had been a dream, a fantasy, that her parents had loved one another more than they loved anything else in the world.

"It doesn't matter now," she said quietly.

"But it does," Bran said gently, and the gentleness unnerved her. "It has always mattered. And that is why Father kept it from you, and from Jon. From everyone."

Their way was the old way: He who passed the sentence should swing the sword.

A blow was to be dealt: Bran made sure he was the one who delivered it, not some stranger lost to legend. She stared down at the sword, at the whispers of gold and silver glinting amongst the steel grip, the fat glowing ruby set into the rain-guard. It was an exceptional sword.

"Lyanna." Bran spoke quietly, but she heard the name, and the silence in the cave was deafening. "Your mother was Lyanna Stark."

She flinched, and anger blistered her insides.

Lyanna Stark, who had died in Dorne after Rhaegar fell at the Trident; whose bones were interred with the ancient Kings of the North. It wasn't just an empty tomb: Father had brought her home.

He had returned from the war with a corpse and twin babies.

She used to see Father lighting the candles around Lyanna's statue.

And his rare smiles always faded whenever someone remarked how similar Larra was to the wild Northern beauty famously carried off by the Last Dragon.

She knew the stories; they all did. How could they not? Their House had almost faced extinction. Seven kingdoms had bled because of Rhaegar's infatuation with a Northern wolf-girl; a dynasty three-centuries in the making had ended with by and blood.

"If Lyanna was my mother, then you are telling me Ned Stark was not my father."

"In the ways that matter, Ned Stark was indeed your father," said the Bloodraven solemnly. "He raised you, educated you, protected you. But the man who fathered you, the man who took Lyanna Stark into his bed…that was the Last Dragon. Rhaegar, Prince of Dragonstone."

Larra exhaled a breath she hadn't realised she was holding, feeling hollow.

"Rhaegar never kidnapped Lyanna," Bran said softly. "He loved her, Larra… He saw the iron beneath her beauty; he saw her strength and her kindness… You remember Meera's story, about the Knight of the Laughing Tree?"

Larra frowned, glancing over her shoulder at Meera, who lingered, her eyes wide, lips slightly parted. "I remember. At the Tourney of Harrenhall, he defended the honour of Howland Reed."

"He did. Only it wasn't a 'he'; it was Lyanna," Bran said, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. "King Aerys commanded his men to find the mystery knight; Rhaegar found the weirwood shield up a tree…and Lyanna. I saw it. Larra, I saw them. I saw the whole thing - how they met; when Rhaegar crowned her his Queen of Love and Beauty. Rhaegar never kidnapped Lyanna, or raped her: She chose him. He saw exactly who Lyanna was. And he married her."

"Rhaegar was wed to Elia Martell, Bran, everyone knows that. He carried off Lyanna when he tired of the Dornish princess."

"Elia was ill; another pregnancy would have killed her. Rhaegar had his marriage to her annulled, he wanted Elia to retire to Dorne," Bran told her, shaking his head in his urgency. "The High Septon wed Rhaegar and Lyanna in a private ceremony on the Isle of Faces, a ceremony of the Seven, in front of a heart-tree; Rhaegar's friends witnessed it, Ser Arthur Dayne, all of them. They escorted Rhaegar and Lyanna to Dorne, to the tower Rhaegar called Joy…where you and Jon were born after Rhaegar fell at the Trident."

Ned Stark had ridden south after lifting the siege of Storm's End: And when he had found his sister, in a Dornish tower, she had been guarded by the most legendary swordsmen in the Kingsguard for generations. Ser Oswell Whent, Lord Commander Gerold Hightower, and the Sword of the Morning, Ser Arthur Dayne…

Ned had returned from Dorne with his sister's dead body, and twin babies.

Lyanna…

The only person Ned Stark would ever have loved enough to sacrifice his honour. To protect hers.

To protect them.

She had finally learned her mother's name.

And with it, all hope had died.

She remembered, vividly, sobbing bitterly at the unfairness of Lady Catelyn's hatred of her; at having no mother. She had sobbed for missing her; ached to know her name; and dreamed of the day her mother would come to Winterfell and take her and Jon away, somewhere they would be safe, and happy, and know a mother's love.

After years, she finally knew her mother's name. And she knew that her mother had been dead and gone for decades.

The only hope she had ever had was that one day, she and Jon would meet their mother, and know that they had been loved, even from afar. She would look at them, and her kind eyes would crinkle as she smiled, the way Jon's and Uncle Benjen's did, thrilled to see them, relieved they were healthy and strong and good.

Lyanna Stark.

Dead in the tower of Joy years ago. The last of the great casualties of Robert's Rebellion.

Had she known Rhaegar was already dead, as she laboured to bring Larra and Jon into the world? That Robert had been proclaimed king and all hope was lost for the Targaryen dynasty?

Had she given up?

"Why are you telling me this? Why now? Father kept Lyanna's secret, he kept us safe, what does it matter now?" she asked, and her voice rang around the echoing cavern as she panted, her blood boiling in her veins. Father had always called it the wolf-blood; he had warned her that Lyanna had touch of it, her uncle Brandon more than a touch…

"Because you ought to know…" Bran said, staring at her in that way he never had before. He was truly looking at her, as if he had never seen her before, as if he was looking for something in her face - and had found it. His lips parted. "He loved her. And she loved him."

"It doesn't matter. Jon and I - we don't matter," Larra said fiercely. But even she heard the crack in her voice, the desperation.

Father had found Lyanna dying in her birthing-bed in Dorne…and brought his bastard twins back to Winterfell. Because their mother…was dead… Her mother.

"But you do," Bran said softly, staring at her. "You always have. After the Siege of King's Landing, Father journeyed all the way to Dorne to find Lyanna. She was protected by three of the most lethal Kingsguard to wear the white cloaks in generations… Father told us the story, how many times? But he never told us all of it. But I have seen it. Father found Lyanna, bleeding to death in her birthing-bed, her newborn daughter in her arms as they wrapped her son in his swaddling-cloth." Larra could not meet his eye; hers burned, as she scowled at the longsword in her hands, too hurt, too devastated by the loss.

Her mother, snatched away from her the moment she learned her name.

"Larra… You were wanted, and by no-one more than Rhaegar and Lyanna," Bran said firmly. "Rhaegar was gone before you were born, as was Aerys, and Rhaegar's children by Elia Martell. The Queen was in exile on Dragonstone, expecting her last child, her surviving son still a boy. All Lyanna could do, as she lay dying, was hold you - and make Father promise."

"Promise to what?" she moaned, heartbroken. If all this was true, and she knew it was, then her father's life had been more honourable, his death more tragic than anything she had ever heard.

"To protect you. To protect you, and your twin-brother…the heirs to the Iron Throne," Bran said quietly, and she flinched again. "She was dying, and she was brave, Larra… She made Father swear, she refused to die until he had sworn an oath to her, to protect you. The heir to the Iron Throne; the future of House Targaryen."

And he had.

Ned Stark had loved his sister more than anything and anyone; more than his own honour.

Even the Dragonknight had never protected his beloved as well as Ned Stark had protected his sister.

He had protected them all their lives; and he had died, protecting his sister's secret. He had let her die, virtuous and tragic, forever young and beautiful, songs sung of her tragic romance with the brilliant, noble young prince.

But Lyanna had died. And Rhaegar had been murdered at the Trident: His infant son Aegon and daughter Rhaenys had died gruesomely the same night as the Mad King…

With a horrible sense of finality, Larra accepted the devastating truth; that all Bran was telling her was irrefutable.

It all made far too much sense to deny.

Her mother was Lyanna Stark, the wild she-wolf of the North; and her father…the Last Dragon, Prince Rhaegar.

They had never been bastards.

Jon had been born a king.

They had a claim to the Iron Throne. Jon had the only claim to the Iron Throne.

And that frightened her more than any Night King's army of wights: The dead could only kill them.

"Lyanna lived long enough to name you. Jon she named Aegon, after Rhaegar's great-grandfather, Aegon the Unlikely… And you, Larra… Lyanna named you for Rhaegar's mother…Rhaella…"

"Rhaella," she whispered. It sounded foreign on her tongue. Because it was. An old name, a Valyrian name, remnant of a lost culture, the ghost of a lost age. And the name her mother had given her…meant nothing. She was Alarra Snow: The name her father had given her. The name she armoured herself with, the name that at once meant a lack of honour, and freedom - to carve out her own fate.

She unsheathed Dark Sister, the light glinting off the impossibly sharp, smoky blade, rubies glowing.

Dark Sister was wielded by a firstborn Targaryen daughter, older sister to a king…now it shall be again…

Dark Sister had been forged for a woman-warrior, in the days before the Doom of Valyria, before the Targaryens had occupied the last Valyrian outpost, Dragonstone… A slender blade, expertly forged, exquisitely decorated, but lethal, thirsty for blood, wielded by warrior-queens and heroes…

A Valyrian steel sword, given to a ferocious warrior sister, to protect her brother-king.

She lowered her eyes to the Bloodraven. His ancient face was saddened.

Lord Rivers had gifted her Dark Sister, not just to protect Bran, she knew, or to help in their fight against White Walkers and their legions of the undead…

He had returned the blade to a true Targaryen. If they survived the dead, it fell to Larra to protect her brother, as Queen Visenya had Aegon, with this very blade.

The Bloodraven's face was sombre, but his eye glittered as he watched her swing Dark Sister from one hand, her wrist like water, practicing thrusts and parries to learn how she weighed in Larra's hands, the balance beautiful. The blade sang through the still air.

Father had allowed her to learn alongside Robb and Jon and Theon how to wield weapons: He'd told Ser Rodrick that wild girls had to learn to protect themselves. And those who could not wield a blade often died upon them: As a bastard, Larra had been allowed what Lady Catelyn refused Sansa and Arya - the right to defend themselves.

The Bloodraven's ancient face was alight with admiration and dread as he watched her, and he murmured, "Dark Sister looks as if she were forged for your hand by the gods themselves… She has been idle too long, and has a thirst for blood… May she bring you good fortune, in the wars to come."

A.N.: So I'm very happy that we all have fanfiction to burrow into for comfort after the disappointments of canon… Several things don't make sense in Season 8, and will be addressed (corrected) in this story: Jon telling Daenerys before he even tells his sisters or Ser Davos - really?! She's that good in bed? You love her that much? After Ygritte, his 'romance' with Daenerys feels soooo forced, and they lack onscreen chemistry (in my personal view). Also, Jaime… We had some exquisite Lannister-brother scenes, but I feel cheated out of a more satisfying end to Jaime's identity arc. Also, why couldn't we have had the sack of King's Landing from Gendry's perspective, rather than Arya's? They've completely under-utilised him, and I wish we saw more of a bond growing between him and Jon; just to see Gendry's reaction when he finds out Jon's father was actually Rhaegar, whom Robert killed!