Winterfell, 272 AC
The night he was born, the North was locked in silence.
Not the still quiet of peace but the cold hush that comes when winter itself holds its breath. The wind had ceased, fires burned low and over Winterfell, snow fell in thick curtains, smothering the world in white.
In a dimly lit chamber of stone and furs, Brylla Umber screamed through her labor, the bed soaked with blood and sweat. Maester Walys, trembling in his old bones, muttered prayers to the Seven though none answered. This was not the work of gods. This was Northern old gods work, bloody, brutal, and real.
Then he came…
The boy burst into the world not crying, but growling, covered in blood, his chest heaving with the weight of breath, as if it were his first fight. Enormous for a newborn, his limbs thick, his back broad, fists clenched tight as if ready to strike the world that dared summon him into being.
His mother battered, pale, yet grinning like a madwoman looked into his silver eyes and let out a hoarse laugh.
"By the old gods," she murmured. "He's already glaring at me."
Maester Walys wiped his brow. "This boy… he's not right."
Brylla bared her teeth. "You mean he's not weak."
"No," the Maester said quietly. "He's not. His eyes… I've seen steel glare with less shine."
When word reached Brandon Stark, heir to Winterfell, he came alone, snow crusting the edges of his dark cloak. The guards made no fuss. They knew where he was going and why.
Brandon stood at the threshold, gaze landing on the boy wrapped in wolfskin. His jaw tightened, unreadable to all. For a long moment, silence reigned. Then he walked forward and placed one calloused hand on the infant's chest.
The boy didn't flinch.
"What's his name?" Brandon asked.
Brylla, too tired to lift her head, whispered, "He's yours. Name him."
"Then he's Wulfric," Brandon said. "He'll carry Winter in his bones." His voice held something heavy, something no father would normally have at having his first son.
And like that, he turned and left, unsure, conflicted, and with a swirl of emotions he had no idea how to confront.
But the name stuck, even as his mother's last breaths carried hope and promise, even as his father walked farther and farther. His name is a remembrance of who he was and where he came from.
Wulfric Snow, they called him. The bastard of Winterfell. His name was spoken in quiet tones by servants, whispered by maids, and muttered by guards sharing cups of warm ale. He was neither lord nor peasant yet the shadow of the direwolf loomed behind him.
Brandon did not speak of him often, but he did not disavow him either. In the cold logic of Northern tradition, a bastard's existence was a truth that needed no fanfare. But others beyond the North were not so accepting.
When word of Wulfric's birth reached Riverrun, Lord Hoster Tully was said to have flown into a quiet, seething rage. He had just started correspondence with Rickard Stark about Brandon and Catelyn being wed. A Stark-Tully alliance would be beneficial, practical, and strong. But a bastard born in open recognition before marriage soured the arrangement with a stain that left a bitter taste.
"Is this what he offers my daughter?" Hoster is said to have muttered to his maester. "A howling brute from the snows, born of a giant woman and a lustful wolf of a son!?"
Even still, the match would not be entirely abandoned. But in Hoster's court, Brandon's name was spoken more carefully after that. And Catelyn Tully, who had never met Wulfric, would carry that discomfort years later especially when duty drew her to Winterfell, long after Brandon's death.
In the halls of Winterfell, reactions were quieter, but no less complicated.
Rickard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, spared no words upon learning of the child. He did not rage, did not scorn, did not exile. He merely nodded when Brandon confessed, his silence layered with disappointment and caution.
"He is your burden," Rickard had said. "See to it he does not become mine."
And so Brandon arranged for the boy to be raised within Winterfell's walls, but not beneath its heart. He was not permitted to sleep in the family wing, but he was given warm clothes, a dry room, and food not much less than the trueborns. A compromise, a Stark in blood, if not in name.
Eddard Stark, only eleven at the time, watched the boy from afar. Ned had inherited his father's somber quiet, but his thoughts were his own. He visited the nursery on rare nights when his visits would permit him to winterfell from his fostering in the vale. Wulfric, even as an infant, would meet his eyes and simply stare. No fear. No softness.
"He doesn't blink, not even a stare but more like a glare.." Ned once remarked to his younger brother.
Benjen, five and precocious, had already made his opinion clear. "He smells like fresh dropped snow and wolf piss," he had said, scrunching his nose, "but he kicked me when I poked him. I think I like him."
Raised within the walls of Winterfell, he was afforded no titles and gifted no honors, but neither was he cast out. Rickard Stark, grim and iron-willed, allowed the boy to remain, so long as he caused no shame. Some said it was guilt that kept him close. Others said Rickard saw something in Wulfric… Something primal and hungry.. Something Stark.
He grew like a tree sprouting through stone. By age two, he moved with forceful purpose. At three, he was already matching boys twice his age in wrestling games behind the stables. And at four, he took a wooden sword from the practice yard, wandered off into the snow, and didn't return until moonrise, his hands blistered and bloody, face muddy, breath fogging like a dying beast.
Maester Walys found him later in the great hall, sword resting across his lap, his eyes staring into the fire. The sight unsettling and with steps, Walys approached.
"What are you doing?" the old man asked.
"Learning, listening, watching." the boy replied.
Walys lips pursed as he took a look into the fire for a long moment, and then he heard something. The mumblings and whispers over crackling fire. Maids, guards, servants and more, whoever was near a fireplace, whoever spoke too loudly that their voices carried into the connected chimneys carrying smoke and secrets.
Then with a step back, and wide eyes, Walys shaking movements tried to comprehend. How was a boy so young doing this… why was he doing this… and so he turned on his heels and left the strange boy to his fire unsure how he should feel.
The North respects strength, and Wulfric Snow no matter his birth had strength in his bones and steel in his stare. His blood was liquid metal and frost given form, Umber fury and Stark brutality, wrapped in the silence of snowfall.
Even at four, he listened more than he spoke. His voice, when used, was steady and low. His silver eyes watched everything: guards training, lords quarreling, servants bickering or gossiping. A past time for him.
He mimicked sword stances, copied the gait of seasoned men-at-arms, and stared for hours at maps in the Maester's chambers without saying a word. Maester Walys once told Eddard, years later, "He learned to be quiet not because he was shy but because he wanted to understand the world before he decided how to fight it."
And all the while, the cold never bothered him. He often walked barefoot in the snow with no shirt. When asked why, he simply said, "The North doesn't care if I'm warm." his strange actions always drawing stares and questioning glances.
It was a strange, almost haunted childhood but one watched from afar by Northern eyes who knew better than to dismiss a snow-born wolf.
Because something stirred in Wulfric Snow. A hunger not just for strength but for something more, something even he didn't know of yet.