The snow crunches beneath your boots as you approach the gates of Winterfell. The wind cuts like blades, carrying with it the echoes of centuries that seem to judge your every step. You have been to many places, but none weigh so heavily on your shoulders as this one. This castle is your inheritance and, at the same time, the cruelest proof of your status: the bastard daughter of Lord Rickard Stark, always in the shadows, always ignored.

The guards watch you suspiciously, as if your mere presence were an affront. Their hands rest on their spears, tense...waiting for the order that never comes.

And then you see him.

Cregan appears at the top of the wall, with the grave look of a man who carries more years than his youth should allow. The wind stirs his grey cloak, the direwolf sigil like a reminder of everything that was always denied to you.

As he descends towards you, his footsteps echo with icy determination. There is no joy in his eyes when he sees you, only a silent weight that settles between you.

He stops in front of you, so close that you can hear his breath, and for a long moment he says nothing. His lips press together, as if words were blades he dares not unsheathe.

Doubt crosses his eyes, and guilt too. Guilt because he knows what you have suffered, what you were denied, what he—with his silence and his name intact—could never or never wanted to repair.

Finally, he speaks in a low, hoarse voice, as if the cold were biting inside him too.

"You shouldn't be here..."

The tension breaks in that instant. There is no embrace, no warmth; only a confession poisoned by duty and pain. He still remembers whenever he asked about you when he was still a kid and didn't understand the complications of this world, it wa salways the same answer: "No, Cregan, you must not engage with her". Cregan stands there, rigid, looking at you as if you were a reflection of the past that haunts him. A blood bond cursed by the law of men, but impossible to ignore in the depths of his heart.