you live or you die. got au.

The lone wolf dies but Claude Stark still breathes.

Nobody would miss her, she had told mother & father, if she just left. The pack survived, hundreds of years after winter had ended and the creatures beyond the wall fell like snow. Lady Stark of Winterfell, one of dozens, a second cousin to the true heir. Her father was a spare, second in line, she the third. There was a life out there beyond sewing and marriage, walking about the garden, bathing twice a day in honeyed water. More than whatever else the girls in the North dreamed of.

They called her White Walker to be cruel, infamous child who stopped breathing at birth only to start screaming 16 minutes after her pronounced death. Her mother had wept tears of joy and they toasted to the gods for twelve days & twelve nights after her name day - Claude, strong of will. The lady who refused to die. 

The lady who refused to live for nothing but weddings and child-bearing - strange, serious child. So she left in the night atop her mare, day before her eighteenth nameday, cloak the colour of the midnight air - and when the sun rose on the new day she wept - free, living. Truly living for the first time in eighteen years and sixteen minutes.

A ghost haunts Claude Stark's dreams - she looks like the statues in the crypt. She carries a knife and she slaughters iced skeletons bearing the clothes of her childhood tormentors. "Not today," she had said, glistening eyes - Aria, she knows it to be true the moment she opens her eyes. So she sets sail for the Westerlands, beyond the lines of cartographers, tells the crew her name is Clementine Snow and she's barren - good with a knife, better with a sword, they let her on after she disarms five of their men in twenty seconds. 

Not today -- Aria smiles in her dreams. Knife glints in the sunlight- four years later and Claude Stark is just a memory now. A girl that once was. A ghost who died, haunted by her great ancestor. 

Until the whispers travel across the stormy seas -- King of The North is dead, no children, her father passed on. The lone wolf dies and Claude Stark still breathes.

At night she chews on two possible paths. Clementine Snow - Queen Claude of the North. Both with their freedoms. Both with their restrictions. She asks her ghost as she slumbers, voice an echo in dreams. 

What do I do?

Aria Stark smiles - 
Tomorrow.

Claude Stark, White Walker - she will rise from the dead, reborn as queen.

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