A Song of Fire & Snow (GOT)(Jon Snow)

Chapter 2: Jon Snow

The snow fell gently over Winterfell, coating the ancient stones with a soft, silent blanket. Jon Snow, just a boy, felt the cold seep into his skin, but he welcomed it. He was used to it by now. The North was harsh, and so was his life here.

He remembered the day his father had brought him to Winterfell, a small bundle wrapped in furs. He didn't remember the journey, but he remembered the faces. Robb had been there, just a baby himself, already the pride of the Starks. But the woman—the Lady Catelyn Stark—her eyes had held something different. Something colder than the Northern wind.

"His name is Jon," Ned had said, his voice heavy with finality. And so, Jon Snow had become the boy who did not belong.

The Stark children grew up in the same halls, played in the same courtyards, learned from the same masters, but Jon knew he was different. He was the bastard. The one without a mother. The one who would never carry the name Stark. Catelyn never let him forget that. Her sharp looks, her cold words, her distance—they carved a hole in him, one that no amount of training or play could fill.

Robb was his brother in all but name, and for that, Jon was grateful. They trained together, laughed together, and shared secrets like boys often did. But when Robb returned to the warmth of their mother's chambers at night, Jon was left alone, the shadow of his father's indiscretion.

Eddard Stark was a good man, a just man. Jon admired him more than anyone, but even he could not erase the stigma of his birth. "The North remembers," they often said. And Jon remembered too. He remembered the way the servants whispered when he passed, the way Lady Stark's face tightened whenever she saw him. He was reminded of what he wasn't—what he could never be.

His father's honor had saved him from a worse fate, but it had also condemned him to a life on the fringes of his own family. Jon would never be a Stark, no matter how much he longed for it. He was a Snow, born of some woman his father never spoke of. Even now, he wondered who she had been. What had his father seen in her that had made him break his sacred vows to Lady Stark?

Despite his loneliness, Jon threw himself into his training. The sword, the shield—these were things he could rely on. Ser Rodrik Cassel had taught him well, and Jon worked hard to prove himself. He wanted to be worthy, if not of the name Stark, then of something. But no matter how well he fought or how hard he tried, he was always left outside the warmth of the hearth.

Winter was coming, as his father often said, but Jon had already felt its chill all his life.

Years passed, and Jon learned to wear the cold as a shield. He trained with Robb, Theon, and the other boys, but he always carried the weight of being different. Even with his brothers, there was a distance he could never quite cross.

The wall between him and his family was invisible but ever-present—like the wall between the living and the dead. And as Jon grew older, he began to wonder if that was his true place: beyond the Wall, where outcasts like him belonged.

The dead were stirring in the far North, the old stories said. And Jon, though still young, felt a strange pull toward the unknown. Toward the cold, where perhaps the sting of being an outsider would finally fade away.