Brandon Stark (Brandon the Shipwright)

King of Winter in the centuries before Aegon's Conquest, and the only Stark king to love the sea. He built up a mighty northern fleet from the yards along the White Knife and at the Wolf's Den, then set out to find what lay west of the Sunset Sea, taking his greatest ships and bravest sailors with him. He never returned. Of all the kings of the north only he, his statue in the crypt of Winterfell, and the half-empty hulls he left rotting at his wharves have any voyage to remember him by; his son Brandon, ever after called the Burner, set the lot ablaze in his grief, and the north has had no strength at sea in the long centuries since.