Arya Stark

Who is Arya Stark?

Arya is the younger daughter of Eddard and Catelyn Stark, sister to Robb, Sansa, Bran and Rickon, and the member of the family least willing to become what a lord's daughter is supposed to be. She would rather ride, fight and roam than sew, and the story takes that restlessness seriously. In Game of Thrones she is played by Maisie Williams, and in the novels she is one of the main point-of-view characters.

When her family is torn apart she is cut off from all of them, and much of her story is spent alone, surviving among strangers who do not know who she is. That isolation shapes her more than any teacher does. The girl who wanted adventure gets far more of it than any child should, and the series watches what it costs her to keep going.

How does she learn to fight?

With a sword called Needle, a small blade that Jon Snow gives her as a parting gift and that she names herself, as a joke about the needlework she hated. Her first real teacher is Syrio Forel, who trains her in the Braavosi style of fighting, quick and light rather than heavy and brutal, a style that suits her size and her temperament.

Those lessons matter less for the technique than for the attitude. Syrio teaches her to watch, to be patient and to keep her fear in check, and she carries that habit of attention through everything that follows. Needle, meanwhile, becomes a link to the family she has lost; holding on to it is holding on to who she was before the war.

What happens to her direwolf?

Arya's direwolf is Nymeria, adopted as a pup at the start of the story. Early on, Nymeria attacks the young prince Joffrey when he threatens Arya, and the wolf has to flee; in her absence Sansa's direwolf, Lady, is killed in her place. It is the first time the family pays for a quarrel with the crown, and it sets the sisters against each other for years.

Losing Nymeria is also the first of Arya's many separations. Soon afterwards Arya is cut off from her family too, and she lives much as a lost wolf would: on her own, among strangers, keeping her name hidden. The story draws the parallel lightly, but it is there in both versions, the wolf that would not be tamed and the girl who will not be either.

What do the Faceless Men teach her?

In Braavos she joins the Faceless Men, a guild that trains its members to give up their own identities in order to serve its god. The training is a long test of whether Arya can become no one, and she keeps failing it in the same way: she cannot stop being Arya Stark, with a family to avenge and names she will not forget.

That failure is the meaning of the chapter. Arya learns the guild's skills, how to move unseen and wear another face, without accepting its creed, and she leaves Braavos with a weapon the guild never meant her to keep. The series treats her return to Westeros as a choice of identity over power, which is unusual in a story where most characters make the opposite choice.

Why is she the one who ends the Night King, and where does she go?

In the third episode of the final season Arya destroys the Night King with a Valyrian steel dagger, ending the war against the dead. The show frames it as the payoff of everything she has learned rather than as destiny: no prophecy named her, but she is the person trained to reach a target nobody expects to be reached. It is the most celebrated moment of her arc and one of the most argued about in the series.

At the end of the show she does not stay in the realm her family now partly rules. In the final episode she sets out to explore the uncharted sea west of Westeros, a choice that fits a character who never wanted a place in the order everyone else was fighting over. In the novels her story is unfinished as of the date this page was last checked.