Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North through the long winter of the Dance of the Dragons, who came to his seat as a boy of nine after the death of his father Lord Rickon and ruled in his own right from his sixteenth year. Tall, grey-eyed, and grave, he kept the old gods and the old ways; he wed first Lady Arra Norrey, who gave him his heir Rickon, and after her death the cunning Black Aly Blackwood, mother of his daughters and of his second son the famed knight Bennard. When Prince Jacaerys Velaryon flew north on his dragon Vermax to win the North for his mother Queen Rhaenyra, it was Cregan who pledged Winterfell's swords beneath an oath sworn in the godswood (the Pact of Ice and Fire) that bound a Stark daughter to a Targaryen son in the years to come.
He marched south at the head of a host of greybeards, lads, and wolves that men named the Winter Wolves, taking King's Landing without a battle in the last weeks of 130 AC, only to find King Aegon II already dead by poison and his nephew Aegon III a captive child upon the Iron Throne. There he served as Hand of the King for a single day (the Hour of the Wolf), long enough to put the murderers and turncloaks of the old regime to the headsman's axe, to forgive a few who repented, and to set the realm to rights before he laid down the chain and turned his face homeward. He lived on at Winterfell for near five decades more, outliving sons and grandsons, and died at last in 178 AC, the last great lord of the Dance and the longest-reigning Lord of Winterfell in living memory.