The phantom scream sliced the frozen night air with the power of a thousand fiery blades, and young Bran Stark felt a chill of true terror run down his spine as he heard the horrible tearing sound of reality itself splitting asunder.

He watched in confusion as his yelling sister appeared out of nowhere, and casually dispatched the Night King with the small catspaw dagger he'd given her to stab up Littlefinger mere episodes ago. He scratched his head.

This wasn't the way it was supposed to go down.

This wasn't the vision he'd seen in the weirwood trees, north of the Wall.

This wasn't the way to destroy his silent, deathless adversary – he was sure of it.

All the other Three Eyed Ravens had been sure of it too – he'd had a mental teleconference with them a few days ago just to check, and he was pretty sure they'd agreed some sacrificial offering was needed to defeat the Night King's relentless march of death on the living world of Planetos.

Frowning, he stepped back into his hivemind again for a second, checking the immaculate data repository that the Ravens had collected over the years – containing every detail that had ever happened in the Seven Kingdoms, and all indexed under searchable categories like a sophisticated digital web crawler – and whined over at his big sister.

"You're not supposed to be here. No one's supposed to be here."

"It's a mercy he's dead already, Bran! Dany's lost nearly her entire army, Jon's being attacked by the ice dragon, and the corpses in the crypts will be murdering Sansa and Tyrion any minute now. I had to kill him. I had to kill him, or we'd all be dead!"

Arya was grinning at him in delight, thinking she'd saved Season Eight along with the fictional inhabitants of the Seven Kingdoms, but all the Three-Eyed Raven felt was a weary sense of pity for her.

"You don't understand. It's like the Last Jedi, all over again."

His sister opened her mouth to argue, but before she could speak, a flash of brilliant blue lightning tore the sky above their heads, hitting the weirwood tree and sending swirls of violet flames into its gnarled wooden face.

The tree screamed in fury as it burned (just like the dreams of an entire fandom).

The Three-Eyed Raven closed his eyes, at last seeing the horrible truth, and wondering how he could make any of his friends understand the enormity of what had just happened to their whole fictional fanverse.

"Seven hells, Bran – what was that?"

And as both Stark siblings stared into the glowing purple eyes of the screaming weirwood tree, the face around it slowly dissolved into blackness – a blackness that grew larger and larger until it swallowed the entire tree.

And then in that blackness – details emerged. They could see another town in the vision – covered in snow, just like Winterfell was. They could feel a chill breeze blowing out at them from that distant location, and smell the weird and exotic scent carried on the foreign wind.

"Bran? Is this really bad?"

His sister was unsure of herself now, he could see it in her face – and it deepened his human unease.

It was the first time Arya had displayed any vulnerability at all for nearly an entire season, and he knew in his infinite knowledge that she must sense the deep trouble they were all in, even without Sansa to spill the beans and proclaim the news all over the Winterfell Godswood.

But he had no comforting words for her this time. Instead, he met her wide brown eyes with a creepy, emotionless stare that would have chilled the Night King – had he not already been made of solid ice and immune to displays of human feeling – and steeled himself to deliver the most genuinely profound line of dialogue he'd ever uttered.

"It's beyond really bad, Arya. It's Benioff and Weiss..."

And as the two youngest Starks stared into the gaping plothole opening up between worlds, what remained of the disintegrating magic weirwood tree seemed to cackle evilly, mocking not only the surviving Stark family – but the entire world of Ice and Fire, and its real world fandom too.