Late July, 298 AC
Bran was falling. Had he been falling forever? Stars whirled overhead. The sun rose, and set, and rose again. It was raining, storming, with thunder and lightning that seemed to crack his bones, and then the rain was gone. There was nothing here with him, nothing but the air whipping at his face and the sunlight burning in his eyes.
Suddenly, far above, Bran heard a scream. Bran looked up, up to the dark storm clouds which appeared from nowhere, flashing with streaks of lightning. A figure was there, in grey skirts with long flaming hair.
"Sansa?" Bran cried out. He blinked, and she was falling beside him. Her hair streamed above her like a banner.
"Bran?" Sansa shrieked, grabbing for him. She could not quite reach; her pale fingers barely brushed his.
"Where are we?" Sansa cried, looking about, her eyes wide with fear.
"Falling," Bran replied. He could almost feel his sister's exasperated sigh.
"You fell weeks ago, you should have stopped by now," she scolded. "Mother is so scared, you have to wake up!"
"Where did you fall?" Bran asked. Sansa wasn't making any sense.
"I didn't."
Bran stared into Sansa's eyes. He saw Nymeria bite the golden prince, he saw Sansa weeping, he saw Father unsheathe Ice as Lady panted beside him. He saw a weirwood tree with no face, he saw Sansa clawing at black dirt with pale bloody hands.
Bran blinked, and Sansa burst into a thousand weirwood leaves, the same red as her hair.
"Bran?" the leaves cried. "Bran?"
The leaves swirled around each other, forming dim shapes against the grey clouds. A girl with long hair wept on her knees. A tree stretched its branches to the sky. A direwolf raised its head, its howl echoing with a woman's scream.
"Bran!" The leaves cried again, and were gone.
In their place was Sansa, and she was falling, falling faster than Bran. There was an island below, an island in the middle of a glittering lake. From above he could see the blood red leaves of a weirwood forest, a small clearing in their midst. Bran closed his eyes, too frightened to see Sansa hit the ground.
Yet there came no scream of agony, no thud of flesh and bone upon rock. Bran looked, and saw a weirwood sapling in the midst of the clearing, its trunk as white and smooth as a maiden's skin, two branches reaching upward. The weirwood sapling's face was strange. Its lips were full and womanly, its eyes closed in sleep.
A crow flew past Bran to perch on one of the sapling's leafless branches. It cawed loudly, then began pecking at the tree's face, its beak digging into the place above its eyes.
"No!" Bran cried.
The crow shook its head, and pecked again. The trunk began to bleed where the crow had marked it, the limbs shaking as buds appeared, then leaves unfurled. The weirwood's eyes snapped open, bluer than the sky, bluer than the sea. They looked at Bran for a moment, and he was drowning. How could he drown while falling through the air?
"Bran," the weirwood leaves whispered. Then the tree vanished, as though it never was, and Bran was falling, and Bran was screaming.
"Fly," the crow cawed in his ear.