?, 300 AC
Bran awoke in darkness.
The rocky chamber yawned around him, a great black mouth with sharp stone teeth hanging from its roof and rising from its floor. The little fire had dwindled to embers, and Bran watched as they faded, their light swallowed up by the greedy cave. At last only one coal remained, burning red, a lidless eye that pierced the dark and raised shivers up his spine.
"This place was not meant for us," Meera had told him, shivering as she built up the fire.
The caverns under the hill were warm, free of the snow and ice and howling wind that tormented the world above. But sometimes the chill crept in all the same, and they must have fires to keep the cold at bay. Jojen was always wrapped in furs, his face wan, his limbs frail. Even the merest whisper of wind seemed to pierce him like a knife. Now he slept uneasily in a snug alcove, Summer panting beside him.
"You're my bannermen," Bran said. He was a prince; he could not say they were his friends, no matter how much he wanted to. "Your place is at my hearth."
Meera smiled sadly. "Aye, my prince, but this hall is not your keep. It is theirs."
The memory trickled over Bran like icewater through his veins. How long ago that had been, Bran could not say. The caverns were boundless, noiseless, timeless. No cock crowed at the break of day; no beam of sunlight dared enter to wake the dreamers with its touch.
Once the children of the forest had danced beneath the summer sun, in ancient days when the world was young. Their clans roamed the forests, the streams, and the deep places of the earth, their voices raised in songs of power.
Now there were less than a hundred singers, their domain the passages and grottoes hidden beneath the hill. Their great golden cat's eyes no longer feasted upon flowers and trees, or drank the clear waters of a thousand rivers in all their shades of blue. All they looked upon were dark stones and pale bones, their home and lichyard one and the same.
Yet it was a refuge still, safe from the Others and their dead men. The children had found them starving in the woods; now they had mushrooms and blind white fish from the underground river that ran through the caverns before falling over a bottomless abyss. There was cheese and milk from the goats who lived with the singers, and thick blood stew filled with onions and chunks of tender meat. Dancer grazed with the goats in a hidden pasture beside the hill, the only one of their horses to survive crossing the Wall.
"The greenseer is ready for you," a voice murmured from the darkness.
There was the scent of sweet dried grass, the sound of rocks striking, then the light of a flame. A rushlight glowed faintly in the gloom, clasped tightly in Leaf's hand. She had sharp black claws in place of nails; her small hand had only three fingers and a thumb. Her hair was mossy brown tinged with green, like the patches of lichen that dappled the walls; her skin was nut-brown, speckled like a fawn's with paler spots.
Four singers carried Bran through the dark passages, following after the wispy flame of the rushlight. Bran could not talk to them; Leaf alone among her brethren spoke the Common Tongue. It was Leaf who had walked the realms of men for two hundred years, it was Leaf who had waited for Bran among the trees and led them to the cavern, and it was Leaf who had brought them before the three-eyed crow, just as it was she who led him to his teacher now.
In dreams the crow had three eyes, dark as onyx; in life he had only one, blood-red and unblinking. The crow wore glossy feathers; the greenseer wore faded, rotten clothes that stank of decay.
But both can fly
, Bran reminded himself as the singers lowered him into his weirwood throne, draping warm furs over his useless legs. The abyss loomed beside them like a question that would never be answered, a nightmare never remembered.
Bran wished he could not remember the sight of his teacher. Lord Brynden was his name, or so he had told Meera. Who knew how long the lord had reigned from his throne of twisted roots, but it was long enough to turn his flesh to withered leather, his skin to tatters of parchment that dangled from his bones. His skull shone yellow beneath the last thin strands of long pale hair; a weirwood root twisted through his empty eye socket. Mushrooms sprouted from his cheek and his chest, their plump caps and slender stalks so white that Bran could pretend they were carved from pearls.
"Attend," Lord Brynden said, his voice a raspy echo. "You have eaten the paste of the weirwood seeds. You have slipped into the roots, and beheld Winterfell from within the heart tree. This is well and good. Your gift awakens, and grows stronger. But you must not bind yourself to a single tree, nor linger in a past you cannot change. You must reach further, to weirwoods you have never seen, places you have never known."
"But," said Bran, "my father won't be there."
Lord Brynden's sigh rattled in his throat, the sound of some ghastly dying thing. "Set your father aside, boy. Winter approaches, and you must learn. Nothing else matters."
"Summer matters," Bran protested.
And so do Meera and Jojen,
he remembered guiltily. Without them, he would never have reached the cave. Jojen had led the way, following his greendreams, and Meera had hunted and fished and kept their spirits up.
"No," the corpse lord said. "The direwolf was your first step into the world of the unseen. He has served his purpose, as have the others. It is you, Bran, that must go where they cannot. Now, close your eyes and slip your skin. Follow the roots where you will, so long as you do not return to Winterfell." The red eye glinted. "I shall know if you do."
Bran closed his eyes. Slipping his skin was as easy as falling, and the roots caught him, cradling him like a mother with her babe.
He said I could not go to Winterfell
, he thought. And as Bran reached, he thought of his mother.
After so long in the dark the sunlight blinded him. When the stars left his eyes he looked down upon a bright and airy garden, filled with redwoods and elms and burbling streams. Birds chirped in the trees; flowers bloomed around fountains graven with leaping fish. Lady Catelyn lay upon the grass, looking up at the weirwood. Bran had never seen her look so sad.
"Mother?" Bran whispered. Fallen leaves danced through the air, and then she was gone.
Rain dripped down his bark and his roots drank deep. He felt much smaller, and it was hard to see, as if his sapling lacked a face. A girl was praying on her knees, her voice low so the tall woman clad in chainmail who knelt beside her could not hear.
"Come on, you old gods. Robb needs you, please. Help Jey- help our queen get better, and I'll have Nymeria bring you a whole deer."
"What queen?" Bran asked, confused. Arya looked up, head tilted, lips parted, but an answer never came.
Frustrated, Bran filled his mind with thoughts of silver crowns and silken gowns and merlons painted gold. If Arya would not tell him, he'd make the weirwoods show him. Suddenly he felt sap dripping from branches trimmed short. It hurt, but it was a good hurt, like when he'd lost a baby tooth the night they entered the cave. Now his other sister knelt before him, wet hair flowing down her back like a deep red river. Sansa was a princess, not a queen, were the weirwoods even listening?
Again
, he told himself,
just once more.
He tried to remember Robb, the way his voice rang stern and lordly, the way he towered over Bran and grew stronger every day.
Show me a tall king, with blue eyes and broad shoulders and a will of iron.
He was warm, too warm. Bundles of kindling covered his roots; the scent of oil hung heavy in the air. Torches were everywhere, their heat drying his leaves and turning them crisp. Around him stood charred skeletons of trees, their branches crumbled away to ash, their trunks bare and desolate.
"See how the dark gods resist R'hllor's cleansing fire!" The woman was beautiful, a priestess garbed in scarlet silks. She raised her hands and the wind rose, carrying the fragrance of anise and other spices he could not name. "R'hllor, come to us in our darkness," she called. "Lord of Light, we offer you these false gods, these nameless demons of rock and tree and stream. Take them and cast your light upon us, for the night is dark and full of terrors."
A tall king stood beside her, blue eyes burning in a gaunt face. His head was bare but for a fringe of dark hair and a crown of red-gold with points in the shape of flames. In his hand he held a torch, and as the red woman spoke its flames roared higher, twisting into the shape of a golden stag.
No
, Bran thought as the king lowered the torch, the oil drenched kindling catching the light.
No, don't—
The oil caught fire, and Bran screamed, and the weirwood burned.
NOTES
1) I didn't research real life caverns, instead sticking with canon details for this horrifically creepy cave. I did look up whether mushrooms can grow from corpses, as Bloodraven's cheek mushrooms are a canon detail. Apparently mushrooms growing from a corpse is incredibly unlikely/implausible, but fuck it, that's scary as fuck, it can stay.
The specific mushroom I described is the destroying angel, an extremely poisonous mushroom found in Europe. Also, when I was checking whether pearls can be carved, I found this Japanese artist who carves SKULLS, among other things, out of pearls. I am both amazed and terrified. Guillermo del Toro would love this man.
2) Bran's visions took him to:
•The heart tree at Riverrun: Chapter 55, Catelyn V
•The sapling at White Willow: Chapter 92, Arya V
•The heart tree at the Red Keep: Chapter 95, Sansa VIII
•The heart tree at Storm's End: Stannis burned the godswood at Storm's End after Melisandre killed Cortnay Penrose. This doesn't happen onscreen; Davos remembers it later. The fan timeline has this occurring in August 299 AC.