Work Text:
The world lay in a shroud of permanent inky dusk. A full moon and the scattered light of the distant stars were the only lamps that lit the sky. It was cold in Lord Brynden’s cave. Lonely. Dark shadows watched with a malicious glean. The milk-white roots of the vast heart tree seemed almost to glow in the dim flickering firelight. Bran watched it all from his throne of tree and bone.
Bran saw everything that happened on that great hollow hill now. All that ever was and all that could be. He saw his arrival, pursued by the corpses as they fled inside the ward lines. He saw them leave under half a hundred different situations, each more terrible than the last. If time was a river then it ran the wrong way. The past was a but single stream, a burn that ran straight and true. The future was the many tributaries that fed the brook; a vast web of divergent paths that separated into the distant hills and mountains.
No, the broken boy thought, the past is a tree. It had a central trunk and branches higher up, and at the top, the leaves hide many secrets. But he could climb to the birds’ nests hidden in the highest reaches once, back in Winterfell. Back before the king came and his father left. Back when they were six wolves and six children, and they all believed they were safe. What fools we were.
There was no safety. Bran knew that now. Only evil men and evil monsters. Often, they were the same thing.
Bran saw everything that happened on the hill. He watched deep into the past as a man in black cut open the eyes of the Weirwood with a blunt bronze axe, as a dozen shadows surrounded him. He watched as they tied a Singer to the freshly bleeding tree and pushed a blackened blade through her heart and her blood steamed into the cold white snow, burning a red brand of betrayal into the soil and roots and tall white tree itself. He could taste the blood that still nourished the roots.
There were newer betrayals Bran bore witness to as well. He saw himself push further into Hodor’s mind until nothing was left of the giant stable boy. Nothing save for an empty shell and too much guilt for Bran to bear. He saw Jojen lured to the cave by a dream of greater purpose, only to be… to be…
He could not bring himself to think on what he did to Jojen. What I did to Meera.
I did not know.
You should have known, the shadows echoed in father’s voice. It was angry, accusing. He wondered if it was real. Bran could not stay here in this prison, yet he could not flee, his crippled body would not let him. He was nothing more than a broken little boy who dreamt of being whole again. Fool.
I have led my friends to death. To bone and blood and crimson pain and death.
Guilt and anguish pressed tight around him. Squeezing. Strangling. Suffocating. Bran needed to leave this cavern of corpses. He stole the skin of a raven, and in a fury of feathers he flew. High into the blackened sky he flew. From above, the heart tree was a drop of blood in a sea of snow and shadow. Nothing moved in the forest north of the Wall. Nothing lived outside the cave. There were no survivors of the endless tide of ice and corpses. No man could survive the ceaseless pits of cold that marched forth from the heart of winter so far north.
Not without the aid of the Singers. Not without him.
He hated that the fate of the world was dependant on the monster that was to consume him. The monster that was him.
The moon gazed down at him, urging him to choose. But how do I know what choice is right. He was still a child. Such a burden should not have landed on him. Protecting the north was father’s role, Robb’s duty. Not his. Never his.
But father and Robb were dead, and Jon Snow too. The broken boy was all that remained of the Starks of Winterfell, and it was up to him to rule the winter.
He saw the Other gliding between the trees, translucent in the moonlight. A pale shadow of the cruel blue star that sat in the eye of the Ice Dragon high in the northern sky. A trail of corpses stumbled in its wake. Wildlings and rangers united in death.
More would perish if he did not act soon.
He thanked the Gods that father no longer lived to see what he had become, what he would become.
He let the darkness consume his mind. And the world trembled beneath him.