BRAN — Chapter 35

In the safety of the singers’ caves, Bran sits a weirwood throne and trains under the last greenseer, Brynden. He learns to fly through a raven and to slip easily into Summer, while dead things gather outside the warded hill. Life underground is sustained by mushrooms, goats, fish, and stew, as the singers—led by Leaf—tend fires and warn of the abyssal tunnels below.

Bran’s bond with animals grows, and he increasingly wears Hodor’s skin to explore the caves and follow Meera and Jojen, who venture down to the black river. Hodor hauls the exhausted Jojen up a rope, showing Bran the power and peril of using another’s body. Jojen becomes sullen and fatalistic about his greendreams, distressing Meera; Bran feels helpless and tempted to use Hodor to comfort her.

Brynden explains the rarity of skinchangers and greenseers and how the singers become part of the weirwoods. Bran is unsettled by Brynden’s half-tree, half-corpse state and fears a similar fate, yet yearns for the promised “thousand eyes and one.”

When Brynden declares it is time, Leaf brings a weirwood-seed paste. Bran eats, and under darkness he is told to slip into the roots and look through the trees. He finds himself at Winterfell’s heart tree, seeing Lord Eddard cleaning Ice, and pulls back insisting his father lives. Brynden clarifies that trees see the past differently; men cannot change it. Attempts to speak are only whispers on leaves.

While resting, Bran dreams again through the heart tree, witnessing Eddard praying for love between his sons, children dueling with branches, a woman begging the gods for a vengeful son, kisses and hunts, Stark lords of old, and finally a blood sacrifice beneath the weirwood. Bran cannot intervene, only taste the blood through the tree, grasping both the reach and limits of his new sight.