Game of Thrones: Holy Flame King

"Are we there yet?"

asked Bran Stark.

Since leaving the Great Wall, he couldn't remember how many times he had asked the same question.

But every time I can't get a satisfactory answer.

"Soon," said Jojen Reed, "I promise, the Three-Eyed Raven is ahead."

You've promised this countless times. Bran complained secretly.

He dangled in the wicker basket behind Hodor, the snow had been falling non-stop, his hair had been frozen into a tangled mass of frost, and even fine icicles were hanging from his temples.

The north wind howled, and occasionally a crow flew over the head. Other than that, the eyes were filled with a vast expanse of white silence.

"Have we gone deep into the land of eternal winter?"

"right."

"Will you meet a ghost?"

Jojen was silent for a moment, then nodded:

"maybe."

Bran stopped talking, looking unsurprised by the answer.

In the far north, it gets dark early. And as the days get shorter, the weather gets colder.

The lips of the group were frozen blue, and their faces turned purple.

"Hodor, stop!" Bran said suddenly, "There seems to be something wrong."

The direwolf Xia Tian also smelled something, and anxiously scratched the snow on the ground with its front paws.

Jojen froze for a moment, but Meera had already exclaimed:

"Look, there is a real person! Underfoot!"

When Bran heard Meera's exclamation, Hodor had already fallen to the ground suddenly, and he had experienced a dizzying turn, and when he came back to his senses, his mouth was already full of blood.

He saw a black hand, and then something half-human burst out of the snow.

"Ghoul!"

Ghouls poured out from under the snow one after another, there were more than a dozen of them, they suddenly stood up, setting off bursts of snow and mist.

Some were wearing black robes, some were naked, and some were not wearing anything at all, exposing flesh and blood that was black and purple from the cold.

"Run!"

Hodor held Bran in his arms and wanted to escape, but found that the shin was tightly held by the ghoul.

The direwolf pounced on the wight, its fangs tearing half its throat out of the rotting flesh.

A Duo took the opportunity to break free, and fled to the distance with clumsy steps.

Jojen and Meera lead the way, but the ghouls in the snow surround them.

"Get out!"

The Reed sisters swung their spears, but they couldn't stop the wights from approaching.

"Fire!" Bran exclaimed suddenly.

A ghoul in front of him was suddenly engulfed in flames, and a little girl was holding a torch, walking and running among the ghouls at an astonishing speed, her thin figure almost became an afterimage.

In a blink of an eye, all the ghouls surrounding them had been ignited.

The fire gave them rest and reduced them to ashes.

"Thank you for saving us!" Bran looked at the little girl, always thinking that she looked like his sister Arya.

"The fire killed them, the fire of hunger," the girl replied, but it was the voice of an adult, sweet and high-pitched, with a strange rhythm and a ray of sorrow from the vicissitudes of life.

Bran narrowed his eyes to study her carefully.

Her appearance is indeed a little girl, wearing a cloak of leaves, her eyes are large and clear, narrow and long like a cat's eyes.

Humans don't have eyes like this.

And she has messy hair with vines, twigs, and dead flowers in it.

"Who are you?" Meera asked.

"She is a child, the Children of the Forest," Bran answered. The body trembled with excitement.

The magical creature from Old Nan's story appeared in front of my eyes.

"The First Men called us Children," said the Children of the Forest, "and the Giants called us Squirrelmen, for we were small and swift, and loved the woods. But we were not Squirrels, and we were not Children. Our name in the old saying is 'Sing the Earth The meaning of 'people'. And I'm over two hundred years old."

"More than two hundred years old?" Meera's eyes widened.

"Yes." The Son of the Forest smiled, "Compared to me, you humans are just children. Let's go, he is waiting for you."

"Three-eyed crow?"

"It's the Green Prophet." The Son of the Forest turned and left after speaking.

Bran and the others quickly followed.

A group of people walked for an hour in the snow and entered a narrow and curved cave.

The Son of the Forest walked ahead with a torch, his leaf cloak rustling behind him.

The cave twisted and turned, and Bran quickly lost his way.

"We are heading underground." Meera whispered.

"There may be a weirwood forest overhead." Bran pointed to the thick and tangled roots ahead.

"Quack——" Several crows stayed on the roots of the tree, waiting for their bright black eyes to look at the group of uninvited guests.

After an unknown amount of time, there was the sound of gurgling water ahead, and they came to an underground river.

The Son of the Forest stopped: "We have arrived."

"Here?" Bran froze for a moment, "The Three-Eyed Raven..."

Before he finished speaking, he saw the Son of the Forest holding up the torch, and the light kept jumping and changing, filling the whole cave with a red halo.

But in the next moment, all the colors fade away, leaving only black and white.

Bran gasped.

For he saw a pale man appear before him, a weirwood cage wrapped around his withered limbs like a mother holding a child.

His body was so thin that at first glance Bran thought he was a corpse.

"Are you the Three-Eyed Raven?" Bran asked cautiously, noticing that the man had one eye instead of three.

A blood red eye.

And where the other eye should be, a thin white tree root climbed out of the cheek from the empty eye socket and pierced deeply into the neck.

"A crow?" The man's voice was dry, as if he hadn't spoken for a hundred years, "Yes, I used to be. I have been through a lot, Bran Stark, and this is what I am now. I have always been very I want to find you, but unfortunately, I can't move..."

"I'm disabled too." Bran said empathetically, "And I'm here because you told me in a dream that you could heal my leg..."

"I never said that." The Three-Eyed Crow said.

A cheated rage welled up in Bran.

But the Three-Eyed Crow said again: "You will never be able to walk. But you can fly."

"How to fly?" Bran rekindled hope.

"Fly in dreams, green dreams," said the Three-Eyed Raven, and the Son of the Forest came up to Bran with a bowl in his hand.

The bowl was filled with a viscous, pungent white liquid mixed with strands of red.

"You have to eat this."

"What's this?" Bran looked at the bowl suspiciously.

"Weirwood seed paste."

This stuff made Bran sick, but considering how hard he had gone to find the Three-Eyed Raven, he certainly couldn't give up like that.

So, he picked up the bowl and forced himself to eat it.

The first bite was the hardest to swallow, and he almost spat it out.

But the second bite was much better, the third was even a little sweet, and after that, I almost devoured all the seed paste.

"Please close your eyes." The Three-Eyed Crow said, "Just like you entered the body of the direwolf, try to enter the root of the weirwood, and follow its guidance to integrate into the earth."

Bran closed his eyes, consciousness leaving his body.

Suddenly, he saw the dark cave, the rushing river below, countless walking corpses, and the black water bay under the storm.

I saw the one-eyed man on the bloody phalanx, and the white dragon standing on the cliff.

"What did you see?" The Three-Eyed Crow's voice was extremely ethereal.

"Caesar." Bran immediately recognized the man behind the dragon.

They had met once before, thousands of miles apart.

"what else?"

"And krakens," said Bran, "burning krakens."