Brann sees the Three-Eyed Raven

After a harrowing journey through the haunted forest, Bran Stark and his companions—Meera Reed, Jojen Reed, Hodor, and the enigmatic ranger Coldhands—arrive at the mouth of a cave high in a hillside, warded against the dead. The final ascent is steep and treacherous; wights rise from beneath the snow, and only the intervention of a small, leaf-cloaked child of the forest with a torch saves them. Inside the cave, the child leads them deeper into the earth, through twisting passages lined with weirwood roots and littered with the bones of birds, beasts, giants, and children of the forest. At last they cross a natural bridge above an underground river and come to a vast chamber where a pale lord in ebon finery sits dreaming in a tangled nest of roots—a woven weirwood throne that embraces his withered limbs. His body is skeletal, his clothes rotted; a thin white root grows from an empty eye socket down his cheek and into his neck. Bran asks if he is the three-eyed crow. The pale lord replies that he has been many things, but now he is as Bran sees him, and he has watched Bran for a long time with a thousand eyes and one. When Bran begs to be fixed—to have his legs healed—the pale lord answers, "No. That is beyond my powers." Instead he promises, "You will never walk again, Bran, but you will fly."