Deep beneath the Haunted Forest, Brynden Rivers opened his single red eye.
He had been old when he came to the cavern, older than the standards of most men. That was more than a century ago. Now, he was older still, far beyond the brief measure of mortal lives. A throne of woven weirwood roots held his frame, growing through him, around him, and deep into his flesh over decades of quiet vigil. Pale wood emerged from his chest, his thighs, and his arms, fusing with bone and sinew until it was impossible to tell where the man ended, and the tree began.
His skin hung like brittle parchment over a body that had long since ceased to require food or water. His right eye was gone, replaced by a root that had burrowed through the empty socket and sealed it forever.
Weirwood and man, interwoven to host the spirit of the Three-Eyed Raven, a legacy spanning millennia.
Around him, the Children moved soundlessly through the gloom, small, quiet figures with luminous eyes and skin the color of damp moss. High above, where the roots opened into a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow, thousands of ravens roosted in absolute silence.
He saw everything. Or rather, he had.
Through the weirwoods, he could trace the Past and the Present as clearly as a map. He could see futures that branched, forked, and multiplied like the roots beneath him, each path a possibility, each life a single thread in a tapestry far too vast for any mortal mind to hold. The Future was a living thing, fluid and treacherous; the smallest ripple could send the current cascading down an entirely untraveled channel.
Yet his task remained singular and absolute: watch, guide, and maneuver the realm of men, those blind, stumbling, violent mortals into the final act.
The Song of Ice and Fire had been beautiful in its terrible, tragic way. A symphony of suffering and triumph, of dragons and wolves, lions, flowers, and stags, all moving toward a crescendo that would determine whether the world lived or died.
Then, fifteen years ago, the first distortions in Fate began.
He had felt it first as a dissonance, a single note struck wrong, somewhere in the south.
At the time, he dismissed it as a minor variation. The Song allowed for those: a man choosing a different road, a woman speaking a different word, a battle won instead of lost. The small choices that rippled outward and then faded, absorbed back into the greater harmony.
Then came the Sack of King's Landing, and the tapestry of the future was ripped to shreds.
Aegon was meant to die. Rhaenys was meant to die. Elia Martell was meant to die. In the Past of what should have been, he had watched Ser Gregor Clegane crush the infant prince's skull against the stone. He had watched Ser Amory Lorch drive his dagger into the princess a dozen times, her blood pooling on the nursery floor. He had watched Elia die screaming.
Queen Rhaella was meant to flee with Viserys across the Narrow Sea, giving birth to Daenerys amid a raging storm on Dragonstone, the last two Targaryens in the world, save for the Prince That Was Promised tucked away in the freezing North, a secret kept by a wolf.
That was what had been Seen.
Except Aegon had not died. Rhaenys had not died. Elia had not died. Spirited away to Dorne, they now lay hidden in Sunspear, under the watchful eye of Doran Martell.
The Song that should have been written was now never to be. Lives that should have ended in death were now drawn toward a future Brynden could no longer read.
He had torn into the Greendream again and again, desperate to understand what truly transpired in Maegor's Holdfast on that fateful night. A hundred times, a thousand times, his three-eyes burned as he reached back through the years toward the Sack of Kingslanding
And every time, the visions betrayed him. Just as the scene would begin to clarify, the vision would dissolve into a blinding flash of gold that consumed his sight entirely.
But Brynden refused to yield.
He scried every thread he could reach in the years leading up to the Sack: the whispers traded in the Small Council, the ravens flying between Casterly Rock and King's Landing, the quiet shift of gold and men across the Seven Kingdoms.
And his investigations led him back to a single origin.
Casterly Rock. A dwarf. A Lannister. A boy who should have been one thing, but was, inexplicably, something else entirely.
Brynden had seen Tyrion Lannister's Song long before the boy ever drew his first breath. He had watched it take shape in the Greendream.
A child born crippled, his limbs twisted and stubbed, a monster in his father's eyes.
A mind sharp as Valyrian steel trapped in a frame that would never allow him to seize the world as he desired.
A man who would drink, whore, and fashion clever japes to shield a heart starved for love, but who would, against all odds, play a critical, leading role in the great war to come.
But at the inception of his birth, something other. A power beyond this reality had reached into the boy's cradle and rewritten him.
Magic clung to him like smoke, thick and foreign, woven through his bones and blood. Brynden could see it when he scried, but not clearly, never clearly, because every time he reached for Tyrion Lannister's path, his image appear with a blinding flare of gold that shielded his Self from Brynden's Sight. But in the glimpses he gained, he saw a forge that burned with lava drawn from the heart of the world. A dwarf who spoke to the earth, and it listened.
Through sheer, dogged persistence and a technique that involved scrying the people around the dwarf rather than the dwarf himself, Brynden had finally managed to piece together a picture of what Tyrion Lannister had become.
And it was, quite frankly, absurd.
The event at birth had not been an isolated incident. At intervals throughout the boy's adolescence, at spaced months or sometimes years apart, something reached across the boundary between realities and touched the dwarf's very essence, grafting new power into his vessel.
This meant that by his fifteenth year, there was very little left in the world that could kill Tyrion Lannister. Fire found his skin resistant; steel found his bones unyielding. The boy had been reforged so many times by forces beyond comprehension that he was less a man now, and more akin to a demigod in the flesh.
Brynden had mused upon the implications for years. Tyrion Lannister was an anomaly, an entity that, by the sheer gravity of his existence, bent the destiny of everyone around him.
And as Brynden watched the dwarf stride through the corridors of Casterly Rock, a baby gryphon perched on his shoulder and a scarred giant trailing behind him like a particularly surly shadow, he could only marvel at the sheer insanity of it.
Just moments ago, a disturbance had rippled through the fabric of reality: a tear in the veil as something reached across from beyond, and out of thin air, a baby gryphon had materialized, dropping directly into Tyrion Lannister's arms.
How, he thought darkly, has something like this escaped my notice for fifteen years? I am the Three-Eyed Raven. Did the Old Gods not make me all-seeing? All-knowing? I have seen kings crowned and kingdoms fall, yet I missed a boy becoming a living god beneath my very nose.
He couldn't even reach out to speak to him. It was not as though he hadn't tried; Tyrion visited the godswood of Casterly Rock frequently, and Brynden had attempted multiple times to slip into the boy's consciousness. Each time, he was rebuffed, his mind repelled by a psyche saturated with foreign magic and shielded by forces beyond his comprehension.
Abruptly, the vision frayed and snapped. Brynden felt himself wrenched backward toward his physical frame, a low rasp of pain escaping his throat. And a vicious headache throbbed behind his brow.
Over the decades, he had learned to endure pain, pain was the currency of his existence, the price for seeing what others could not. Yet scrying Tyrion was utterly draining. Each attempt left him hollowed, as if the mere act of looking upon the dwarf burned his very soul. The only solace he could draw from this, was that the boy had never sensed himself being scryed. Rather, the foreign magics that permeated his Self automatically viewed his Greensight as anathema.
As these thoughts ran through his muddled mind, Leaf approached silently, bearing a carved wooden cup filled with the pale, bitter sap the Children brewed from weirwood bark. She held it to his lips without a word. He drank. The liquid was cold, astringent, and foul, but the agonizing spike in his skull receded, settling into a dull, manageable throb.
He exhaled softly, staring grimly into the cavern's gloom.
Only one truth remained constant, one that not even the dwarf's meddling could unravel.
The Long Night was coming. Far to the north, the Others stirred in the frozen dark, gathering their strength, and even the great wall of ice would not hold against them forever.
The world was changing in ways he could no longer predict, but the Three-Eyed Raven would remain. Whether the living triumphed or perished, his watch remained eternal.
Brynden River closed his eyes, and he dreamed.
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Short chapter, but wanted to give you a sneak peak at the grand puppetmaster himself
Check out the image of Tyrion and our baby gryphon for free on (linktr. ee/DarkeBones.)
If you want to read TWO chapters ahead of my public release, please see:
linktr. ee/DarkeBones