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Clay's sign was little more than a frightening trick to ordinary folk, the kind of magic that could replay the chaos of that bloody throne-room dream and nothing else.
But to a creature like the Three-Eyed Raven, the sign cut far deeper. It was a blade pressed against an artery, a threat that reached into the very core of what kept such beings alive.
At once, his kindly old man's disguise shattered. His eyes flashed, and the body that had seemed frail and human dissolved into a storm of shadowed feathers. A great black raven surged upward with a harsh flurry of wings, each beat churning the air.
Even as he rose into the dark sky, the bird twisted back and spat a curse, his voice burning with fury. "You emissary of the foreign god, are you trying to kill me?"
Clay only gave a short, amused breath of laughter. He lifted his hand and drove an Axii Sign straight into Bran Stark's face.
The power held true even in a dream. The boy crumpled onto the soft grass without a sound, as if some invisible weight had crushed the strength from his small body.
"I strike you here in the dream," Clay said, his tone calm yet edged, "and you look as though you might die for real."
The great raven glided down to a heart tree beside the ruined tower, its black wings folding in slow motion. From that perch the creature listened, then gave a low sigh that seemed older than the forest itself.
"Death will not claim me," he admitted, his voice a mixture of weariness and warning, "but this is troublesome. If I fall in this place, I may never find my way back."
The Three-Eyed Raven's voice held the weight of an ending hour. "There is no time left… Emissary of the Foreign god. You would not have come unless you had made up your mind about certain things."
The certainty in his tone rang like a quiet bell.
Clay gave no answer. He simply lifted a hand and pointed toward the distant shape of Winterfell, his voice soft but firm. "If nothing else has gone wrong, this must be a dream that you and Bran Stark are sharing together, isn't it?"
He let the thought settle, then added with a faint note of surprise, "It seems you reached him sooner than I expected."
From the moment Clay entered this place, he had suspected that Bran was the true dreamer. Yet Brynden Rivers, that shameless trickster cloaked in feathers, had forced his way in without so much as a knock, shaping the boy's vision as though it were his own.
Because of that intrusion the dream kept unfolding, piece by piece, until it belonged to both the old greenseer and the boy.
Ordinary dreams always have edges. They fray and end, and their details blur if you try to walk too far. When Clay had first stepped into the throne room in King's landing, he had found the doors sealed no matter how he willed them open. That was the boundary, a limit beyond which nothing existed, because nothing needed to.
But here the world stretched outward. Grass swayed under a wandering breeze, leaves rustled overhead, and even from afar the towers of Winterfell stood etched in fine detail. He knew at a glance that he could walk through those gates if he chose.
In other words, this was a dream rooted deep in Bran Stark's mind, replayed again and again until every stone and blade of grass had taken on the substance of memory. Its completeness could only have come from such endless repetition.
Clay's words met no challenge. Brynden Rivers had already returned to his human shape and received them in silence.
When Clay had first sworn to safeguard the Stark bloodline, interference of this kind had stood against the terms they had agreed upon. Yet now neither of them spoke of that old pact.
Times were shifting, and both men could see it.
"Tell me," Clay said at last, his gaze drifting toward the boy he had placed into a brief enchanted sleep, "what exactly do you intend to do with him?"
Bran lay motionless on the grass, his small chest rising and falling in the quiet air.
Clay considered the matter without a flicker of pity. With Robb Stark dead, he no longer needed the Stark name to steady the North. Bran had become, in his eyes, nothing more than a piece on the board, a token to be bargained away if the price proved high enough.
The Three-Eyed Raven studied Clay's face for a long moment, finding nothing there to read. At last he gave a soft, resigned sound. "Since you came here, you must have broken through the three dreams I wove before your arrival. I cannot say how you managed it, but let me put it this way. This place is to Bran what the throne room is to me."
Clay weighed the meaning of those words. "So, what you are telling me is that Bran remains the master here. Unless he gives his consent, you cannot devour him through the dream. Am I right?"
The old greenseer betrayed no embarrassment. Anyone who could step into a realm like this was far beyond the reach of ordinary morals, and both of them knew it.
"Yes," he said at last, his voice a low rustle like wings through dark branches. "The surest path would be to bring the boy himself to my cave beyond the Wall. Face to face his resistance would falter. He would have far less strength to oppose me if I could touch him directly."
He let out a dry breath that might have been a sigh. "But it is clear I have failed to do that, though I have whispered to him again and again in these dreams, hinted again and again, and still he does not come. Touching the waking world is still too difficult. He is, after all, the lord of the North now, and I cannot simply take him away."
A shadow of wry amusement passed through his eyes. "Eddard Stark raised this stubborn child to be just like his unlucky elder brother, filled from head to toe with notions of honor and duty."
Clay understood.
The Three-Eyed Raven was performing a dance for an audience that would never care.
This Bran Stark was nothing like the boy Clay remembered from another path of time; the boy who had fallen from a tower, crippled in body and quietly yearning for escape. In this timeline Bran had remained in Winterfell when Robb marched south to war. Because of Clay's own interventions the ironborn had never breached the castle walls.
So even though the greenseer came to Bran night after night, whispering temptations in the dark, every morning the boy awoke with the Stark name heavy on his shoulders. That name alone was enough to keep him rooted, without the faintest wish to travel beyond the Wall.
And what could the Three-Eyed Raven do? He was as helpless as he was ancient.
Clay saw it plainly. "So in the end you can only work here, inside this dream that you and he have built from the depths of memory. You need his consent before you can truly merge with him, or claim him as your own, isn't that right?"
Brynden Rivers inclined his head in a slow, deliberate nod.
"That is exactly it."
No wonder the old creature had worn the mask of a sly old schemer earlier. It had all been for this.
Clay studied Brynden Rivers' weathered face, the creases carved deep by time and shadow, and asked with quiet puzzlement, "It has been so long, and I have not interfered with you once. Why is your progress still crawling?"
The Three-Eyed Raven released a breath of pure resignation. "I have no choice. This is his dream, and none of my powers can force a change in the thoughts of another."
His crimson eyes shifted to Clay's open hand, then to Bran Stark lying unconscious on the grass. A flicker of envy entered his voice. "Emissary of the Foreign God, I still do not know from where you drew that power. Yet from what I see, you have not even used it to its full reach. To move another's thoughts, to guide their will exactly as you please…"
The blood-red gaze glimmered with a tangle of fear, awe, jealousy, and something darker that Clay could not name. "Even my own master lacks such a gift. That is the simple truth."
Clay only nodded, offering no answer. He understood well what his witcher-born strength could accomplish if he chose to unleash it. But what amusement was there in that?
If he wished, he could slip alone through King's Landing with its walls as porous as a sieve. With the gifts he carried there would always be a way to reach the man who sat the Iron Throne and end him before the city even stirred. Yet where was the sport in such an easy kill?
"Enough," Clay said at last, his voice calm but final. "How I use my strength is my concern."
He pointed to the boy stretched on the earth. "I came here and you have no means to drive me out. What I want now is an answer. Why have you stirred such chaos across the North?"
His tone hardened, cold as the winds that scoured the Wall. "The whole of the North reeks of the corruption you have spread. Even if you stopped this instant, the land would remain scarred and weak. Winter is coming. You know what that means."
Brynden Rivers tried to summon a look of harmless confusion, but Clay gave him no room to dodge. He moved without warning and clamped a hand down on the old man's shoulder.
A surge of alien power spilled from Clay's palm, magic not born of this world, and the greenseer stiffened as though every phantom hair on his body had risen in alarm, if he still possessed such mortal things at all.
"Ah—enough, don't make me hurt you. Let go of me," the old creature hissed, his voice breaking beneath the weight of that foreign magic.
Clay leaned closer, his eyes narrowing. "Still pretending? When you begged for help earlier, you said 'open the gate.' What gate were you talking about? Are you some kind of gatekeeper after all?"
The anger in his voice was no bluff. In Clay's mind the Three-Eyed Crow's secretive games were nothing less than a breach of trust, a quiet betrayal.
If the mystery surrounding this ancient being were not so deep and wide, if the knowledge bound to him were not so dangerously tempting, Clay would have ended the matter here and now. A single burst of Igni in this hollow of roots and the so-called crow would be nothing more than ash.
Brynden Rivers held out for a long moment, silent and rigid beneath that growing tide of magic. At last the looming promise of death broke his resolve. He exhaled a long, ragged sigh and spoke in a low voice.
"Alas… you're right, Emissary of the Foreign God. I am nothing more than a keeper of the gate."
His blood-red eyes dimmed with something like resignation. "A wretched gatekeeper, that is all I have ever been. Whether they call me the Greenseer or the Three-Eyed Raven, it makes no difference. Before those names, before the first watch was ever sworn, we stood here. Our line has held its vigil longer than the Night's Watch itself. We were here even before the Wall rose against the cold."
These were truths no outsider was meant to hear, secrets passed only from one greenseer to the next. Yet with Clay's hand burning against his shoulder and the smell of raw power in the air, Brynden knew that silence would only hasten his end.
"So," Clay asked quietly, "you are not the first Greenseer, are you?"
The old man gave a slow, defeated nod. "I am not. Many came before me. But now there is only me. Bran Stark cannot take the mantle alone. His gifts are too thin, his blood too young. That is why—"
"Let me guess," Clay said, his voice edged with quiet amusement, "that because of this, you intend to consume him?"
He studied the ancient figure with a half-smile that held neither warmth nor mercy.
Brynden Rivers only lifted his shoulders in a weary shrug. He had already seen that this strange emissary of an unknown god could not be deceived. There was no use in weaving yet another clever story.
"Enough of that," Clay said, his gaze hardening. "We can leave morality for someone who still clings to it. Tell me the truth. You call yourself a gatekeeper. Which gate do you guard?"
He had no patience left for the old creature's double standards. The hypocrisy was too plain to bother with, and he felt no need to argue over it. What could be done with someone who had lived so long beyond the reach of shame?
Brynden exhaled a slow breath, a sound like dry leaves stirring in a hollow tree. "You would have learned soon enough anyway," he said. "I am a warden of the gate. In some sense I am not so different from the men of the Night's Watch, for we both guard the northern edge of the realms of men."
He let the words linger in the cold air before continuing, his voice low and steady. "It is only that, for the past thousand years, the Night's Watch has believed their task is to hold back the wildlings. My charge, and the charge of every greenseer before me, is far older. I observe the god of cold in the Land of Always Winter. I watch for the stirring of His will."
"The strange rhythm of the seasons in Westeros… your maesters and scholars may cling to their own theories, but I can tell you plainly what it means. What men call a broken cycle is nothing less than the struggle between the Cold God and the Red God, the one you now name R'hllor."
"The Cold God has sought rebirth for ages. Every great winter is His trial upon the world's strength. And we, the first to feel the change in the winds, must carry word of Ice to the servants of Fire as swiftly as possible."
He gave a dry, almost scornful laugh. "Not with those ridiculous white ravens from the Citadel, announcing the coming of winter like fools. We are the true messengers."
Pride crept into his voice as he spoke, an echo of old authority still clinging to his cloak of roots.
Clay listened in silence, turning the words over in his mind. There was a flaw in the tale, a note that rang false. At last he asked, "You said the former Red God, now R'hllor. Are they not one and the same?"
In response to this question, a strange smile flickered across Brynden's pale face. "Who told you that the dominion of gods never passes from one to another?"
He leaned forward, his crimson eyes gleaming like half-hidden embers. "The one you call R'hllor may once have walked the earth as flesh and blood. Power changes hands. Thrones in heaven fall as easily as thrones of men."
"These many years He has faltered again and again in His struggle with the one from the Land of Always Winter. To my eyes He is but a pale shadow of the god who came before. The steps of the Cold God can no longer be stopped."
He lowered his gaze, his voice dropping to a whisper that sank into the roots around them. "Once, the Cold God could not find me. Now R'hllor no longer has the strength to shield me."
Then he looked back at Clay, a thin smile curling across his face. "Tell me, Emissary of the Foreign God. What is your judgment of the knight who came from beyond the stars?"
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[Chapter End's]
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