To epitomize the world in which we live, we must first step back and remember that we are flawed.
But to understand the world in which we live, we must recognize that man realizes just this: the good exploit the flaws and the wicked jeopardize their...
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Bran's never seen as much blood as the crimson that covers the length of Lyanna Stark's body, sodden in saturation and pressed against her skin as the darkness of her facade is blanched of color at the extent of her blood loss. Her palm rises to press against Ned's cheek—red with blood as he stares between the bloody hand and his sister's face, her words a whisper in his waiting ear, "Please. Listen to me, Ned. If Robert finds out, he'll kill him, you know he will. You have to protect him. Promise me, Ned. Promise me."
From behind him, Bran watches the one handmaiden pass softly against the stone floors of the Tower of Joy, carrying a bundle of cloth that's swaddled about a form—Bran startling as he recognizes the form of a baby. Stepping forward and watching as his father stares dumbfounded, Bran moves into the vicinity of Lyanna's pleas—"Promise me, Ned. Promise me"—and peers over his father's shoulder as the baby opens his eyes for the first time.
And he suddenly knows the baby from the dark brown eyes that could be mistaken as no one other than Jon Snow—the child of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen, the last dragon.
But—just as suddenly as he'd been drawn here by touching that weirwood tree—Bran's losing his grip on reality as the stone floors fall out from beneath him and the bodies and colors blur together in a mess of nothingness, alone again. Bran's heart beats heavily at the revelation and panic races through him at nothingness, before his feet are suddenly back on the ground, but this time, it's snow. And the stone of the ceiling is replaced by the massive red and white boroughs of a weirwood, the walls now forgotten as stones jut up in that spiral pattern Bran knows from before—and he realizes he's back with the Children of the Forest, millennia ago.
But this time, the firm peace of a ritual and screaming of the Night King are absent with all face of this memory. The grasses no longer blow green, but are covered in thick Winter snows, and the weirwood tree's grown taller and more vibrant since the last time Bran saw it. And the shouting of before is now the crying of a babe in the background, like a screech in Bran's ear as he approaches the only familiar sight—a collection of Children huddled together and thick in the tension of a hushed conversation.
"Where will it go?" one of them asks as Bran gazes down upon them—unseen.
"It cannot stay here," another says with a shaking head. "Not when he knows. He sees it as a betrayal."
But the first one disagrees, "He will search for her even if we take her away."
"She only needs to grow," a third one presses as she palms a dagger of dragonglass in her hand. "She'll be the most powerful of us to ever live, a safeguard against their innate evils."
Bran's eyebrows deepen in a frown at this scene now echoing in his ears, confused as to what they seek and consider, but drawn instead to an approaching Child he knows well—Leaf. In her arms, a baby's swaddled to protect it from the cold, rather large in Leaf's arms as she approaches the others with a firm and unfeeling expression like that of a leader before her people. Bran tries to see past the swaddling—to see if they've made another White Walker—but Leaf sways before him so that he cannot see, her eyes locked firm on the other Children before her. She reminds them, "We all know she is not one of us. She cannot stay here—this is not her time."
