"Are we there?"

Bran Stark asked.

He couldn't remember how many times he'd asked the same question since he left the Great Wall.

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

"It's coming." "I promise, the Three-Eyed Raven is ahead. ”

You've pledged it this countless times. Bran complained to himself.

He curled up in the wicker basket behind Addo's back, the snow kept falling, his hair had frozen into a tangled ball of frost, and even his sideburns were hanging down with tiny ice cubes.

The north wind howled, and the occasional crow swept overhead, but beyond that, there was a white dead silence all over the eyes.

"We've gone deep into the land of eternal winter, haven't we?"

"Yes."

"Will you run into strange ghosts?"

Jiu Jian was silent for a moment, then nodded:

"Maybe."

Bran stopped talking, seemingly unsurprised by the answer.

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

The group's lips were frozen blue, and their faces were purple.

"Addo, stop!" Bran suddenly said, "Something seems wrong. ”

Icewolf Summer also smelled something, and restlessly scraped the snow on the ground with its front paws.

Jiujian was stunned for a moment, and Mera had already exclaimed:

"Behold, there are indeed people! At the feet! ”

By the time Bran heard Mera's exclamation, Addo had fallen to the ground, and he had gone through a whirlwind of heaven and earth, and by the time he came to his senses, his mouth was full of blood.

He saw a black hand, and then something that looked like a human was rushing out of the snow.

"Ghouls!"

The ghouls poured out from under the snow, more than a dozen, and they rose to their feet, kicking up a cloud of snow mist.

Some were wearing black robes, some were unclothed, and some were simply not wearing anything, revealing their flesh and blood that was frozen black and purple.

"Run!"

Addo held Bran in his arms and tried to escape, only to find that the shhoul was holding on to his shul.

The Icewolf lunged at the ghoul suddenly, fangs ripping half of its throat from the mass of carrion.

Addo took the opportunity to break free and fled into the distance with clumsy steps.

Jiujian and Mera open the way ahead, but the ghouls in the snow have surrounded them.

"Kill it!"

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

"Fire!" Bran exclaimed in surprise suddenly.

A ghoul in front of him was suddenly engulfed in flames, and a little girl with a torch in her hand ran among the ghouls at an extremely alarming speed, her thin figure almost becoming an afterimage.

In the blink of an eye, the ghouls surrounding them had all been set on fire.

The fire gave them rest and reduced them to ashes.

"Thank you for saving us!" Bran looked at the little girl and felt that she looked a lot like his sister Arya.

"The fire burned them, the fire of hunger." The girl replied, but it was an adult's voice, sweet and high-pitched, with an unfamiliar rhythm and a wisp of vicissitudes of sadness.

Bran narrowed his eyes in order to scrutinize her.

She did look like a little girl, cloaked in leaves, and her eyes were as large and clear as a cat's eye.

Humans don't have such eyes.

And she had a messy head of hair with vines, twigs, and withered flowers.

"Who are you?" Mera asked.

"She's a child, a child of the forest." Bran replied. The body trembled with excitement.

The magical creatures in the old nurse's story actually appeared in front of me.

"The ancestors called us children." "The giants call us 'squirrel people' because we are small and agile and love the woods. But we're not squirrels, and we're not kids. Our name means 'one who sings the praises of the earth' in the ancient saying. And I'm more than two hundred years old. ”

"More than two hundred?" Mera's eyes widened.

"yes." The Children of the Forest smiled, "Compared to me, you humans are children. Let's go, he's waiting for you. ”

"Three-eyed crow?"

"It's the Green Prophet." The Son of the Forest turned and walked away.

Bran and the others hurriedly followed.

The group walked for an hour in the snow and entered a narrow, curved cave.

The Children of the Forest walked at the front with torches, the cloak of leaves rustling behind them.

The cave twists and turns, and Bran quickly loses his way.

"We're going underground." Mera whispered.

"Overhead, maybe it's a forest of fish beams." Bran gestured to the tangled roots in front of him.

"Quack—" A few crows perched on the roots, waiting for their bright black eyes to look at the uninvited guests.

After some time, there was a murmuring of water ahead, and they came to an underground river.

The Children of the Forest paused: "Here we are. ”

"Arrived?" Bran was stunned for a moment, "Three-eyed crow......"

Before he could finish speaking, he saw the Children of the Forest raise the torch high, and the light jumped and shifted, filling the entire cavern with a red halo.

But the next moment, all the colors faded, and only black and white remained.

Bran gasped.

For he saw a pale-skinned man appear in front of him, a cage woven of fish beams and wood around his dry limbs, like a mother holding a child.

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

"You're the Three-Eyed Crow?" Bran asked cautiously, noticing that the man had only one eye, not three.

A blood-red eye.

And where the other eye should be, a thin white tree root crawled out of the empty eye socket and plunged deep into the neck.

"Crows?" The man's voice was dry, as if he hadn't spoken in hundreds of years, "yes, it used to be." I've been through a lot, Bran Stark, and that's what I am now. I've always wanted to go to you, but alas, I can't move......"

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

"I've never said that." The Three-Eyed Raven said.

Bran felt a surge of anger at being deceived.

But the three-eyed raven said, "You will never be able to walk again." But you can fly. ”

"How do you fly?" Bran rekindled hope.

"Fly in dreams, green dreams." With that, the Three-Eyed Raven walked up to Bran with a bowl in his hand.

The bowl contained a viscous and pungent white liquid mixed with wisps of red thread.

"You've got to eat this."

"What is this?" Bran looked at the bowl suspiciously.

"Fish beam wood seed paste."

This thing made Bran feel disgusted, but he couldn't give up when he thought that he had gone through so much trouble to find the Three-Eyed Crow.

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

The first bite was the hardest to swallow, and he almost threw it up.

But the second bite was much better, the third bite was even a little sweet, and the next bite was simply gobbling up all the seed paste.

"Please close your eyes." "Just as you would enter the wolf's body, try to enter the rhizome of the fishbeam and follow its guidance to melt into the earth." ”

Bran closed his eyes and consciousness left his body.

Suddenly, he saw the dark caverns, the rushing rivers below, the countless walking corpses, and the blackwater bay shrouded in the storm.

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

"What do you see?" The three-eyed crow's voice was ethereal.

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

They had met before, thousands of miles apart.

"What else?"

"And the sea monsters," Blandau, "the burning sea monsters." ”

(End of chapter)