“Even in dreams, you could not fall forever.”

“The ground was so far below him, he could barely make it out through the grey mists that whirled around him, but he could feel how fast he was falling, and he knew what was waiting for him down there. Even in dreams, you could not fall forever. He would wake up in the instant before he hit the ground, he knew. You always woke in the instant before you hit the ground.”

“Even dreams cannot live up here.”

“You told me that the children of the forest had the greensight. I remember.”“Some claimed to have that power. Their wise men were called greenseers.”“Was it magic?”“Call it that for want of a better word, if you must. At heart it was only a different sort of knowledge.”Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds andtheir thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and sothey seem . . . but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sinkbeneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.So long as there was magic, anything could happen. Ghosts could walk, trees could talk, and broken boys could grow up to be knights.”

“It seemed as he had been falling for years. Fly, a voice whispered in the darkness, but Bran did not know how to fly, so all he could do was fall.”

“Jon Snow had dreamed of leading men to glory just as King Daeron had, of growing up to be a conqueror. Now he was a man grown and the Wall was his, yet all he had were doubts. He could not even seem to conquer those.”

“Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world.”