“Not cry. Fly.“I can’t fly,” Bran said. “I can’t, I can’t…”How do you know? Have you ever tried?The voice was high and thin. Bran looked around to see where it was coming from. A crow was spiraling down with him, just out of touch, following him as he fell. “Help me,” he said.I’m trying, the crow replied…The crow took to the air and flapped around Bran’s hand.“You have wings,” Bran pointed out.Maybe you do too.Bran felt along his shoulders, groping for feathers.There are different kinds of wings, the crow said…Bran was falling faster than ever. The grey mists howled around him as he plunged toward the earth below. “What are you doing to me?” he asked the crow, tearful.Teaching you how to fly.“I can’t fly!”You’re flying right now.“I’m falling!”Every flight begins with a fall, the crow said. Look down.”

“Now you know " the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. "Now you know why you must live." "Why " Bran said not understanding falling falling. "Because winter is coming.”

“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.”

“When I was a boy, I dreamt that I could fly, he announces. When I woke, I couldn't... or so the maester said. But what if he lied?What do you mean?Perhaps we can fly. All of us. How will we ever know unless we leap from some tall tower? No man ever truly knows what he can do unless he dares to leap.There is the window. Leap. What do you want?The world.”

“All men must sleep, Bran. Even princes.”“When I sleep I turn into a wolf.” Bran turned his face away and looked back out into the night. “Do wolves dream?”“All creatures dream, I think, yet not as men do.”“Do dead men dream?” Bran asked, thinking of his father. In the dark crypts below Winterfell, a stonemason was chiseling out his father’s likeness in granite.“Some say yes, some no,” the maester answered. “The dead themselves are silent on the matter.”“Do trees dream?”“Trees? No . . .”“They do,” Bran said with sudden certainty. “They dream tree dreams. I dream of a tree sometimes. A weirwood, like the one in the godswood. It calls to me. The wolf dreams are better. I smell things, and sometimes I can taste the blood.”Maester Luwin tugged at his chain where it chafed his neck. “If you would only spend more time with the other children—”“I hate the other children,” Bran said, meaning the Walders. “I commanded you to send them away.”

“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.”

“You disappoint me, Arianne.Said the crow to the raven. You have been disappointing me for years, Father.”