Bran Stark

The second Stark son, a fearless climber who dreams of being a knight of the Kingsguard. His direwolf is Summer.

The fuller tale

Bran wanted to be a knight, and the tale made him something so much older that the word barely reaches. The second son of Ned and Catelyn was Winterfell's climber — seven years old, forbidden the walls by his mother, up them anyway, familiar with the castle's rooftops the way other boys know their own beds. What he found at the top of the First Keep's tower was the story's inciting secret, the queen and her brother, and what found him was Jaime Lannister's shove. The things I do for love: the tale begins in earnest with a boy falling.

He wakes weeks later with dead legs, a nameless grief, and a direwolf howling under his window — and with something extra that took root while he slept: a three-eyed crow in his coma dreams, promising him flight. The catspaw sent to finish him is finished instead by Summer, at his mother's torn hands; the fall's witness sleeps on inside him. Broken, he learns the hard arithmetic of being a lord's son who cannot walk in a world that calls the broken worthless — and learns, too, that he can slip his own skin into Summer's, running on four good legs while his two useless ones sleep.

As Robb rides south, Bran is the Stark in Winterfell — a child prince taking petitions from a basket on Hodor's back, counseled by Maester Luwin, guarded by his baby brother's temper and a captured wildling woman's knowledge. Theon's twenty men take the castle from under him; the boys escape into the crypts while their home burns over their heads, and two farm boys are hanged and tarred in their place. From the smoking ruin, the party splits: Rickon north with Osha, and Bran — with Hodor, Summer and the Reed siblings, who arrive like an answer to a question he hadn't asked — toward the Wall, chasing the crow of his dreams.

The journey north is the story's strangest pilgrimage: through the Wall's black gate, past Craster's Keep, across the haunted forest to a hill riddled with weirwood roots where the last greenseer waits — a pale man grown into a tree, the three-eyed raven, keeper of the world's memory. Bran learns to swim the past: his father young in the crypts, the tower of joy, the origin of the Others at the children's hands, and — in the tale's most devastating loop — the making of Hodor, a lesson in what his power costs paid by the person who carried him. The Night King's icy grip on his arm in a vision marks him, follows him home, and burns the cave and its keeper behind him.

What walks out of the north is Brandon Stark mostly in name. The Three-Eyed Raven who returns to Winterfell — flat-voiced, unsurprised, informative at socially catastrophic moments — is the realm's memory wearing a young man's face: the archive that proves Jon's birthright, the bait that draws the Night King into Arya's reach, the witness who tells Theon he was good. And when the wars are done and the lords gather to choose, Tyrion's argument carries the day: nothing beats a good story, and no one holds more of them. Bran the Broken, first of his name, King of the Andals and the First Men — the boy who fell from a tower, raised higher than any Stark before him.

He is the tale's answer to its own violence: after all the swords, the realm hands itself to the one person who cannot hold one and no longer wants anything at all. Whether that ending is wisdom or unease — a king with no desires, elected by the exhausted — is argued in every rewatch, which is presumably how the world's memory would want it.

The page and the screen

In the books Bran is still under the hill. His published story ends deep in his training with the last greenseer — who has a name and a history there: Brynden Rivers, Bloodraven, a Targaryen bastard, spymaster and Lord Commander of the Night's Watch a century gone — and the darkest hints in his chapters (the weirwood paste, old sacrifices before the heart tree, whispering to Theon through a tree in Winterfell's godswood) suggest a stranger and more troubling power than the show's serene oracle. The 'three-eyed crow' of the books became the show's 'three-eyed raven'; readers met a person, viewers met a function.

The road north differs too: the books escort him with Coldhands, an undead ranger on a great elk whom the show reduced to a single merged appearance, and Summer still lives on the page. Nothing in the published books points explicitly at a crown — the show's ending is, for Bran more than anyone, a destination announced before the books have laid the track, reportedly from the author's own map. Whether the page can make the journey feel inevitable is the adaptation's biggest outstanding IOU.

In the show, season by season

Season One. In Winter Is Coming — Climbs too well, sees too much, falls too far. In The Kingsroad — Sleeps on while a knife comes for him.

Season Two. In The Old Gods and the New — Gone into the dark with a giant and a wildling.

Season Three. In Dark Wings, Dark Words — The three-eyed raven has a name now, and a direction: north. In The Rains of Castamere — Enters Hodor's mind to still him — a thing no one has done.

Season Four. In Oathkeeper — Caught by mutineers with his secret one warg away. In First of His Name — So close to Jon he could call out — and can't afford to. In The Children — "You will never walk again. But you will fly."

Season Six. In Home — The past is a place he can visit now. It will cost him. In Oathbreaker — "Your father wasn't there." The past talks back. In The Door — Learned the price of the past: it can reach forward. In The Winds of Winter — Knows the realm's greatest secret and can tell no one yet.

Season Seven. In The Queen's Justice — Home — but what came back isn't quite Bran. In The Spoils of War — Hands Arya the Valyrian dagger meant to kill him.

Season Eight. In The Iron Throne — "Why do you think I came all this way?"

In the books

A Game of Thrones. In A Hand's Summons — The things he does for love — said the man who pushed him. In The Hand Investigates — A crow with three eyes keeps showing him the heart of winter.

A Clash of Kings. In Kings in Every Corner — Opens his third eye in dreams he can't refuse. In The Kraken in the Godswood — In the crypts below, listening to his own funeral. In Valar Morghulis — Says goodbye to his little brother in a crypt by candlelight.

A Dance with Dragons. In The Lost Lords — Coldhands leads them through the dead lands to the tree.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.