Leaf

One of the Children of the Forest, the small, ancient, golden-eyed first people of Westeros, keepers of secrets older than the First Men.

The fuller tale

Leaf is one of the last of the children of the forest — the small, dappled, golden-eyed people who were singing in Westeros ten thousand years before the First Men brought bronze and axes across the Arm of Dorne. The children fought the newcomers, made peace on the Isle of Faces, taught the old gods to the men who had come to kill them, and then spent a hundred centuries diminishing — retreating north, then beyond the Wall, then under it, into the hollow hill where the last greenseer sits in his roots. Leaf is among the few who remain: a being the size of a child and older than most human houses, tending the world’s memory in the dark.

To Bran Stark’s ragged company she is rescue, guide and gentle disillusionment in one. It is Leaf who meets them at the cave mouth with fire against the dead, Leaf who feeds them and answers what may be asked, and Leaf who delivers, in her strange singing accent, the elegy of her whole race: the children are not hiding, they are ending — going out slowly, like an ember, while the world that replaced them forgets they were ever real. The tale gives its oldest people its quietest voice, and lets her matter-of-fact sorrow do what no battle scene could: make ten thousand years of loss feel like a household grief.

The show hands her one more burden — authorship. In a vision of the Dawn Age, Bran watches Leaf and her kin bind a captive First Man to a weirwood and press dragonglass into his heart, making the first White Walker: a weapon, she admits when he confronts her, forged in desperation when men were cutting down the children’s trees and the children’s throats. It is the saga’s bleakest irony delivered in its smallest voice — the world’s ending was invented by its first people, in self-defense, and has outlived every war it was made for.

The page and the screen

Book-Leaf carries the same elegy with different particulars. On the page she has walked in the lands of men — sent out young into the world beyond the cave, which is why her Common Tongue is fluent where her kin sing only the True Tongue — and she is emphatic that the children do not call themselves children at all; the name is men’s, and their own means those who sing the song of earth. Above all, the books never make her a weaponsmith: the Others’ origin remains a genuine mystery in the published novels, with no scene of dragonglass and no confession, and many readers doubt the show’s creation story reflects the books’ eventual answer. Book-Leaf is alive in the published story, still keeping the cave with her dwindling kin; her death in the tunnel, like the raid that causes it, is the screen’s invention.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The dead pour in. Summer dies, the Raven dies, Leaf dies — and Hodor holds the door as a boy's whole life collapses into one word. (S6·E5)

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

The show: Fell defending the cave (S6·E5)

One of the last children of the forest, who made the first White Walker in a desperate age and spent ten thousand years regretting it. She died buying seconds in the tunnel, a fire-bomb in her fist, swallowed by wights.

The show gives the last of the first people a rearguard’s death. When the Night King’s host breaches the greenseer’s hollow hill, Leaf and her remaining kin hold the tunnels with fire and obsidian while Bran is dragged toward the daylight — a species’ final battle fought in a corridor, buying seconds apiece. Cornered at the last with the wights closing from every side, Leaf lets them come: she waits until the dead are on her, a fire-charge clenched in her fist, and vanishes in the blast, spending the last of herself to seal the passage behind the survivors. The creature that made the first White Walker dies unmaking a few of his soldiers — ten thousand years of regret discharged in a single light. She is alive in the published books.