The Children & the Others
The oldest powers of Westeros ÔÇö the Children of the Forest and the greenseers who keep the memory of the world, and the White Walkers of ice and night who would end it.
The fuller tale
Before the First Men, before the Andals, before any king any house remembers, Westeros belonged to the children of the forest ÔÇö a small, ancient people who carved faces into weirwood trees and could see through their eyes across vast distances, greenseers whose memory the weirwood network still holds in the story's present, waiting for someone patient enough to listen. Their war with the invading First Men ended not in conquest but in the Pact, sworn on the Isle of Faces, dividing Westeros between the two peoples for four thousand years of uneasy, mostly-kept peace ÔÇö a treaty older than every subsequent war the story bothers to name.
Opposite the children stand the Others, ancient and nearly wordless enemies who wake once an age to bring the Long Night down on whoever is unprepared for it, walking in ice and cold with the dead marching behind them. What the two powers actually are ÔÇö how old, what they want, whether either is simply misunderstood rather than evil ÔÇö remains one of the saga's most carefully guarded mysteries, doled out in fragments through Bran Stark's visions and old wives' tales half the realm has stopped believing.
Bran's own arc runs directly into this older, colder history: trained by the last greenseer to see through the weirwoods and remember what the world forgot, he becomes the story's living bridge to everything that predates the great houses' quarrels entirely, memory itself made into a character with a body and a name. That the Long Night's final battle is fought and, in one telling, finished in Winterfell's own godswood ÔÇö the exact place where the North's old gods have always been kept ÔÇö is not coincidence so much as the story admitting, at last, which conflict was the real one all along.
The page and the screen
The show supplies an explicit origin for the Night King ÔÇö created by the children of the forest from a captured First Man, transformed with a shard of dragonglass through the heart, as a desperate weapon against human invaders that escaped their control. The published books have offered no such confirmed origin for the Others as a species or for any singular leader among them; their nature remains deliberately unresolved on the page, one of the largest open mysteries the novels have yet to address, which the show chose to answer decisively rather than leave hanging.
