Brynden Rivers
Bloodraven: a legitimized bastard of King Aegon the Unworthy and a Blackwood mother — albino, red-marked, and a sorcerer if the smallfolk are believed. Master of whisperers and, under King Aerys, Hand: a thousand eyes, and one. It was his weirwood arrow that ended Daemon Blackfyre at Redgrass Field.
The fuller tale
Born to King Aegon the Unworthy and a Blackwood mistress, Brynden Rivers enters the world already marked as strange — skin and hair drained of color, one eye said to burn a shade of red no ordinary birth explains, and a birthmark blooming dark across half his face that smallfolk take, depending on their mood, for either a raven’s wing or a stain of old blood. Legitimized alongside a clutch of his father’s other bastards in Aegon’s dying attempt to settle his tangled succession, Brynden shares that legitimization with the very half-siblings — Daemon Blackfyre foremost among them — whose claim to the throne he will spend the rest of his life working to destroy.
What he lacks in birthright he makes up in usefulness, and usefulness, in Brynden Rivers’s hands, becomes a kind of power the great lords never quite anticipate. At Redgrass Field, where the Blackfyre Rebellion reaches its crisis, it is his weirwood bow that ends Daemon Blackfyre and two of his sons in a single engagement — a feat that wins him the rebellion’s outcome and, from Daemon’s furious half-brother Bittersteel, a hatred and a missing eye that both follow him for the rest of his days.
Under King Aerys and beyond, Brynden Rivers becomes Hand of the King and master of whisperers in the same span of years, running the machinery of the realm less through armies than through information — tax rolls, ravens, and a reputation, cultivated as carefully as any weapon, for seeing everything that happens anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms through a thousand watching eyes and one real one. Whether the reputation is more sorcery or more theater is a question the smallfolk debate; either way, it does its work.
That reputation reaches its fullest expression at Whitewalls, where a gathering of old Blackfyre loyalists under Lord Butterwell’s roof believes itself well hidden and is, instead, precisely where Brynden Rivers wants it — watched, catalogued, and finally surrounded before a single planned battle can be fought. The Second Blackfyre Rebellion ends not on a field but in a courtyard, because Bloodraven has already done, quietly, everything a war would otherwise have required.
His methods leave him with few friends and a great many enemies among the lords whose secrets he keeps, and the tale gives him one of its strangest final turns even within its own limited frame: a man whose value to the crown was always his ability to know things others could not, eventually sent to serve at the one place in Westeros where knowing things stops mattering in any of the ways the court understands. What becomes of him beyond that posting belongs to a history the tales themselves only hint at.
The page and the screen
Bloodraven does not appear in the events of The Hedge Knight and so has not yet been cast or featured in the show’s aired first season — his significant page time belongs to The Mystery Knight, material no confirmed season has adapted as of this writing. His outsized reputation in the books rests on comparatively few direct scenes and a great deal of implication, which will make him an intriguing casting challenge whenever the production reaches that novella; viewers of the original Game of Thrones series will already recognize the older incarnation of this character by another name entirely, giving any future casting an unusual amount of built-in anticipation.
In the books
The Mystery Knight. In The Black Dragon and the White — Bloodraven: a thousand eyes, one, and an army that was never far away.
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.