Leave my mind.
Furious snow had killed the fire, but the forest was still smoking. White-hot pains rung through his belly and eye. Any movement he tried to make, agony hit him where the spears were still stuck. He saw the White Walkers surround him with their army of corpses.
Please, leave my mind alone!
In his dying breath, he opened his mouth feebly to try to burn as many as he could. All that escaped his jaws was cool smoke. They are going to turn me. The feeble effort was the last he could muster before they climbed on him like roaches. It was over in seconds.
“They must come to save me,” he heard. “They must.”
Bran was in the dungeons. No, I must go back! He squeezed his eyes shut, willing his mind to focus, to find the Lands of Always Winter again, but when he opened his eyes, all he saw was the dungeons. “They must come to save me,” the man was still saying, chewing his white hair. Flies began encircling him, and he vigorously shook his head to drive them away. In that moment, his face, previously covered in tangled locks, was exposed, and Bran recognized the gaunt, dirty face of Mad King Aerys Targaryen.
He suddenly realized where he was, and what was happening. The Defiance of Duskendale. When, for several months, King Aerys was captured by the Lord of Duskendale, before being rescued by Tywin Lannister and Barristan Selmy. Bran was more than five-and-twenty years back in time, he realized, the time before the fall of House Targaryen.
The voice of the Three-Eyed Raven came back to him in macabre reminder. “The past is already written. The ink is dry,” it said, but it was up to him to change it. The Walkers were a legion of a hundred thousand, maybe more, and now they had an ice dragon. The fall of man must be prevented, even if the cost was time. “Aerys,” he said aloud. “Aerys! Aerys! Aerys!”
The Mad King was suddenly alert. “Who is that? Who speaks?”
He can hear me! Aerys could hear, but not see him. No matter, it was good enough. “I come from the future!” he yelled, hoping against hope he was still heard. “The army of the dead is on the march! The Night King, the White Walkers, they are all real! Send every man you can spare north of the Wall! Only you can do this, do you hear? You are the chosen one! Burn them! Burn them all!”
Bran felt himself pull away from the dungeon, his mind taking him to another memory. He tried his best to stay, to listen to his response. “Do you hear me?” he said, voice increasingly desperate. “Do you hear me?” Change history, please, maybe Father will still live, maybe Robb, Rickon…
The last Brandon Stark saw, before the dungeons dissolved, was the Mad King’s eyes lighting up in realization. “Yes,” he said. “I am the chosen one. A dragon does not kneel.”
*
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