Of Dragons and Trees: The Final ADWD Chapters of ASOIAF’s Most Magical Monarchs
ADWD is not the favorite, or even second or third favorite, book for a large part of the fandom. It does however have some of its finest prose and chapters; Theon, Bran, and Arya, especially.
A line from Bran’s last chapter, in particular, struck me:
You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now, or you’ll go dreaming into death.
Bran’s final ADWD chapter is intensely dreamlike, with time flowing past, and moving to past, present, and future with little distinction. Even more, it’s something that connects him to ASOIAF’s other most magically infused character; Dany. Her own final chapter is defined by visions,. She muses that,
If I stay here, I will die. I may be dying now.
When she closed her eyes at last, Dany did not know whether she would be strong enough to open them again.
She dreamt of her dead brother.
What follows is a series of intense and symbolic hallucinations.
Each reaches a moment where they go as far from the human world and into the magical as they have ever gone, and will likely go, and each confronts and ultimately accepts the legacy that their monarchical ancestors have left them.
Their journeys, one upward flight toward the light, and the other a descent into darkness, mirror each other. One accepts (for better or worse), that “dragons plant no trees”, and like her ancestor Aegon the Conqueror and the Valyrians, she must forge her destiny through war. The other is told that he must regrow his identity, and his home, from the roots, from dark places both literal and emotional: “Never fear the darkness, Bran. The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk. Darkness will make you strong.” In his vision of the sacrifice to weirwood, he sees how that “monstrous stone tree” (Winterfell) was grown.
Fire and Earth: The Conqueror and the Builder
The legendary monarchs of the past, even though their names are rarely spoken, dominate the background of Dany and Bran’s narrative, much like the mythological and fantasy material that GRRM draws from an author to structure his writing. For these two POV’s, it is their ancestors Aegon the Conqueror and Brandon the Builder. Each struggles throughout their chapters with the intensely magical legacy left to them through a long, hallucinatory journey of revelatory visions and because of that abandon the remnants of their childhood selves, and childhood desires in their final chapter of ADWD.
Indeed, their ancestors’ approach to creating their realms is embodied in elements they are closely associated with, the monoliths they left behind, the magical creatures that aided them and in their very names.
Aegon, of course, did not create a realm of his own: he conquered it, and in a single, swift wave of violence akin to fire, forged the 7 kingdoms into one, a process symbolized by his signature creation, the Iron Throne. The swords of enemies were melted together by dragonfire as much as his dominion was.
Because of its role in creative destruction, fire is also the element of change and idealism, destroying old orders to create new ones. For this reason, fire and the dragons (“fire made flesh”) appeal have to Dany in ways that she would rather not admit. In her heart, she wishes to completely wipe away slavery and the slaveowners and build an utterly new world, which seems only possible with massive violence:
Aegon the Conqueror brought fire and blood to Westeros, but afterward he gave them peace, prosperity, and justice.-Dany, ASOS
I hate this, thought Daenerys Targaryen. How did this happen, that I am drinking and smiling with men I’d sooner flay? … This is peace, she told herself. This is what I wanted, what I worked for, this is why I married Hizdahr. So why does it taste so much like defeat?-Dany, ADWD
Dany’s life has many suggestive parallels to her ancestor Aegon I; each is a dragonrider, each comes (or will come) to Westeros as a conqueror, and he desires to radically reshape Westeros as a way of reclaiming a lost legacy. In his case, he appears to have been trying to imitate in some way the Valyrian Freehold, but in Dany’s case it is to imitate him.
By contrast, the Builder and his heirs built the Stark realm steadily and gradually over the centuries in a process symbolized by Winterfell and its heart tree’s growth:
The place had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree, Maester Luwin told him once, and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth. -Bran, AGOT
The [heart] tree itself was shrinking, growing smaller with each vision, whilst the lesser trees dwindled into saplings and vanished, only to be replaced by other trees that would dwindle and vanish in their turn.-Bran, ADWD
Bran’s vision is a journey backwards in time, so the heart tree grew larger over time.
Similar the Conqueror, the Builder’s work required blood.
Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.
“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth … but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.
While the Starks have associations with the element of ice, their primary connections are to the element of earth. Much like the Builder’s greatest works (Winterfell, Storm’s End, possibly even the Hightower, and even the Wall) are strong and enduring, still standing after thousands of years.
Whereas the power of fire as manifest in the dragons is the power to destroy and forge (a fundamentally inorganic process), the power of earth as manifest in the weirwood and infused into Winterfell, is to know and control. Greenseeing provides a limitless well of knowledge and wisdom, and skinchanging allows a human to create a lasting and powerful bond that can be either symbiotic, as with the warg, or parasitic, as with Varamyr and the bear (who hated him).
The Dragon and Winterfell
Dany’s dragons, as beings that she gave life in a ritual act of burning, are the direct catalyst of the identity she has for herself: A Mother, and in particular, the Mother of Dragons.
Dany struggles to accept the full implications of the role. Her dragons are wild, “fire made flesh” and often leave chaos in their wake:
The winged shadow, the grieving father called him. He was the largest of her three, the fiercest, the wildest, with scales as black as night and eyes like pits of fire.
Dany did not want to talk about the dragons. Farmers still came to her court with burned bones, complaining of missing sheep, though Drogon had not returned to the city. Some reported seeing him north of the river, above the grass of the Dothraki sea. Down in the pit, Viserion had snapped one of his chains; he and Rhaegal grew more savage every day.
At the same time, Dany finds that violent power alluring:
“If you were grown,” she told Drogon, scratching him between the horns, “I’d fly you over the walls and melt that harpy down to slag.”
Her desires for peace are ultimately impossible, both because of the warlike idealism embodied in the dragons, and because of her circumstances (namely the implacability of her enemies, the slave masters). Simply put, war and violence suit her deeper impulses:
I hate this, thought Daenerys Targaryen. How did this happen, that I am drinking and smiling with men I’d sooner flay? … This is peace, she told herself. This is what I wanted, what I worked for, this is why I married Hizdahr. So why does it taste so much like defeat? –Dany, ADWD
All of the entertainers were slaves. That had been part of the peace, that slaveowners be allowed the right to bring their chattels into Meereen without fear of having them freed. In return the Yunkai’i had promised to respect the rights and liberties of the former slaves that Dany had freed. A fair bargain, Hizdahr said, but the taste it left in the queen’s mouth was foul. She drank another cup of wine to wash it out.-Dany, ADWD.
Fire, dragons, and war offer Dany what she truly craves: total, complete victory over the slaveowners that she so deeply hates.
In contrast to the fire-forged Iron Throne, Winterfell is described as being an almost organic creation; asymmetrical, somehow sentient and with a will of its own:
Winterfell was a grey stone labyrinth of walls and towers and courtyards and tunnels spreading out in all directions. In the older parts of the castle, the halls slanted up and down so that you couldn’t even be sure what floor you were on. The place had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree, Maester Luwin told him once, and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth.
The builders had not even leveled the earth; there were hills and valleys behind the walls of Winterfell.-Bran, AGOT
It forbids and resents the intrusion of outsiders, something that non-Starks feel intensely, in the godswood and the crypts most of all:
Catelyn had never liked this godswood… It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of moist earth and decay…This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows
[Tyrion] remembered their godswood… That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder.-Tyrion, ACOK
[Jon] dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he passed, and their grey granite fingers tightened on the hilts of the rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here.-Jon, ASOS
“Strong” is a quality attached to Winterfell, to other associated symbols of House Stark, and one that Bran aspires too and that draws him down the path toward becoming the Rebuilder, exploring the magic he’s inherited.
The grey is strong. Stronger than he knows.”-Jojen about Bran/Summer, ACOK.
The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.-Bran, ACOK
[He was] Prince of the green, prince of the wolfswood. He was strong and swift and fierce, and all that lived in the good green world went in fear of him.-Bran, ASOS
Whereas Dany is drawn to the dragon because it promises uncompromising victory and power in contrast to a young queen who must negotiate, Bran seeks strength as a wolf and lord of Winterfell as a way to endure, to have a kind of dignity from that in contrast to his brokenness.
Bran and Dany’s final chapters in ADWD are in many senses the climax of their training in magical monarchy. They take journeys as far from the human world, of its sophistication, comforts, and pretenses, into the world of magic as they have ever been or will likely go. And they mirror perfectly, the queen ascending out and upward toward the sun and blue sky from which fire comes, and the king down and into the darkest reaches from which the weirwood and Winterfell, grow. Each lives for hours, even days at a time, inside intense visions of magical and supernatural significance, and the intensity of this experience breaks them to their base elements and rebuilds them anew. The visions are of such a vivid quality, Bran in particular has a hard time differentiating them from physical reality:
Some days Bran wondered if all of this wasn’t just some dream. Maybe he had fallen asleep out in the snows and dreamed himself a safe, warm place. You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now, or you’ll go dreaming into death. Once or twice he pinched his arm with his fingers, really hard, but the only thing that did was make his arm hurt. In the beginning he had tried to count the days by making note of when he woke and slept, but down here sleeping and waking had a way of melting into one another. Dreams became lessons, lessons became dreams, things happened all at once or not at all. Had he done that or only dreamed it?
[Dany] dreamed. All her cares fell away from her, and all her pains as well, and she seemed to float upward into the sky. She was flying once again, spinning, laughing, dancing, as the stars wheeled around her and whispered secrets in her ear. “To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”
“Quaithe?” Dany called. “Where are you, Quaithe?”
Then she saw. Her mask is made of starlight. “Remember who you are, Daenerys,” the stars whispered in a woman’s voice. “The dragons know. Do you?”
Dany’s journey is literally searing flight marked by burning and fire, and takes place where literally no trees grow:
The rocks had scraped her hands raw…Her skin was pink and tender, and a pale milky fluid was leaking from her cracked palms, but her burns were healing.
The air smelled of ash, every rock and tree in sight was scorched and blackened, the ground strewn with burned and broken bones, yet it had been home to him.
Dany knew the lure of home.
She had survived as best she could on the dragon’s leavings, on burned bones and chunks of smoking meat, half-charred and half-raw.
The sun grew hotter as it rose, and before long her head was pounding.
She might live for years amongst the sunbaked rocks of Dragonstone
“Drogon killed a little girl. Her name was … her name …” Dany could not recall the child’s name. That made her so sad that she would have cried if all her tears had not been burned away
…her feet sore and blistered.
The day grew warmer, and the sun beat down upon her head and the burnt remnants of her hair.
Dany, starved, slid off his back and ate with him, ripping chunks of smoking meat from the dead horse with bare, burned hands
Bran’s is consumed with darkness:
Under the hill, the broken boy sat upon a weirwood throne, listening to whispers in the dark as ravens walked up and down his arms.
Down here there was no wind, no snow, no ice, no dead things reaching out to grab you, only dreams and rushlight and the kisses of the ravens. And the whisperer in darkness.
Under the hill, Jojen brooded, Meera fretted, and Hodor wandered through dark tunnels with a sword in his right hand and a torch in his left.
No sunlight ever reached the caves beneath the hill. No moonlight ever touched those stony halls. Even the stars were strangers there.
Light entered as a trespasser, unwanted and unwelcome, and soon was gone again; cookfires, candles, and rushes burned for a little while, then guttered out again, their brief lives at an end.
He liked it better when the torches were put out. In the dark he could pretend that it was the three-eyed crow who whispered to him and not some grisly talking corpse.
He raised a hand, and the other singers began to move about the cavern, extinguishing the torches one by one. The darkness thickened and crept toward them.
In the raw and fearsome dream they enter, two signature passages mark themselves as embodying, right or wrong, the inheritance left to Bran and Dany by their monarchical ancestors:
“Never fear the darkness, Bran. The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk. Darkness will make you strong.”
You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.
Each frames the choice to accept this legacy within the context their inability, or failure, to be anything else:
Meereen was not her home, and never would be. It was a city of strange men with strange gods and stranger hair, of slavers wrapped in fringed tokars, where grace was earned through whoring, butchery was art, and dog was a delicacy. Meereen would always be the Harpy’s city, and Daenerys could not be a harpy.
I was going to be a knight, Bran remembered. I used to run and climb and fight. It seemed a thousand years ago…
Bran did not want to be married to a tree … but who else would wed a broken boy like him? A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. A greenseer.
Bran and Dany also understand the to choice as a complete and total abandonment of their childhood dreams or childish wants:
He had thought the three-eyed crow would be a sorcerer, a wise old wizard who could fix his legs, but that was some stupid child’s dream, he realized now. I am too old for such fancies.
You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros. “It is such a long way,” she complained. “I was tired, Jorah. I was weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow. I am only a young girl.”
Ultimately, they accept it, ready to return to the human world with their old selves discarded and their new identities, ones created for them by their ancestors and destiny itself:
A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. A greenseer.
He ate.
“Fire and Blood,” Daenerys told the swaying grass
One author characterizes Dany’s intoning of her house’s words as “a rejection of Meereen. A rejection of peace. A rejection of bending over backward to protect innocent life. A rejection of ‘planting trees.’ And instead, an embrace of vague, violent rhetoric about who she is ‘made to be’ — and her words, ‘fire and blood.’
Bran’s own final vision shows him the blood price of what it took to draw from the magic of the heart tree, and imbue its strength into the “monstrous stone tree” that is Winterfell:
Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.
“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth … but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.
Fitting with Bran’s other connections to the Fisher King,(also called “the Wounded King”) before he drinks blood from ASOIAF’s equivalent of the Holy Grail, he is still “the broken boy”, but once he does, he is “Brandon Stark” having now seen the greatest extent of the Builder’s legacy and been healed by divinity.
The same writer at the Meereenese Blot concluded based on Dany’s final chapter:
Since the first book, Dany has been tormented by the innocent lives lost when she unleashes violence and war. Now, she has apparently resolved to stop letting all this bother her. Her new ‘fire and blood’ approach just seems likely to lead to many more Astapors and thousands more Hazzeas. But in this chapter Dany seems prepared to write them off, as sad but necessary collateral damage of her embracing her true ‘dragon’ self and who she was ‘made to be.’
This is the tragedy of Dany. She achieved peace. And then she decided war felt better to her.
But if Bran’s visions of the sacrifices to the heart tree, TWIOAF accounts of the wars that were “legion” between House Stark and its rivals, (namely the Boltons), and Ser Bartimus’s tale of the entrails hung in the branches of its notably huge weirwood after the victory of Brandon the Ice Eyes, tell us anything, it is that while the Conqueror and the Builder may have taken fundamentally opposite approaches to ruling and expanding their realms, blood (a lot of blood), was always a part of the price. And whether it is the ability of bend other living beings to your will, as Bran does with animals, even with another human being, (an abomination he does not grasp the moral ramifications of), or the total indiscriminate destructive force of the dragon, so was the use of fearsome power.
Their final chapters mark the furthest extent of their travel from the human world, and also an end of their childhood. In a very real sense, Bran and Dany do not return from their transmigrations. Those young children aren’t coming back, monarchs are: Brandon Stark, King of Winter, and Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons.
