#heart tree

The Tully look, blue eyes aside, is very intentionally created to resemble the heart tree, which is evident in the connection between Bran and these trees, who literally is in the process of becoming one if he does not stop. (Much like Brynden Rivers, a red-eyed albino with a red mark on his face, literally entwined with the tree.)

There is the visual parallel between mutilated Lady Stoneheart and a carved, sap-teared weirwood - they give her human sacrifices to slake her thirst for blood. They reside in a cave of weirwood roots much like Brynden. She had morphed into the personification of a very old magic.

And there was Sansa in the scene where the blood orange juice runs down her face and onto her white dress, or on the ramparts when she is bleeding and furious. Bereft. Murderous.

Clearly, these visual echoes have meaning. The tree as a person, as the faces carved into the weirwood, invites us to contemplate the connection between primal emotions (pain, grief, fury) that might inform the long memory within these magical trees that go back to a history even before the origin of the Wall and the Starks and the abnormal seasons. Centuries of feeding on blood.

Lady Stoneheart has given into those primal emotions, Bran is teetering on the edge, but we have seen Sansa pull away from it before. From self-destruction and from murder.

But that anger cannot be all that he old gods are.

"Your little one is with the gods now," the woods witch told his mother, as she wept. "He'll never hurt again, never hunger, never cry. The gods have taken him down into the earth, into the trees. The gods are all around us, in the rocks and streams, in the birds and beasts. Your Bump has gone to join them. He'll be the world and all that's in it." (ADWD, Prologue)

Varamyr's dying scene tells us this peaceful, almost joyful vision is true.

Ghost is a weirwood-colored wolf, blood and bone and he is life. A gift, a beast sent by the gods, who are the world and all that's in it. Jon's.

Ghost did not count. Ghost was closer than a friend. Ghost was part of him. (ADWD, Jon III)

And that part of him belongs to the old gods, and it belongs with...

They look as though they belong together. Val was clad all in white; white woolen breeches tucked into high boots of bleached white leather, white bearskin cloak pinned at the shoulder with a carved weirwood face, white tunic with bone fastenings. Her breath was white as well …  but her eyes were blue, her long braid the color of dark honey, her cheeks flushed red from the cold. It had been a long while since Jon Snow had seen a sight so lovely. (ADWD, Jon XI)

A carved weirwood face. More than anger and old pain, there can be life and renewal and beauty in that red and white color combination, and a weirwood's face does not need to be angry. Sansa drew back from anger, and so will Bran. So what can it mean?

There is a moment past crisis and grief. Recovery, renewal. The difficulty of reaching that place, and the necessity of doing so, and the destruction that follows the failure to do so, is a central theme in the books. So if Ghost visually belongs with a cheerful young woman with weirwood colors, we are being told something through that image.

It is an image that recalls Sansa in the middle of building her snow Winterfell. Flushed, joyful, creative.