The visions had not ended.

  Gojo staggered as more truth surged through him like lightning through a cursed tool. Bran the Builder—no longer just a myth, no longer just a name carved into stone. He was a man, weighed down by regrets, decisions, and blood.

  Gojo saw how Bran, after building the Wall, did not rest. With the help of the Children of the Forest, he constructed other fortresses across Westeros—strongholds interwoven with magic, designed to repel the touch of the White Walkers and the darkness beyond. Storm’s End, Hightower, Moat Cailin… each one held whispers of the old blood, the old ways.

  And at the heart of it all, Bran created Winterfell.

  A root. A core. A home.

  The seat of House Stark. The family that would bind the pact in blood, generation after generation.

  Gojo saw the truth in Bran’s design: if the Starks ever abandoned Winterfell, the magic in the Wall would collapse. The blood would run dry. The sacrifices would cease. The moon would rise again.

  "Winter is coming."

  Not a warning for the world.

  But for the Starks themselves.

  Bran married. Had children. Laughed. Loved. But none of it washed away what he’d done. In every quiet night, he heard the screams of those frozen into the Wall. And even when his children asked for stories, all he saw were weirwood roots, coiling like veins beneath the earth.

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  So, when the time came, Bran did not resist the call of the Night’s Watch. He became the Thirteenth Lord Commander—the man who built the Wall, swearing to die in it.

  It was penance. Justice. A twisted circle of duty.

  Until she came.

  A woman from Asshai. Pale as dawnlight, with eyes like silver flame. She came to the Wall cloaked in shadow and snow, bearing secrets old as the stars.

  She whispered to Bran of the truth he had never been told.

  Of the moon shard buried deep in the Land of Always Winter. Of how the Children of the Forest had worshipped it—not as a god, but as a weapon. Fed with blood, pulsing with ancient hunger. A tool to call down one of the three moons of world, to veil Westeros in night.

  She told him the Children had never stopped.

  That the glass candles were their newer, crueler invention—tools of cursed preservation. That they could use them to keep a man alive indefinitely—not in body, but in soul. That they used the blood of these men to craft the White Walkers. Controlled. Artificial. Designed to strike when sacrifice waned.

  She told him the pact had never been peace.

  It had been control.

  Bran did not believe her—not at first. He ordered her gone, furious that she dared speak against the Children who had given him his power, his magic, his purpose.

  But after she left… Bran began to see.

  He followed the weirwood roots further than ever before. Backwards. Into times older than memory. And the deeper he looked, the darker the truth became.

  Everything the woman had said… was true.

  The Children had manipulated him.

  Manipulated everyone.

  Bran, the boy who wanted to save the world, had helped create its prison.

  Gojo watched the agony bloom on Bran’s face like a wound. The betrayal of it. The knowledge that all his pain, all his sacrifices… had fed something worse.

  The winter moon was not gone.

  It had only waited.