Edge of the Land of Always Winter, deep in the Haunted Forest.
When the Children of the Forest finally shook off the blinding flash and thunderous crash, the cave was already choking with flames and thick black smoke.
They were far smaller than humans, with deep-brown skin like polished nuts, pale dappled markings like a deer's, oversized ears that caught sounds no man ever heard, and large cat-like eyes—clear golden-green with narrow slit pupils.
Their hands had only three fingers and a thumb, tipped with sharp black claws instead of nails.
They lived inside a low hill riddled with weirwood trees. Over centuries the pale roots had eaten the entire interior hollow.
That was why the steel-and-flame vessel from the sky punched straight through the hilltop and slammed down right in front of the weirwood throne woven from blood-red leaves.
On the throne sat a pale king adorned in ebony.
His body was frail and withered, clothes hanging in rags. He looked more corpse than man. Thick roots wrapped around and through him, holding the broken frame upright.
The little skin left was deathly white, broken only by a blood-red birthmark crawling from neck to cheek. His white hair trailed like roots across the dirt floor.
More roots coiled around his thighs like wooden pythons; one bored into his dried-up leg and burst out at the shoulder. Dark-red leaves sprouted across his skull, and gray mushrooms clustered on his forehead.
The last of his skin stretched tight over his face, hard as boiled leather and cracking at the edges while brown and yellow mycelium squirmed underneath.
Now it was all burning.
The fire from the sky swallowed everything it touched—including the king who had almost become one with the tree.
It was hard to believe he was still alive. His face showed surprise and shock, but never pain or fear.
Only when the flames licked up through his white hair and reached his forehead did that ruined face finally change. In the end it settled into an eerie calm.
The Children of the Forest, cut off by the wall of fire, desperately tried to grow vines and roots to seal off the blaze. All they did was feed it more fuel.
They cried out in low, haunting voices, but the heat and the threat of death drove them deeper underground through the maze of tunnels.
There were so few of them left. They could not afford any more losses. They had to escape before their protective magic failed and the white walkers arrived.
The flames raged unchecked from midday until dusk. Whole stands of weirwood turned to ash. Large sections of the hill collapsed inward.
Only when nothing remained to burn and silence fell did the steel vessel that had brought the disaster finally show its true shape.
It was a man-made object, rounded on top and flat at the bottom, like an enormous bell from some giant clock tower. Its outer shell was scorched jet-black by re-entry, but it showed no sign of having crumpled on impact.
Then came a harsh metallic screech.
If any Children had still been nearby, their big ears would have flicked in disgust at the unnatural sound.
Moments later a seam split open along the side. A two-foot-wide circular hatch pushed outward.
A pale, swollen arm emerged, followed by a shoulder, then a smooth, hairless head with no facial features. The torso and legs came next.
The strange creature tumbled clumsily out and face-planted into the ash. It didn't seem to mind the heat; it simply lay there a while among the still-smoldering embers.
Only when the freezing wind howled through the ruins did it push up with one hand and slowly kneel.
Its pale skin was marked with symmetrical red patterns—an intricate red spear-like design on the front, a strange rectangular bulge on the back etched with irregular block characters.
Any human from Earth would have recognized those characters as simplified for "Blue Star United Aerospace Group."
As time passed, the bitter wind quickly stole away the remaining heat.
Inside the heavy spacesuit, Lynn felt like every bone in his body had been run over by a truck. His organs felt knocked out of place.
Even so, he could hardly believe he was still alive.
A routine near-Earth spaceflight had gone completely wrong. First the auto-return program glitched, then comms died, and finally the parachutes refused to deploy.
Had he really survived?
Lynn painfully turned his head to look at the blackened return capsule. The parachutes had definitely never opened.
As for the retro rockets… without parachutes they were useless.
So how the hell am I still alive?
He couldn't make sense of it.
Before he could think any further, he spotted a burned corpse through his helmet visor.
Or what was left of one. Only half a charred skull and the main torso remained recognizable as human.
Lynn's heart sank. He hadn't expected his crash to kill an innocent bystander.
Legally he probably wasn't liable, but the guilt still hit him hard.
He staggered to his feet, only to collapse back into the ash. His head spun and he nearly threw up.
He yanked off the helmet and dropped to his knees, dry-heaving from shock and guilt.
After spitting up a little sour bile, he wiped his mouth and sat down heavily.
He had no idea where he had landed, but after something this big, Blue Star United Aerospace would be tracking and coming for him immediately.
Still… this poor bastard really got screwed by fate.
Once he calmed a little, Lynn felt a wave of pity for the dead man.
In such a remote, desolate place, the odds of getting smashed by a crashing spacecraft were insane.
Probably some extreme hiker who had camped nearby.
He wanted to cover the body with something, but there was nothing left. Everything around him had burned to the ground.
That was when he heard a sound like porcelain shattering.
A chill ran down his spine. The noise had come from the burned remains.
Lynn was a firm materialist, but he was alone in the middle of nowhere, fresh off a near-death experience. Feeling spooked was only natural.
Fortunately, whatever made the sound soon revealed itself.
It rolled out.
Lynn stared as an egg-shaped object bigger than an ostrich egg pushed free from the ash. Its surface was covered in glassy scales of blood-red and silver-gold that shimmered with faint inner light. Most of the scales were red.
It wriggled free, rolled a few times, and stopped right at his feet.
He figured it was some artifact the dead man had been carrying that had cracked from the heat and sudden cooling.
He nudged it gently with his boot.
The egg split open with a sharp crack. The fragments turned dull gray-white, like stone.
The next instant a horned, snake-like head burst out. Its slender neck glowed vivid red. Two leathery bone wings flapped open.
Lynn jerked back.
Before he could react, two small, pale eyes locked onto his and drilled straight into his mind.
In that moment an overwhelming will slammed into him, followed by an ocean of memories and knowledge crashing over his consciousness like a tidal wave, trying to scour away everything that made him who he was.
On pure instinct he understood what was coming: his will would be erased, his body taken over, and his own meager memories would drown in the flood.
Lynn Morningstar would cease to exist.
But then something strange happened.
The incredibly powerful will and near-infinite stream of information thrashed violently, searching for any purchase but finding none. It was like swinging a sledgehammer through empty air—terrifying force with almost no effect.
The struggle lasted ten minutes, an hour, or perhaps only a single heartbeat.
Whatever it wanted, it got nothing.
Just as Lynn thought the nightmare was ending, his mind surged again.
Every memory of his life was violently ripped out and flashed before him at blinding speed. Strangely there was only imagery—no language or words attached.
It felt like watching a silent, twenty-year color film of his own life in perfect detail.
When the images reached the many movies he had watched, the flashing suddenly slowed.
Before that sequence finished, the foreign will howled and fled—fast and decisively.
Lynn sensed it hadn't left cleanly. It had been forced to leave something behind.
Among the remnants was a special ability, plus many memories belonging to a man named Brynden Rivers.
Those memories were enough to let him understand the impossible situation he now faced.
"Westeros… the Seven Kingdoms… the First Men… the Andals… the Old Gods and the New… the Wall…"
As consciousness returned to his body, Lynn muttered like a man in a trance:
"Children of the Forest… greenseers… the Three-Eyed Crow… Ha. The Three-Eyed Crow!"
He breathed hard, still shaken by yet another brush with death.
The entity had come fast and left fast. It hadn't actually hurt him.
But the syllables coming from his throat were no longer in the language he had spoken his entire life.
They were now in the Common Tongue of Westeros.