Bran can only see the past; he can’t see the future

Potential Spoilers Below

I believe that Bran is mostly responsible for most of the prophecies within the books.  I also believe that it is impossible for him to see the future.  This I believe is corroborated by what is said in the books.  A greenseer can see anything that has passed as easy as skipping to your favorite movie/TV scene on a DVD.  Think of it this way; you go back in time today a thousand years and have a computer with accurate information of the past.  A significant event is about to occur and you tell someone of those events but they don’t quite believe you.  Once the event has passed, they recall what you have said and dub you a prophet.  This to me is what Bran does.  He has total recall of all the events that came before but nothing of tomorrow.  Simply put he doesn’t know what happens tomorrow because it hasn’t happened yet.  I believe that there is one exception to a greenseer’s ability to see all and I will cover that later.

“Bran’s throat was very dry. He swallowed. “Winterfell. I was back in Winterfell. I saw my father. He’s not dead, he’s not, I saw him, he’s back at Winterfell, he’s still alive.”

“No,” said Leaf. “He is gone, boy. Do not seek to call him back from death.”

“I saw him.” Bran could feel rough wood pressing against one cheek. “He was cleaning Ice.”

“You saw what you wished to see. Your heart yearns for your father and your home, so that is what you saw.”

“A man must know how to look before he can hope to see,” said Lord Brynden. “Those were shadows of days past that you saw, Bran. You were looking through the eyes of the heart tree in your godswood. Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak. And the weirwood … a thousand human years are a moment to a weirwood, and through such gates you and I may gaze into the past.”

“But,” said Bran, “he heard me.”

“He heard a whisper on the wind, a rustling amongst the leaves. You cannot speak to him, try as you might. I know. I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them. The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it.”

“Will I see my father again?”

“Once you have mastered your gifts, you may look where you will and see what the trees have seen, be it yesterday or last year or a thousand ages past. Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth’s wing, and past, present, and future are one. Nor will your sight be limited to your godswood. The singers carved eyes into their heart trees to awaken them, and those are the first eyes a new greenseer learns to use … but in time you will see well beyond the trees themselves.”

“When?” Bran wanted to know.

“In a year, or three, or ten. That I have not glimpsed. It will come in time, I promise you. But I am tired now, and the trees are calling me. We will resume on the morrow.”

My theory suggests that Bran physically went back in time at some point that we haven’t reached yet most likely to escape the Night King in the TV show.  HBO lends credibility to this by the season 1 DVD where they released a picture of Bran the Builder being carried around, as if he couldn’t walk, while directing others in the building of the Wall.  This to me is shown in the books in the following excerpt.

Bran the Builder directing the building of the Wall.  Notice that he is being carried around as if he can't walk.

“The songs said that Storm’s End had been raised in ancient days by Durran, the first Storm King, who had won the love of the fair Elenei, daughter of the sea god and the goddess of the wind. On the night of their wedding, Elenei had yielded her maidenhood to a mortal’s love and thus doomed herself to a mortal’s death, and her grieving parents had unleashed their wrath and sent the winds and waters to batter down Durran’s hold. His friends and brothers and wedding guests were crushed beneath collapsing walls or blown out to sea, but Elenei sheltered Durran within her arms so he took no harm, and when the dawn came at last he declared war upon the gods and vowed to rebuild.

“Five more castles he built, each larger and stronger than the last, only to see them smashed asunder when the gale winds came howling up Shipbreaker Bay, driving great walls of water before them. His lords pleaded with him to build inland; his priests told him he must placate the gods by giving Elenei back to the sea; even his smallfolk begged him to relent. Durran would have none of it. A seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder. No matter how the tale was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm after storm against it, the seventh castle stood defiant, and Durran Godsgrief and fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their days.”

When Bran goes back in time, he has the knowledge or can access the events of everything that has ever occurred from the day, hour, minute and second that he went back.  Lord Brynden, aka Bloodraven, and the 3-eyed crow from the TV show tells Bran that he can’t interact with anyone in the past but Bran seems to be the exception to this rule for whatever reason.  The look on the 3-eyed crow when he realizes this in the TV show lets us know that this is the case.  What would happen if Bran, the exception to this rule, started using glass candles in conjunction with his talent?  Or does he have the ability to do on his own what others do with glass candles?  Would he be able to do what Archmaester Marwyn suggests to Sam?

“What feeds a dragon’s fire?” Marwyn seated himself upon a stool. “All Valyrian sorcery was rooted in blood or fire. The sorcerers of the Freehold could see across mountains, seas, and deserts with one of these glass candles. They could enter a man’s dreams and give him visions, and speak to one another half a world apart, seated before their candles. Do you think that might be useful, Slayer?”

“We would have no more need of ravens.”

He knew that you were coming.”

“How?”

Alleras nodded at the glass candle.

Did Bran do this with Daenys Targaryen and inspire her to write the books Signs and Portents.  Was this Bran putting his pieces in place in order to fight the darkness he saw coming?  Is this the reason why the Targaryen’s were spared the Doom?  Without them there would be no Jon Snow, no Azor Ahai who I believe to be one in the same.  Click here for that.

Daenys Targaryen, also called "Daenys the Dreamer", was the daughter of Lord Aenar Targaryen of Dragonstone. Daenys is reputed to have had a gift of prophecy; She wrote the book Signs and Portents in which she detailed her visions.  Aenar and his family survived the Doom of Valyria because they sold all of their holdings and belongings twelve years before the Doom and left Valyria, moving instead to the island of Dragonstone where they claimed the castle by the same name. It is believed by scholars that Aenar's decision to relocate his family was based on one of Daenys's visions, in which she predicted the Doom. 

“Finally he looked north. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal, and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him. And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks.

Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live.

“Why?” Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling.

Because winter is coming.”

Is what Bran saw the White Walkers planning to cross back into the realms of men?

Do the stories that are told that are believed to be from events in the past actually just happen in the present, relatively speaking?  Take the stories of Lann the Clever and the Rat Cook; we saw them play out with Tyrion and Arya.  Click here to get my meaning.  This leads me to the most popular of those stories Azor Ahai.  Did that story play out entirely from events of the past or are they a combination of both the past and the present?  Below is the story that Old Nan tells the children but in the books the story is never fully completed.  Why is that?  I think it hasn’t because it hasn’t yet occurred; the ending at least.

Oh my sweet summer child … What do you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north, when the sun hides it face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods.

The Others … Thousands and thousands of years ago, a winter fell that was cold and hard and endless beyond all memory of man. There came a night that lasted a generation, and kings shivered and died in their castles even as the swineherds in their hovels. Women smothered their children rather than see them starve, and cried, and felt their tears freeze on their cheeks.

In that darkness, the Others came for the first time … They were cold things, dead things, that hated iron and fire and the touch of the sun, and every creature with hot blood in its veins. They swept over holdfasts and cities and kingdoms, felled heroes and armies by the score, riding pale dead horses, and leading hosts of the slain. All the swords of men could not stay their advance, and even maidens and suckling babes, found no pity in them. They hunted the maids through the frozen forests, and fed their dead servants on the flesh of human children.

Now these were the days before the Andals came, and long before the women fled across the narrow sea from the cities of the Rhoyne, and the hundred kingdoms of those times were the kingdoms of the First Men, who had taken those lands from the children of the forest. Yet here and there in the fastness of the woods, the children still lived in their wooden cities and hollow hills, and the faces in the trees kept watch. So as cold and death filled the earth, the last hero determined to seek out the children, in the hopes that their ancient magics could win back what the armies of men had lost. He set out into the dead lands with a sword, a horse, a dog, and a dozen companions. For years he searched until he despaired of ever finding the children of the forest in their secret cities. One by one his friends died, and his horse, and finally even his dog, and his sword froze so hard the blade snapped when he tried to use it. And the Others smelled the hot blood in him and came silent on his trail, stalking him with packs of pale white spiders big as hounds

We know that Jon Snow goes ranging with Lord Commander Mormont and the White Walkers attack and they kill almost all their horses.  Could not Jon’s horse have been one of the ones that was killed?

“I am not your lord,” said Mance. “And the what is plain enough. Your brothers died. The question is, how many?”

Jon’s face was throbbing, the snow kept coming down, and it was hard to think. You must not balk, whatever is asked of you, Qhorin had told him. The words stuck in his throat, but he made himself say, “There were three hundred of us.”

“Us?” Mance said sharply.

“Them. Three hundred of them.” Whatever is asked, the Halfhand said. So why do I feel so craven? “Two hundred from Castle Black, and one hundred from the Shadow Tower.”

“There’s a truer song than the one you sang in my tent.” Mance looked to Harma Dogshead. “How many horses have we found?”

“More’n a hundred,” that huge woman replied, “less than two. There’s more dead to the east, under the snow, hard t’ know how many.” Behind her stood her banner bearer, holding a pole with a dog’s head on it, fresh enough to still be leaking blood.

“You should never have lied to me, Jon Snow,” said Mance.

“I . . . I know that.” What could he say?”

We also know that in the TV show that Jon faces a White Walker at Hardhome with a regular sword and the blade snaps and shatters.  He may face one somewhere else in the books and something similar may happen.

We also see Jon Snow setout to capture a wight with a dozen companions, in the TV show, and one by they died.  Not all but some.  The story doesn’t say all.

 

Sad to say that doesn’t bode well for Ghost because it says his dog dies also.  Could not Bran have just thrown in the parts about Azor Ahai looking for the Children of the Forest to show what he did to glamorize the story more?  After Jon Snow eventually killed the first White Walker didn’t they get a sense that this man could be a threat to them?  Are they now also stalking him?  Personally, I believe Jon and Bran’s story to be intermingled in the telling of Azor Ahai and I believe that the Night King is stalking Bran; which is the reason he has to hide and eventually goes back in time. 

So, what is it a greeseer can’t see?  I believe that answer to that is each other if they choose not to be known.  I believe this to be true because Bloodraven, who was supposed to be the last greenseer, didn’t seem to know that there were other greenseers living in the same underground cavern that he sat.  The Night King who I also believe to have greenseer abilities didn’t know where the 3-eyed crow sat until an unexperienced Bran gave up his location. 

“Bran ate with Summer and his pack, as a wolf. As a raven he flew with the murder, circling the hill at sunset, watching for foes, feeling the icy touch of the air. As Hodor he explored the caves. He found chambers full of bones, shafts that plunged deep into the earth, a place where the skeletons of gigantic bats hung upside down from the ceiling. He even crossed the slender stone bridge that arched over the abyss and discovered more passages and chambers on the far side. One was full of singers, enthroned like Brynden in nests of weirwood roots that wove under and through and around their bodies. Most of them looked dead to him, but as he crossed in front of them their eyes would open and follow the light of his torch, and one of them opened and closed a wrinkled mouth as if he were trying to speak. “Hodor,” Bran said to him, and he felt the real Hodor stir down in his pit.”

Comments encouraged.  Love to hear the idea’s of others.  Most believe that since I present my idea’s as “fact like” I’m not open to change my viewpoints which is far from the truth.  I simply look at the information presented and go from there.  If you can shine a light on another way of thinking that opens the door to debate.