Bran Stark

Bran was named after an uncle he never met, a brother of his father's who died years before — a death that helped set off the war that put Robert Baratheon on the throne. In Winterfell he's taught by Maester Luwin, who gives him his letters and his first lessons with weapons.

But climbing is what really defines him as a child. He scales the castle's walls and rooftops without leave, enough that Lady Catelyn constantly fears for his life. She makes him promise to stop. The promise lasts barely two weeks. When guilt gets the better of him and he confesses to his father, Lord Eddard sends him alone to the godswood to think it over; hours later they find him fast asleep under the heart tree. Ned ends up accepting his son's habit, though he asks him to keep it from his mother.

Bran wants to be a knight. He asks to hear the same stories so often he ends up knowing them by heart, and none grip him like the tales of the Kingsguard. His father brings him down to earth: these days, he tells him, that guard has lost the old traditions and the standing it once had.

Climbing again, he catches Queen Cersei with her twin brother, Jaime Lannister, in the middle of having sex. They spot him clinging to the windowsill, about to slip, and it's Jaime himself who catches him in time. Then he lets him fall.

He drops several floors and slips into a coma. While he sleeps, someone tries to finish him off with a knife, but Summer lunges for the man's throat and tears it out before the job is done. In that same long sleep, a three-eyed raven keeps appearing to him, promising to teach him to fly. After a nightmare in which he sees the very heart of winter, Bran wakes up and names his direwolf Summer.

He has lost the use of his legs. The raven, in his dreams, keeps telling him he is a winged wolf chained down. To get around he depends on Hodor, a stableboy with a child's mind, and on a basket Maester Luwin builds to strap to Hodor's back.

On his way from the Wall to King's Landing, Tyrion Lannister stops at Winterfell and leaves him a gift: plans for a saddle built so a cripple can still ride. Bran tries it out in the Wolfswood, but the outing ends in an ambush — wildlings and Night's Watch deserters catch him off guard, and only the arrival of Robb and Theon Greyjoy, with the direwolves, saves him. Among the prisoners taken is a wildling woman, Osha, with whom Bran ends up finding common ground through their shared faith in the old gods.

When word comes that his father has been arrested in the capital, Bran watches the Greatjon clash with his brother over what to do next. With Robb marching off to war, rule of Winterfell falls to Bran, under the same watchful guidance of Maester Luwin and Ser Rodrik Cassel.

One night he dreams of his father in the crypts and goes down there with Osha to check; they find nothing. Almost at the same time, a raven reaches Maester Luwin with the news: King Joffrey has had Lord Eddard executed.

When the lords of the North proclaim Robb their king, Bran becomes his heir and, with it, Prince of Winterfell, though he goes on running the castle under the same guardians as before. Around this time Meera and Jojen Reed arrive, children of Howland Reed, lord of Greywater Watch and an old friend of his father's, and the three become friends.

Bran has been slipping into Summer's mind in his sleep for a while without realizing it's real and not just a dream. Jojen is the one who opens his eyes: he recognizes him as a skinchanger and sets out to teach him to control the gift properly. He also tells him something that stays with him — if he crosses the Wall, that's where he'll find the three-eyed raven he keeps seeing in his sleep.

When Theon Greyjoy betrays the Starks and seizes Winterfell, Bran hides in the crypts with Hodor and the Reed siblings. To cover the escape, Theon passes off the bodies of two murdered and flayed farm boys, close in age, as him and his younger brother.

The ruse doesn't hold: one of his own men betrays him, and the castle ends up sacked and burning, with Theon dragged off as a prisoner to the Dreadfort. Running low on supplies, the group hiding underground has no choice but to come out. Before leaving, Bran takes from his uncle's tomb the sword that bears his name; he knows it won't do him much good in a fight, but he likes the feel of it in his hand.

They find the castle in ruins and manage a few last words with a dying Maester Luwin. Bran decides to head north with Hodor and the Reeds.

At the Broken Tower, Bran decides to keep going north to find the three-eyed raven. Ramsay Snow knows the dead boys at Winterfell weren't him and his brother, and sets his men combing the region, so the group keeps off the roads. Bran's gift keeps growing — he can slip into Summer almost at will now, and he starts entering Hodor's mind as well.

At Queenscrown they hide out in a ruined castle and spot people in a village that was supposed to be empty. Riding inside Summer, Bran attacks the men below, among them his half-brother Jon Snow — the attack buys Jon just enough time to break away from the wildlings holding him.

The road ends at the Wall, where they meet Samwell Tarly of the Night's Watch. Sam leads them to a hidden door and gets them through to the other side, where Coldhands is waiting — a creature as unsettling as he is silent.

The group presses on, now with Coldhands, through the Haunted Forest. The journey is long and cold, and hunger bites hard enough that, riding inside Summer, Bran ends up eating human flesh.

They finally reach the three-eyed raven's cave, but wights ambush them just outside it. Bran slips into Hodor to fight them off, blacks out in the attempt, and wakes up safe inside the cave — a place warded against White Walkers and wights that Coldhands himself can't enter. Inside, the last of the Children of the Forest are waiting, along with, at last, the three-eyed raven.

There he starts truly learning what greensight is. The raven feeds him a paste made from weirwood seeds that fully wakes the gift in him, and Bran manages to slip into the roots of Winterfell's heart tree and see his father as a young man, in the past. He tries to speak to him, but only a whisper comes out, lost on the wind; the raven explains that he can look back, but never change what already happened.

In later dreams, always through the weirwood, more loose flashes of his family's past reach him — lords of Winterfell from other ages, private moments from generations long gone. They're images with no explanation, fragments Bran himself doesn't yet know how to read.