Three-eyed crow

Bran begins dreaming of him before ever seeing him awake: a three-eyed raven who tells him he can teach him to fly. When the boy falls into a long sleep after his fall from a tower at Winterfell, it is this same presence that guides him back, calling him the winged wolf, bound in chains.

Later Bran has another dream in which the raven leads him down into the crypts of Winterfell, where he speaks with his father Eddard. He tells Maester Luwin about it without yet knowing that, by then, Eddard has already been executed in King's Landing.

During the harvest feast at Winterfell, Bran dreams again of a red-eyed weirwood with a twisted mouth, the raven perched among its branches.

Jojen Reed, one of the bannermen who has come to the castle, confesses that the same figure has visited him since he was a child, and that in his own dreams he sees a winged wolf bound in stone chains that the raven tries to peck loose. Jojen adds something that will change the course of Bran's path: the creature can be found beyond the Wall.

With Jojen's revelation still on his mind, Bran decides to set out with Hodor and the Reed siblings, Meera and Jojen, beyond the Wall, in search of the figure who keeps visiting him in his dreams.

The group finds him in a cave in the Haunted Forest, north of the Wall, and there Bran discovers that the three-eyed raven was never a bird: he is a man who says he was once a lord named Brynden. It is Brynden who begins teaching him greensight and skinchanging, though Bran is disappointed to learn he cannot heal his crippled legs; in exchange, Brynden promises he will teach him to fly.

When Brynden decides the time has come for the next step, it is Leaf who gives Bran a bowl of paste made from weirwood seeds to awaken his powers as a greenseer. Through it, Bran sees Eddard through the heart tree of Winterfell; his father speaks to him of the ghosts that haunted him in life — a brother he loved, a brother he hated, a woman he desired — and of something he himself learned through experience: that the past cannot be changed.

Of the raven himself, the first thing Bran sees is a body so skeletal and clothes so rotted that he mistakes him for just another corpse: a man dead so long that weirwood roots have grown into and through him. His skin is white but for a blood-red mark crossing his neck and cheek, and his thin white hair is long enough to trail on the floor. From the hollow where his other eye should be, a root grows; the eye he has left burns red among twisted branches. He speaks slowly, in a dry voice, his words accompanied by a faint rustle of leaves. At one point he tells Bran: "With two eyes you can see my face. With three you could see my heart. […] With two you cannot see beyond your walls. With three you could see the Summer Sea, to the south, and the north beyond the Wall."