The visions did not stop.

  Gojo stood still in the crumbling throne room beyond the Black Gate, glass candles pulsing in his hands like cursed hearts. He saw Bran the Builder—older now, wearier, but no less determined—as the truth of the Children’s betrayal rooted itself deep into his soul.

  And then came the dreams.

  The White Witch haunted him.

  Eyes silver like the pale moon, hair flowing like liquid starlight, a voice soft as snowfall. Her beauty was beyond anything Bran had known, but it was the purpose in her gaze that drew him—not lust, but understanding.

  From atop the Wall, Bran saw her again.

  She came not cloaked in mystery, but in sorrow.

  He took her to the Nightfort, the heart of the Wall’s dark legacy, and asked the question that burned in him since her first words:

  "Why?"

  The White Witch did not flinch.

  She spoke of the Shadow Lands, of ancient cities now buried under black stone and silent screams. Of how the people there, too, had fed shards from the sky with blood. How they, too, had forged cursed tools and pacts. And how, eventually, they all turned to ash.

  "Asshai is all that remains," she said. "I do not want the same fate for Westeros… or for Winterfell."

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  She looked at Bran—not as a weapon, but as a hope.

  If he could defeat the Children of the Forest… if he could destroy the Moon Shard that hovered above the Land of Always Winter, tethered by cursed roots and forgotten rituals… then he could do what no sorcerer or king had ever done.

  He could undo the apocalypse.

  Bran believed it was fate.

  He fell in love with her, the White Witch of Asshai. A union neither holy nor recognized, but real in its defiance of all that came before.

  He named himself Night’s King, and her his Queen.

  Together, they ruled the Nightfort—not as Watchers, but as Monarchs.

  For thirteen years, they held the castle.

  During that time, Bran the Builder—the man now cloaked in shadow—did what had once been unthinkable. He turned on the Children of the Forest. He sacrificed them.

  Not for power.

  But to usurp it.

  He wanted control of the weirwood network—the ancient root-bound web of blood and memory. He wanted dominion over the Moon Shard above the north, to destroy it before it could ever fall again. He wanted to sever the cycle.

  He was close. So close.

  But then came the end.

  Wildlings, united by old grudges and older whispers, stormed the Nightfort in the dead of night. While Bran was immersed in the weirwood realm, shaping its currents like a sorcerer god, he felt the breach.

  And then—

  Pain.

  An explosion of cursed energy, sharp as betrayal.

  He turned in the vision—and saw his brother.

  Brandon the Breaker.

  The only one left of his blood. The boy who once looked up to him, now a man with eyes full of tears.

  And in Brandon’s trembling hands, a glass candle.

  Driven through Bran’s skull.

  The visions shimmered as Bran's thoughts echoed through Gojo’s mind, a last flicker of soul imprinted into the cursed tools:

  “I was so close… so close to saving the world…”

  Then silence.

  The cursed energy in the vision faded. The glass candles dimmed. The room went still.

  The last image burned in Gojo’s mind—Bran the Builder, betrayed not by enemies, but by those who thought they were saving the realm.