The Hinges of the World
Mar 27, 2016 23:35:45 GMT
Ser Duncan, Some Pig No Doubt, and 5 more like this
Post by min on Mar 27, 2016 23:35:45 GMT
First, I would like to thank Melifeather and Slowfyre for reviewing my study at various stages and for kind words and encouragement. Also to apologize for not including chapter numbers for quoted material. I lost my reference sheets and now have to remake them. I think most of the quotes are already familiar to people.
My premise, simply stated.
Part 1 – Hinges of the World
The famous quote:
"The Wall is no place for a woman." "You are wrong. I have dreamed of your Wall, Jon Snow. Great was the lore that raised it, and great the spells locked beneath its ice. We walk beneath one of the hinges of the world." Melissandre gazed up at it, her breath a warm moist cloud in the air.
The Wall isn’t one hinge, it’s two hinges.
Sos Jon: He had once heard his uncle Benjen say that the Wall was a sword east of Castle Black, but a snake to the west. (h/t to JNR for pointing this out to me at one time)
The serpent hinge and the sword hinge put together with crooked stitching.
GoT-Tyrion: A wooden stair ascended the south face, anchored on huge rough hewn beams sunk deep into the ice and frozen in place. Back and forth it switched, clawing it’s way upward as crooked as a bolt of lightening.
Each hinge connects to another hinge, to make a door. The House of the Undying is the second serpent hinge.
CoK – Dany: In this city of splendors, Dany had expected the House of the Undying Ones to be the most splendid of all, but she emerged from her palanquin to behold a grey and ancient ruin.
Long and low, without towers or windows, it coiled like a stone serpent through a grove of black-barked trees whose inky blue leaves made the stuff of the sorcerous drink the Qartheen called shade of the evening.
The second sword hinge is Winterfell. The evidence so far is that winter emanates from Winterfell itself (credit to Redriver at Westeros heretics for figuring that one out) and Jon’s vision of the flaming sword.
These four hinges make up the doors of Black and White; fire and ice, dark and light.
The switchback stairs represents the dividing point between the two hinges and calls to mind Arya’s crooked stitching in GoT and her ultimate destination, the House of Black and White. The HoB&W seems to have more to do with the Wall’s construction than I would first suppose. At least with regards to the magic used in it’s construction. That might not be surprising considering that the origin story of the HoB&W goes back to antiquity; a story we have yet to hear in it’s entirety possibly the catalyst that unbalanced the world.
I would like to explore the idea that magic is woven or sewn together with crooked stitching; knitted together. The magic intersects like roadways and crossroads.
Part 2 - Sewn together with Crooked Stitching:
The Black Gate and the Door to the House of the Undying:
Dany CoK: When they reached the door – a tall oval mouth, set in a wall fashioned in the likeness of a human face –the smallest dwarf Dany had ever seen was waiting on the threshold.
Samwell Sos: The Black Gate, Sam called it, but it wasn’t black at all. It was white weirwood, and there was a face on it.
A glow came from the wood, like milk and moonlight, so faint it scarcely seemed to touch anything beyond the door itself, not even Sam standing right before it. The face was old and pale, wrinkled and shrunken. It looks dead. Its mouth was closed, and its eyes, its cheeks were sunken. It’s brow withered, it’s chin sagging. If a man could live for a thousand years and never dies but just get older, his face might come to look like that.
.. It’s lips opened, wide and wider and wider still, until nothing at all remained but a great gaping mouth in a ring of wrinkles.
Kindly old Men:
Arya FfC: “Let us see.” The priest lowered his cowl. Beneath he had no face: only a yellowed skull with a few scraps of skin still clinging to the cheeks, and a white worm wriggling from one empty eye socket.
Bran DwD: His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that a first Bran had him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair r and long enough to brush against the earthen. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as white leather, but even here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through.
.. He has only one eye and that one is red. Bran could feel the eye staring at him shining like a pool of blood in the torchlight. Where his other eye should have been, a thin white root grew from an empty socket, down his cheek, and into his neck.
Grave Worms:
Bran DwD: The way the shadows shifted made it seem as if the walls were moving too. Bran saw great white snakes slithering in and out of the earth around him, and his heart thumped in fear. He wondered if they had blundered into a nest of milk snakes or giant grave worms, soft and pale and squishy. Grave worms have teeth.
…The roots were everywhere, twisting through earth and stone, closing off some passages and holding up the roofs of others. All the color is gone, Bran realized suddenly. The world was black soil and white wood.
Dany CoK: When she stopped, she found herself in eat another dank stone chamber … but this time the door opposite was round, shaped like an open mouth, and Pyat Pree stood outside in the grass beneath the trees. “Can it be that the Undying are done with you so soon” he asked in disbelief when he saw her.
“So soon?: she said, confused. “I’ve walked for hours and still not found them.”
“You have taken a wrong turning. Come, I will lead you.” Pyat Pree held out his hand.
Dany hesitated. There was a door to her right, still closed …
“That’s not the way,” Pyat Pree said firmly, his blue lips prim with disapproval. “The Undying ones will not wait forever.”
“Our little lives are no more than a flicker of a moth’s wings to them.” Dany said, remembering.
“Stubborn child. You will be lost and never found.”
She walked away from him, to the door on the right.
“No,” Pyat screeched. “No, to me come to me, to meeeeee.” His face crumbled inward, changing to something pale and wormlike.
The way out in and the way out are the same:
Dany CoK: “The door to my right,” Dany repeated. “I understand. And when I leave, the opposite?”
“By no means,” Pyat Pree said. “Leaving and coming, it is the same …”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDVnVlQ6PnE
Maze Worlds and Wormways:
Dany CoK: “When you enter, you will find yourself in a room with four doors: the one you have come through and three others. Take the door to your right. Each time, the door to your right. If you should come upon a stairwell, climb. Never go down, and never take any door but the first door to your right.”
Jon Dwd:
“Careful of the rats, my lord.” Doloros Edd led Jon down the steps, a lantrn in one hand. “They make an aweful squeal if you step on them. “
All of Castle Black was connected underground by a maze of tunnels that the brothers called the wormways. It was dark and gloomy underneath the earth, … Jon saw candles burning in several wall niches as they made their way along the tunnel, their footsteps echoing in front of them.
Bowen Marsh was waiting for them at a junction where four wormways met. … They moved through the grey gloom beneath the earth. Each storeroom had a solid oaken door with an iron padlock as big as a supper plate.
As they moved from one vault to another, the wormways seemed to grow colder. Before long Jon could see their breath frosting in the lantern light. “We’re beneath the Wall.” … “And soon inside it,” said Marsh.
The next door was made of rusty iron. Behind it was a flight of wooden steps. Dolorous Edd led the way up with a lantern. Up top they found a tunnel as long as Winterfell’s great hall though no wider than a wormway. The walls were ice bristling with iron hooks. … Hoarfrost covered everything.
Long Hallways with Doors
Dany CoK: The fourth room was oval rather than square and walled in worm eaten wood in place of stone. Six passages led out from it in place of four. Dany chose the rightmost, and entered a long, dim, high-ceilinged hall. Along the right hand was a row of torches burning with a smoky orange light, But the only doors were to her left. Drogon unfolded wide black wings and beat the tale air. He flew twenty feet before thudding to an undignified crash. Dany strode after him.
The mold-eaten carpet under her feet had once been gorgeously colored, and whorls of gold could still be seen the fabric, glinting broken amidst the faded grey and mottled green. What remained served to muffle her footfalls, but that was not all to the good. Dany could hear sounds within the walls, a faint scurrying and scrabbling that made her think of rats.
Jon GoT: “Sometimes I dream about it,” he said. “I’m walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don’t even know who I’m looking for. Most nights it’s my father, but sometimes it’s Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle.”
“Do you ever find them in your dream?” Sam asked.
Jon shook his head. “No one. The castle is always empty.” He had never told anyone of the dream, and he did not understand why he was telling Sam now, yet somehow it felt good to talk of it. ‘Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It’s black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don’t want to. I’m afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it’s not them I’m afraid of. I scream that I am not a Stark, that this isn’t my place, but it’s no good. I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream.” He stopped, frowning, embarrassed. “That’s when I always wake.”
The Sword and the Serpent
Out of curiosity, I googled the sword and the serpent with some interesting results. The Sword and the Serpent is a book on the two fold universe; the world of the real and the alternate world behind it. The world of the real and surreal, waking and dreaming, past, present, future and prophecy. The world behind the door when you lift the veil to quote Euron or when you are in the presence of sorcery to quote Dany. Created with woven magic and crooked stitching.
I think the above examples show how these realities connect and intersect down crooked roadways and intersections. Indeed, Pyat Pree goes so far as to tell Dany that Qarth is the crossroads to the world.
Qarth is the greatest city that ever was or ever will be. It is the center of the world, the gate between north and south, the bridge between east and west, ancient beyond memory of man and so magnificent that Saathos the Wise put out his eyes after gazing upon Qarth for the first time, because he knew that all he saw thereafter should look squalid and ugly by comparison – Westeros Wiki
What is the Wall, but the same thing? A gate between North and South and a bridge between east and west. The wormways beneath the Wall have their own intersection of crossroads.
Dany has entered the wormways through the Black Gate counterpart at the HoU. She has access to visions of past, present and future. She is even chased down the hall by The Things that Comes in the Night. The place is loaded with traps and worms have teeth.
She’s given instructions by Pyat Pree for navigating a maze. Always take the door to the right, always take the stairs upwards, never down.
In contrast, Jon’s recurring dream of a long hallway with doors places him at Winterfell. Counter to Dany; he must descend to the crypts. A dream of the future.
It’s significant that before Dany meets the Undying she has to pass through the doors to the HoB&W; sees their splendid dopplegangers before confronting their trapped souls. The Wall, the Weirnet and the HoB&W intricately connected and sewn together.
They are drinking from a cup of ice, consuming the blue heart at the center of the table, eager to consume Dany’s life force as well.
Dany CoK: Finally the stair opened. To her right, a set of wide wooden doors had been thrown open. They were fashioned of ebony and weirwood, the black and white grains swirling and twisting in strange interwoven patterns. They were very beautiful, yet somehow frightening.
Through a narrow door she passed, into a chamber awash in gloom.
A long stone table filled this room. Above it floated a human heart, swollen and blue with corruption, yet still alive. It beat, a deep ponderous throb of sound and each pulse sent out a wash of indigo light. The figures around the table were no more than blue shadows. As Dany walked to the empty chair at the foot of the table, they did not stir, nor speak, nor turn to face her. There was no sound but the slow, deep beat of the rotting heart.
Through the indigo murk, she could make out the wizened features of the Undying One to her right, an old old man, wrinkled and hairless. His flesh was a ripe violet-blue, his lips and nails bluer still, so dark they were almost black. Even the whites of his eyes were blue. They stared unseeing at the ancient woman on the opposite side of the table, whose gown of pale silk had rotted on her body. One withered breast was left bare in the Qartheen manner, to show a pointed blue nipple hard as leather.
She is not breathing. Dany listened to the silence. None of them are breathing, and they do not move, and those eyes see nothing. Could it be that the Undying Ones were dead?
Drogon saves Dany in the end burning the undying surrounding her pawing and clawing at her flesh, licking sucking and biting. He “tore at the terrible dark heart, ripping the rotten flesh to ribbons,”
She could hear the shrieks of the Undying as they burned, their high thin papery voices crying out in tongues long dead. Their flesh was crumbling parchment, their bones dry wood soaked in tallow. They danced as the flames consumed hem; they staggered and writhed and spun and raised blazing hands on high, their fingers bright as torches.
Outside a long dim passageway stretched serpentine before her, lit by the flickering orange glare from behind. Dany ran, searching a for a door, a door to her right, a door to her left, any door, but there was nothing, only twisty stone walls, and a floor that seemed to move slowly under her feet, writhing as if to trip her. She kept her feet and ran faster, and suddenly the door was there ahead of her, a door like an open mouth.
Pyat Pree is murderous. Dany has smashed one of the hinges of the serpent door, jamming the door shut. If the magic of the world is to come back into balance, the Undying must be cut off from the fountain heads, the sewing, stitching and weaving undone and the wall destroyed; the fountain heads drained.
Trios and the Fountain of the Drunken God
Dany’s experience in the HotU gives us the symbolism of the god Trios and his counter-part, the Drunken God.
Trios is a three-headed god worshipped in Essos. There is a large statue of him near the Temple of Trios in Tyrosh. There is also a tower with three turrets dedicated to Trios in Braavos.[1]
Penny recalls to Tyrion Lannister that an elderly dwarf was cut into three parts and pushed inside the mouths of Trios at the temple in Tyrosh.[2]
The Sailor's Wife once told Arya Stark that the first head of Trio devours the dying and the reborn emerge from the third, but she did not recall the purpose of the middle head
– Westeros Wiki
I would invert the Tale of the Sailor’s Wife and say that Trios devours the living and spits out the undying who occupy the space between life and death by drinking from the fountain of the drunken god. Drink from a cup of ice or a cup of fire; to be determined by the middle head; The House of Black and White. Or the Sailor’s Wife could be saying that the living are continually in the process of dying; that Trios gives them a second life.
It’s interesting that Trios is represented by three turrets in Braavos since the drunken god motif shows up at Moat Cailin as the Drunkard’s Tower, one of three towers; and again on the road to Mole’s Town, one of three trees.
Jon DwD: The drunkard was an ash tree, twisted sideways by centuries of wind. And now it had a face. A solemn mouth, a broken branch for a nose, two eyes carved deep into the trunk, gazing north up the Kingsroad, toward the castle and the Wall.
Also belonging to a group of three trees with characteristics of the greenseer and Bran, the oak tree.
This seems very much a caricature of Tyrion with his broken nose, deep set eyes, a well known drunk. So we have Tyrion symbolically sacrificed to Trios and associated with the Drunken God. It may be that Tyrion is meant to unravel that thread.
Leaning trees and leaning towers as metaphors for unbalanced magic. The other trees seem to represent the greenseer sporting Mormont’s raven on it’s branch and angry Bran, the oak tree.
What this says about Moat Cailin, I’m not sure. Only that these agencies are connected and working together in some fashion.
The Children’s Tower, The Drunken Tower , the Gatehouse Tower with it’s tree sporting sheets of ghost moss. In other words, The Night Fort with it’s Black Gate, a face hung on a stone wall and weirwood tree. (h/t Yield) This seems to be the only fort we know of that has a weirwood within it’s boundaries.
All these places, The Wall, (Library at Castle Black); HoU and Winterfell have a characteristic maze-like structure, to confuse things further. Sam also describes the maze-like quality of the Braavos:
Sam FcF: The stony maze of islands and canals that was Braavos, devoid of grass and trees and teeming with strangers who spoke to her in words she could not understand, frightened her so badly that she lost the map and soon herself.
Woven Magic:
There are a couple of Dany passages that stand out for another reason.
Dany CoK: Finally the stair opened. To her right, a set of wide wooden doors had been thrown open. They were fashioned of ebony and weirwood, the black and white grains swirling and twisting in strange interwoven patterns. They were very beautiful, yet somehow frightening.
There is an idea here that magic is manipulated by weaving light. Melisandre say something similar about magic:
DwD Jon – Jon Sow turned to Melisndre. “What sorcery is this?
“Call is what you will. Glamor, seeming, illusion. R’hllor is the Lord of Light, Jon Snow, and it is given to his servants to weave with it, as others weave with thread.
Coldhands say something similar to Sam SoS:
“The Wall. The Wall is more than just ice and stone, he said. There are spells woven into it … old ones, and strong. He cannot pass beyond the Wall.”
Dany’s description of the carpet in the wormways:
The mold-eaten carpet under her feet had once been gorgeously colored, and whorls of gold could still be seen the fabric, glinting broken amidst the faded grey and mottled green.
I think this is one of GRRM’s great jokes. The carpet Dany describes is representative of the magic that is woven between rock and ice. It’s a magic carpet. And Mel’s statement might also be a bit of trick. R’hllor’s servants weave with light; while the Others weave with thread.
Is it a coincidence that Tyrion always notices myrish carpets and once vomited on one in a drunken hangover?
So we are given a description of the current state of the Wall’s magic. Once gorgeously colored but now depleted and faded, mold-eaten.
If the Wall is made of ice and stone; it is possible that the stone base is full of obsidian? The north is a land of ice and fire; Dragonstone is full of obsidian rock including the green version. Obsidian is not only black; it is also grey.
When the legends say that the Wall was built by giants could the giants be glaciers pushing all that rock and obsidian into an immense glacial moraine? The ice then piled on top through the labor of men and giants?
We already know the qualities of obsidian or frozen fire. It destroys the Others. Is the wall warded by frozen fire? The second quality of obsidian is that they can be used as glass candles.
Sam Cok: The candle was unpleasantly bright. There was something queer about it. The flame did not flicker, even when Archmaester Marwyn closed the door so hard that papers blew off a nearby table. The light did something strange to colors too. Whites were bright as fresh-fallen snow, yellow shone like gold, reds turned to flame, but the shadows were s black they looked like holes in the world. Sam found himself staring. The candle itself was three feet tall and slender as a sword, ridged and twisted, glittering black. “is that …?”
”… obsidian,” said the other man in the room, a pale, fleshy, pasty-faced young fellow with round shoulders, soft hands, close-set eyes , and food stains on his robes.
“Call it dragonglass.” Archmaester Marwyn glanced at the candle for a moment. “It burns but is not consumed.”
“What feeds the flame?” asked 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?”
Was the carpet once so brightly colored? Does the obsidian in the wall also act like a glass candle allowing entry to people’s dreams.
Is the weirnet stitched together with glass candles in the Wall? For example:
Bran Got: Bran looked down, and felt his insides turn to water. The ground was rushing up at him now. The whole world was spread out below him, a tapestry of white and brown and green. He could see everything so clearly that for a moment he forgot to be afraid. He could see the whole real, and everyone in it.
He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the narrow sea, to the Free Cities and the green Dothraki sea and beyond to Vaes Dothrak under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade Sea, to Asshai by the Shadow where dragons stirred in the sunrise.
I’m going to stop here. I do have more to say about the way forward to quote Quaithe and I will come back to that at another time. For now, this is long enough!
What do you think? Have I convinced you about the Hinges of the World and woven magic?
Thanks for reading,
Min
My premise, simply stated.
Part 1 – Hinges of the World
The famous quote:
"The Wall is no place for a woman." "You are wrong. I have dreamed of your Wall, Jon Snow. Great was the lore that raised it, and great the spells locked beneath its ice. We walk beneath one of the hinges of the world." Melissandre gazed up at it, her breath a warm moist cloud in the air.
The Wall isn’t one hinge, it’s two hinges.
Sos Jon: He had once heard his uncle Benjen say that the Wall was a sword east of Castle Black, but a snake to the west. (h/t to JNR for pointing this out to me at one time)
The serpent hinge and the sword hinge put together with crooked stitching.
GoT-Tyrion: A wooden stair ascended the south face, anchored on huge rough hewn beams sunk deep into the ice and frozen in place. Back and forth it switched, clawing it’s way upward as crooked as a bolt of lightening.
Each hinge connects to another hinge, to make a door. The House of the Undying is the second serpent hinge.
CoK – Dany: In this city of splendors, Dany had expected the House of the Undying Ones to be the most splendid of all, but she emerged from her palanquin to behold a grey and ancient ruin.
Long and low, without towers or windows, it coiled like a stone serpent through a grove of black-barked trees whose inky blue leaves made the stuff of the sorcerous drink the Qartheen called shade of the evening.
The second sword hinge is Winterfell. The evidence so far is that winter emanates from Winterfell itself (credit to Redriver at Westeros heretics for figuring that one out) and Jon’s vision of the flaming sword.
These four hinges make up the doors of Black and White; fire and ice, dark and light.
The switchback stairs represents the dividing point between the two hinges and calls to mind Arya’s crooked stitching in GoT and her ultimate destination, the House of Black and White. The HoB&W seems to have more to do with the Wall’s construction than I would first suppose. At least with regards to the magic used in it’s construction. That might not be surprising considering that the origin story of the HoB&W goes back to antiquity; a story we have yet to hear in it’s entirety possibly the catalyst that unbalanced the world.
I would like to explore the idea that magic is woven or sewn together with crooked stitching; knitted together. The magic intersects like roadways and crossroads.
Part 2 - Sewn together with Crooked Stitching:
The Black Gate and the Door to the House of the Undying:
Dany CoK: When they reached the door – a tall oval mouth, set in a wall fashioned in the likeness of a human face –the smallest dwarf Dany had ever seen was waiting on the threshold.
Samwell Sos: The Black Gate, Sam called it, but it wasn’t black at all. It was white weirwood, and there was a face on it.
A glow came from the wood, like milk and moonlight, so faint it scarcely seemed to touch anything beyond the door itself, not even Sam standing right before it. The face was old and pale, wrinkled and shrunken. It looks dead. Its mouth was closed, and its eyes, its cheeks were sunken. It’s brow withered, it’s chin sagging. If a man could live for a thousand years and never dies but just get older, his face might come to look like that.
.. It’s lips opened, wide and wider and wider still, until nothing at all remained but a great gaping mouth in a ring of wrinkles.
Kindly old Men:
Arya FfC: “Let us see.” The priest lowered his cowl. Beneath he had no face: only a yellowed skull with a few scraps of skin still clinging to the cheeks, and a white worm wriggling from one empty eye socket.
Bran DwD: His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that a first Bran had him for another corpse, a dead man propped up so long that the roots had grown over him, under him, and through him. What skin the corpse lord showed was white, save for a bloody blotch that crept up his neck onto his cheek. His white hair was fine and thin as root hair r and long enough to brush against the earthen. Roots coiled around his legs like wooden serpents. One burrowed through his breeches into the desiccated flesh of his thigh, to emerge again from his shoulder. A spray of dark red leaves sprouted from his skull, and grey mushrooms spotted his brow. A little skin remained, stretched across his face, tight and hard as white leather, but even here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through.
.. He has only one eye and that one is red. Bran could feel the eye staring at him shining like a pool of blood in the torchlight. Where his other eye should have been, a thin white root grew from an empty socket, down his cheek, and into his neck.
Grave Worms:
Bran DwD: The way the shadows shifted made it seem as if the walls were moving too. Bran saw great white snakes slithering in and out of the earth around him, and his heart thumped in fear. He wondered if they had blundered into a nest of milk snakes or giant grave worms, soft and pale and squishy. Grave worms have teeth.
…The roots were everywhere, twisting through earth and stone, closing off some passages and holding up the roofs of others. All the color is gone, Bran realized suddenly. The world was black soil and white wood.
Dany CoK: When she stopped, she found herself in eat another dank stone chamber … but this time the door opposite was round, shaped like an open mouth, and Pyat Pree stood outside in the grass beneath the trees. “Can it be that the Undying are done with you so soon” he asked in disbelief when he saw her.
“So soon?: she said, confused. “I’ve walked for hours and still not found them.”
“You have taken a wrong turning. Come, I will lead you.” Pyat Pree held out his hand.
Dany hesitated. There was a door to her right, still closed …
“That’s not the way,” Pyat Pree said firmly, his blue lips prim with disapproval. “The Undying ones will not wait forever.”
“Our little lives are no more than a flicker of a moth’s wings to them.” Dany said, remembering.
“Stubborn child. You will be lost and never found.”
She walked away from him, to the door on the right.
“No,” Pyat screeched. “No, to me come to me, to meeeeee.” His face crumbled inward, changing to something pale and wormlike.
The way out in and the way out are the same:
Dany CoK: “The door to my right,” Dany repeated. “I understand. And when I leave, the opposite?”
“By no means,” Pyat Pree said. “Leaving and coming, it is the same …”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDVnVlQ6PnE
Maze Worlds and Wormways:
Dany CoK: “When you enter, you will find yourself in a room with four doors: the one you have come through and three others. Take the door to your right. Each time, the door to your right. If you should come upon a stairwell, climb. Never go down, and never take any door but the first door to your right.”
Jon Dwd:
“Careful of the rats, my lord.” Doloros Edd led Jon down the steps, a lantrn in one hand. “They make an aweful squeal if you step on them. “
All of Castle Black was connected underground by a maze of tunnels that the brothers called the wormways. It was dark and gloomy underneath the earth, … Jon saw candles burning in several wall niches as they made their way along the tunnel, their footsteps echoing in front of them.
Bowen Marsh was waiting for them at a junction where four wormways met. … They moved through the grey gloom beneath the earth. Each storeroom had a solid oaken door with an iron padlock as big as a supper plate.
As they moved from one vault to another, the wormways seemed to grow colder. Before long Jon could see their breath frosting in the lantern light. “We’re beneath the Wall.” … “And soon inside it,” said Marsh.
The next door was made of rusty iron. Behind it was a flight of wooden steps. Dolorous Edd led the way up with a lantern. Up top they found a tunnel as long as Winterfell’s great hall though no wider than a wormway. The walls were ice bristling with iron hooks. … Hoarfrost covered everything.
Long Hallways with Doors
Dany CoK: The fourth room was oval rather than square and walled in worm eaten wood in place of stone. Six passages led out from it in place of four. Dany chose the rightmost, and entered a long, dim, high-ceilinged hall. Along the right hand was a row of torches burning with a smoky orange light, But the only doors were to her left. Drogon unfolded wide black wings and beat the tale air. He flew twenty feet before thudding to an undignified crash. Dany strode after him.
The mold-eaten carpet under her feet had once been gorgeously colored, and whorls of gold could still be seen the fabric, glinting broken amidst the faded grey and mottled green. What remained served to muffle her footfalls, but that was not all to the good. Dany could hear sounds within the walls, a faint scurrying and scrabbling that made her think of rats.
Jon GoT: “Sometimes I dream about it,” he said. “I’m walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don’t even know who I’m looking for. Most nights it’s my father, but sometimes it’s Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle.”
“Do you ever find them in your dream?” Sam asked.
Jon shook his head. “No one. The castle is always empty.” He had never told anyone of the dream, and he did not understand why he was telling Sam now, yet somehow it felt good to talk of it. ‘Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It’s black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don’t want to. I’m afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it’s not them I’m afraid of. I scream that I am not a Stark, that this isn’t my place, but it’s no good. I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream.” He stopped, frowning, embarrassed. “That’s when I always wake.”
The Sword and the Serpent
Out of curiosity, I googled the sword and the serpent with some interesting results. The Sword and the Serpent is a book on the two fold universe; the world of the real and the alternate world behind it. The world of the real and surreal, waking and dreaming, past, present, future and prophecy. The world behind the door when you lift the veil to quote Euron or when you are in the presence of sorcery to quote Dany. Created with woven magic and crooked stitching.
I think the above examples show how these realities connect and intersect down crooked roadways and intersections. Indeed, Pyat Pree goes so far as to tell Dany that Qarth is the crossroads to the world.
Qarth is the greatest city that ever was or ever will be. It is the center of the world, the gate between north and south, the bridge between east and west, ancient beyond memory of man and so magnificent that Saathos the Wise put out his eyes after gazing upon Qarth for the first time, because he knew that all he saw thereafter should look squalid and ugly by comparison – Westeros Wiki
What is the Wall, but the same thing? A gate between North and South and a bridge between east and west. The wormways beneath the Wall have their own intersection of crossroads.
Dany has entered the wormways through the Black Gate counterpart at the HoU. She has access to visions of past, present and future. She is even chased down the hall by The Things that Comes in the Night. The place is loaded with traps and worms have teeth.
She’s given instructions by Pyat Pree for navigating a maze. Always take the door to the right, always take the stairs upwards, never down.
In contrast, Jon’s recurring dream of a long hallway with doors places him at Winterfell. Counter to Dany; he must descend to the crypts. A dream of the future.
It’s significant that before Dany meets the Undying she has to pass through the doors to the HoB&W; sees their splendid dopplegangers before confronting their trapped souls. The Wall, the Weirnet and the HoB&W intricately connected and sewn together.
They are drinking from a cup of ice, consuming the blue heart at the center of the table, eager to consume Dany’s life force as well.
Dany CoK: Finally the stair opened. To her right, a set of wide wooden doors had been thrown open. They were fashioned of ebony and weirwood, the black and white grains swirling and twisting in strange interwoven patterns. They were very beautiful, yet somehow frightening.
Through a narrow door she passed, into a chamber awash in gloom.
A long stone table filled this room. Above it floated a human heart, swollen and blue with corruption, yet still alive. It beat, a deep ponderous throb of sound and each pulse sent out a wash of indigo light. The figures around the table were no more than blue shadows. As Dany walked to the empty chair at the foot of the table, they did not stir, nor speak, nor turn to face her. There was no sound but the slow, deep beat of the rotting heart.
Through the indigo murk, she could make out the wizened features of the Undying One to her right, an old old man, wrinkled and hairless. His flesh was a ripe violet-blue, his lips and nails bluer still, so dark they were almost black. Even the whites of his eyes were blue. They stared unseeing at the ancient woman on the opposite side of the table, whose gown of pale silk had rotted on her body. One withered breast was left bare in the Qartheen manner, to show a pointed blue nipple hard as leather.
She is not breathing. Dany listened to the silence. None of them are breathing, and they do not move, and those eyes see nothing. Could it be that the Undying Ones were dead?
Drogon saves Dany in the end burning the undying surrounding her pawing and clawing at her flesh, licking sucking and biting. He “tore at the terrible dark heart, ripping the rotten flesh to ribbons,”
She could hear the shrieks of the Undying as they burned, their high thin papery voices crying out in tongues long dead. Their flesh was crumbling parchment, their bones dry wood soaked in tallow. They danced as the flames consumed hem; they staggered and writhed and spun and raised blazing hands on high, their fingers bright as torches.
Outside a long dim passageway stretched serpentine before her, lit by the flickering orange glare from behind. Dany ran, searching a for a door, a door to her right, a door to her left, any door, but there was nothing, only twisty stone walls, and a floor that seemed to move slowly under her feet, writhing as if to trip her. She kept her feet and ran faster, and suddenly the door was there ahead of her, a door like an open mouth.
Pyat Pree is murderous. Dany has smashed one of the hinges of the serpent door, jamming the door shut. If the magic of the world is to come back into balance, the Undying must be cut off from the fountain heads, the sewing, stitching and weaving undone and the wall destroyed; the fountain heads drained.
Trios and the Fountain of the Drunken God
Dany’s experience in the HotU gives us the symbolism of the god Trios and his counter-part, the Drunken God.
Trios is a three-headed god worshipped in Essos. There is a large statue of him near the Temple of Trios in Tyrosh. There is also a tower with three turrets dedicated to Trios in Braavos.[1]
Penny recalls to Tyrion Lannister that an elderly dwarf was cut into three parts and pushed inside the mouths of Trios at the temple in Tyrosh.[2]
The Sailor's Wife once told Arya Stark that the first head of Trio devours the dying and the reborn emerge from the third, but she did not recall the purpose of the middle head
– Westeros Wiki
I would invert the Tale of the Sailor’s Wife and say that Trios devours the living and spits out the undying who occupy the space between life and death by drinking from the fountain of the drunken god. Drink from a cup of ice or a cup of fire; to be determined by the middle head; The House of Black and White. Or the Sailor’s Wife could be saying that the living are continually in the process of dying; that Trios gives them a second life.
It’s interesting that Trios is represented by three turrets in Braavos since the drunken god motif shows up at Moat Cailin as the Drunkard’s Tower, one of three towers; and again on the road to Mole’s Town, one of three trees.
Jon DwD: The drunkard was an ash tree, twisted sideways by centuries of wind. And now it had a face. A solemn mouth, a broken branch for a nose, two eyes carved deep into the trunk, gazing north up the Kingsroad, toward the castle and the Wall.
Also belonging to a group of three trees with characteristics of the greenseer and Bran, the oak tree.
This seems very much a caricature of Tyrion with his broken nose, deep set eyes, a well known drunk. So we have Tyrion symbolically sacrificed to Trios and associated with the Drunken God. It may be that Tyrion is meant to unravel that thread.
Leaning trees and leaning towers as metaphors for unbalanced magic. The other trees seem to represent the greenseer sporting Mormont’s raven on it’s branch and angry Bran, the oak tree.
What this says about Moat Cailin, I’m not sure. Only that these agencies are connected and working together in some fashion.
The Children’s Tower, The Drunken Tower , the Gatehouse Tower with it’s tree sporting sheets of ghost moss. In other words, The Night Fort with it’s Black Gate, a face hung on a stone wall and weirwood tree. (h/t Yield) This seems to be the only fort we know of that has a weirwood within it’s boundaries.
All these places, The Wall, (Library at Castle Black); HoU and Winterfell have a characteristic maze-like structure, to confuse things further. Sam also describes the maze-like quality of the Braavos:
Sam FcF: The stony maze of islands and canals that was Braavos, devoid of grass and trees and teeming with strangers who spoke to her in words she could not understand, frightened her so badly that she lost the map and soon herself.
Woven Magic:
There are a couple of Dany passages that stand out for another reason.
Dany CoK: Finally the stair opened. To her right, a set of wide wooden doors had been thrown open. They were fashioned of ebony and weirwood, the black and white grains swirling and twisting in strange interwoven patterns. They were very beautiful, yet somehow frightening.
There is an idea here that magic is manipulated by weaving light. Melisandre say something similar about magic:
DwD Jon – Jon Sow turned to Melisndre. “What sorcery is this?
“Call is what you will. Glamor, seeming, illusion. R’hllor is the Lord of Light, Jon Snow, and it is given to his servants to weave with it, as others weave with thread.
Coldhands say something similar to Sam SoS:
“The Wall. The Wall is more than just ice and stone, he said. There are spells woven into it … old ones, and strong. He cannot pass beyond the Wall.”
Dany’s description of the carpet in the wormways:
The mold-eaten carpet under her feet had once been gorgeously colored, and whorls of gold could still be seen the fabric, glinting broken amidst the faded grey and mottled green.
I think this is one of GRRM’s great jokes. The carpet Dany describes is representative of the magic that is woven between rock and ice. It’s a magic carpet. And Mel’s statement might also be a bit of trick. R’hllor’s servants weave with light; while the Others weave with thread.
Is it a coincidence that Tyrion always notices myrish carpets and once vomited on one in a drunken hangover?
So we are given a description of the current state of the Wall’s magic. Once gorgeously colored but now depleted and faded, mold-eaten.
If the Wall is made of ice and stone; it is possible that the stone base is full of obsidian? The north is a land of ice and fire; Dragonstone is full of obsidian rock including the green version. Obsidian is not only black; it is also grey.
When the legends say that the Wall was built by giants could the giants be glaciers pushing all that rock and obsidian into an immense glacial moraine? The ice then piled on top through the labor of men and giants?
We already know the qualities of obsidian or frozen fire. It destroys the Others. Is the wall warded by frozen fire? The second quality of obsidian is that they can be used as glass candles.
Sam Cok: The candle was unpleasantly bright. There was something queer about it. The flame did not flicker, even when Archmaester Marwyn closed the door so hard that papers blew off a nearby table. The light did something strange to colors too. Whites were bright as fresh-fallen snow, yellow shone like gold, reds turned to flame, but the shadows were s black they looked like holes in the world. Sam found himself staring. The candle itself was three feet tall and slender as a sword, ridged and twisted, glittering black. “is that …?”
”… obsidian,” said the other man in the room, a pale, fleshy, pasty-faced young fellow with round shoulders, soft hands, close-set eyes , and food stains on his robes.
“Call it dragonglass.” Archmaester Marwyn glanced at the candle for a moment. “It burns but is not consumed.”
“What feeds the flame?” asked 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?”
Was the carpet once so brightly colored? Does the obsidian in the wall also act like a glass candle allowing entry to people’s dreams.
Is the weirnet stitched together with glass candles in the Wall? For example:
Bran Got: Bran looked down, and felt his insides turn to water. The ground was rushing up at him now. The whole world was spread out below him, a tapestry of white and brown and green. He could see everything so clearly that for a moment he forgot to be afraid. He could see the whole real, and everyone in it.
He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the narrow sea, to the Free Cities and the green Dothraki sea and beyond to Vaes Dothrak under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade Sea, to Asshai by the Shadow where dragons stirred in the sunrise.
I’m going to stop here. I do have more to say about the way forward to quote Quaithe and I will come back to that at another time. For now, this is long enough!
What do you think? Have I convinced you about the Hinges of the World and woven magic?
Thanks for reading,
Min