The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods. They were all afire now, Maid and Mother, Warrior and Smith, the Crone with her pearl eyes and the Father with his gilded beard; even the Stranger, carved to look more animal than human. The old dry wood and countless layers of paint and varnish blazed  with a fierce hungry light.

When the weirwoods are burned, the air is similarly filled with the smoke of burning gods, so you can see the correlation here. Now in  the show version, this scene is at night, but in the book version, it takes place in the morning – meaning that the night is ending here as the wooden gods are burnt. We don’t have time to go into detail on it here, but there’s a lot more to the link between burning ships and burning weirwoods – for example, there’s a legendary fellow named The Grey King who sailed weirwood boats and possessed the fire of the gods by means of a burning tree – weirwood boats and burning trees, together, and there’s also something about a sea dragon. You can find out more about that in “The Grey King and the Sea Dragon,” as well as on the Disputed Lands channel, but back here on Dragonstone, what we have is a carved wooden god, burning brightly, with Lightbringer jammed into its wood:

The Maiden lay athwart the Warrior, her arms widespread as if to embrace him. The Mother seemed almost to shudder as the flames came licking up her face. A longsword had been thrust through her heart, and its leather grip was alive with flame.

The sword is thrust through her heart everyone – through the wooden heart of a burning god.

This done, Melisandre begins feeling it and starts to talk of the prophecy of Azor Ahai, giving us a clue that the idea of sticking a burning sword into a weirwood tree has something to do with defeating the Long Night:

Melisandre was robed all in scarlet satin and blood velvet, her eyes as red as the great ruby that glistened at her throat as if it too were afire. “In ancient books of Asshai it is written that there will come a day after a long summer when the stars bleed and the cold breath of darkness falls heavy on the world. In this dread hour a warrior shall draw from the fire a burning sword. And that sword shall be Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes, and he who clasps it shall be Azor Ahai come again, and the darkness shall flee before him.” She lifted her voice, so it carried out over the gathered host. “Azor Ahai, beloved of R’hllor! The Warrior of Light, the Son of Fire! Come forth, your sword awaits you! Come forth and take it into your hand!”

And that’s what Stannis does; hearing all this inspirational Azor Ahai and Long Night talk, he marches into the pyre and pulls Lightbringer out of the carved wooden god and holds it aloft. This is a symbolic depiction of Azor Ahai triumphing over the cold and darkness that covers the world during the Long Night, and again, it involves stabbing a tree-turned-carved-wooden-god with a flaming sword. That’s a pretty nice correlation to the proposed endgame of using Lightbringer to set fire to Night King’s tree, or to the weirwoodnet as a whole. Stannis’s sword even burns with green fire in this scene, as Melisandre has coated the sword in wildfire to make it look like a fulfillment of prophecy, which may be a clue about green magic – the magic of the greenseers and weirwoods – being burned.

Here’s something else to consider – burning weirwoods is a thing Melisandre is into. Speaking in terms of book cannon, Melisandre and Stannis later go to Storm’s End and burn the great old weirwood there, most likely an eight thousand year-old tree from the Age of Heroes. One imagines he waved his Lightbringer around a bit when they did, but either way, it’s another example of an Azor Ahai figure burning weirwoods – actual weirwoods that time, not symbolic ones like here at Dragonstone.

Then in ASOS, Stannis offers to legitimize Jon Snow as Jon Stark, Lord of Winterfell…  but Melisandre would require him to burn the Winterfell heart tree if he takes the offer, so he refuses. But if Jon does end up having to help set fire to the weirwoods in some sense to defeat the White Walkers, this will be looked at as heavy foreshadowing. That Winterfell tree Stannis wants him to burn is associated with Bran more than any other tree, too, since Bran sees through its eyes in his weirwood visions and even speaks from inside of it to Theon, so… yikes.

Mel and Stannis burn more actual weirwood at the Wall (and this is really becoming a theme here) when they demand that each of the wildlings who want to cross to the south of the Wall toss a piece of weirwood into the fire, and this time Stannis is definitely waving Lightbringer around in their faces. The wildlings are of course fleeing from the white walkers, and notice how escaping them is equated with burning the Old Gods:

Behind them was only cold and death. Ahead was hope. They came on, clutching their scraps of wood until the time came to feed them to the flames. R’hllor was a jealous deity, ever hungry. So the new god devoured the corpse of the old, and cast gigantic shadows of Stannis and Melisandre upon the Wall, black against the ruddy red reflections on the ice.

The weirwood trees really do look like corpse trees, with their bleeding faces carved into trunks “as white as bone” and with their leaves like bloody hands, and there’s even a white tree / wight tree wordplay thing going on. Here we see the weirwood corpse of the old gods devoured by fire at the command of an Azor Ahai figure and his fire witch, fitting the pattern once again.

In fact… only moments before unsheathing Lightbringer and opening the gate to the Wildlings, they burn the Lord of Bones, glamoured up to look like Mance Raydar, in a weirwood cage. The Lord of Bones, a.k.a. Rattleshirt, is definitely a white walker symbol, with his bone white armor to match the bone white skin of the White Walkers, and the geenral connotation of the Lord of Death which comes along with dressing up as a skeleton. And anyone who is the King Beyond the Wall like Mance can play that role as well, since the Night King is the real King Beyond the Wall (and this is corroborated by more book symbolism, for what it’s worth).

So that’s a Night King figure, burned inside a weirwood cage y’all, and as he died screaming…

Stannis Baratheon drew Lightbringer.

The sword glowed red and yellow and orange, alive with light. Jon had seen the show before … but not like this, never before like this. Lightbringer was the sun made steel. 

If we imagine Rattleshirt-disguised-as-Mance as playing the role of Night King, this is a home run for our theory – burning Night King inside a weirwood cage at the Wall as Lightbringer shines as bright as the sun. This really seems like a glimpse of what the end game might look like – several heroes working together to trap and contain the Night King while his weirwood tree is set on fire, which contains and consumes him. This is the big hint about how to destroy the Night King: turn his weirwood tree, the source of his power, into a burning weirwood cage. Again we think of the blue-eyed, wighted Ned Umber, pinned to the spiral diagram of the Night King tree while it all burns – it’s a symbolic burning weirwood cage for the Night King.

Returning to the scene of Mance Raydar’s burning, we look around and… oh hey, there’s Jon Snowzor Ahai. Jon actually uses an arrow to put the glamoured Rattleshirt out of his misery, so he is even implied as delivering part of the blow that ends Night King.

Ok, did you enjoy that? I promised Azor Ahai burning weirwoods, and I think we are off to a good start.  You gotta love how how the first Stannis Lightbringer scene is at Dragonstone, home of House Targaryen, and the place where the show has depicted spirals images in the caves alongside white walkers and other cool shit that I broke down with History of Westeros in their video “Caverns of Dragonglass.” I can’t wait to see if there are similar cave drawings in the books, and I’d also recommend Gray Area’s video positing that, at least in show cannon, the Targaryens may have modeled their three-headed dragon sigil off of the spiral designs in the dragonglass caves, which I think makes loads of sense.

I’ll see you again soon with part 3, where we’ll break down the most epic dragonrider versus dragonrider battle in recorded history, one that acts as a perfect model for the eternal clash of ice and fire. We’ll find more symbolism of Azor Ahai symbolically shutting down the weirwoodnet to defeat the white walkers (and even stabbing weirwoods with a sword, like literally), and this time… dragons. Also, I’d like you to invite you to join me and the myth heads (and other honored guests) every Sundays for NOWIE – at 3 EST we do a pregame show, and we do a live postgame reaction show right after the HBO episode is done airing. Thanks again for watching, don’t forget to like and subscribe, and you can find all of my material at Lucifermeanslightbringer.com. See you next time!

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