1000 Worlds - Bitterblooms

One of my favorites. I love this story.

It is very relevant to our discussion on blue roses (Gwindor , SlyWren , kingmonkey , maestercambodia , wolfmaid7 , sagenadia , nanother , whitewolfstark , Direwolf Blitzer , markg171 ).

It has elements of Harrenhal, the North, wolf-blood, the Others, blue roses growing from ice, a "deep winter" that has lasted eight years....you name it.

The "Ice Wagon" sounds a lot like our "Ice Dragon" and makes me wonder if the Ice Dragon is our missing Ursa Major (Plow/Wagon/Wain) constellation in ASOIAF, maestercambodia  and evolett.

A bit more on this quote above:

The stars were out; she could see them peeking through the bare black branches above her. The Ice Wagon dominated the sky, bringing cold into the world, as it had for as long as Shawn could remember. The driver’s blue eyes glared down at her, mocking.

It had been the Ice Wagon that killed Lane, she thought bitterly. Not the vampire. The vampire had mauled him badly that night, when his bowstring broke as he tried to draw in their defense. But in another season, with Shawn nursing him, he would have lived. In deepwinter, he never had a chance. The cold crept in past all the defenses she had built for him; the cold drained away all his strength, all his ferocity. The cold left him a shrunken white thing, numb and pale, his lips tinged with blue. And now the driver of the Ice Wagon would claim his soul.

[and later in the story]
It was blue, all blue; hazy, shifting blue. A pale blue, dancing, dancing, like the ghost light that had flickered on the sky. A soft blue, like the little flower, the impossible blossom by the riverbank. A cold blue, like the eyes of the Ice Wagon’s black driver, like Lane’s lips when last she kissed them. Blue, blue, and it moved and would not be still. Everything was blurred, unreal. There was only blue. For a long time, only blue.

Note the reference to the "eyes" of the Ice Wagon's driver.


Bran V, Clash:

"Very well." The maester rang for help. Hodor must have been busy in the stables. It was Osha who came. She was stronger than Alebelly, though, and had no trouble lifting Bran in her arms and carrying him down the steps.

"Osha," Bran asked as they crossed the yard. "Do you know the way north? To the Wall and . . . and even past?"

"The way's easy. Look for the Ice Dragon, and chase the blue star in the rider's eye." She backed through a door and started up the winding steps.

I think there's something to this. Bittersweet blooms that are false, and the color of the eye of the Ice Wagon's driver/Ice Dragon's rider. Blue as the eyes of death.

In Bitterblooms, the Ice Wagon's driver mocks the living and claims souls.

In ASOIAF, I think our blue roses are again a symbol of the same mockery and soul-collection. What say you Gwindor , prestonjacobs, kingmonkey , SlyWren , maestercambodia , LmL ?

I think this actually bears more upon Lyanna than Rhaegar. Lyanna was fond of flowers, and had a special appreciation for blue winter roses. Which are bitter blooms. Which are lies and death. 

A macabre association for a child-woman to have. Lyanna favored the eyes of death. 



  It's one of my favorites. I really like the woman's voice who does the reading too. It fits the story, and she does the characters perfectly. 

Great notes ser!

The strongest impression this story leaves upon me is that the blooms are bitter. They are lies that are known to be lies, yet are desired in times of desperation.

I'm wondering if our Jon could end up like Shawn at the end of this story, knowingly seeking a false refuge as all warmth flees from him.

No disrespect to Ser PJ, but I had to amend the above post...



@lewispringle at the mothership had the idea first:
asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/103986-a-song-of-ice-and-fire-is-1000-worlds-scifi-story/

It's his one and only post. He joined Westeros on 2/12/14, and was last online 2/14/14... even though he appears to be a huge fan of GRRM and had read a great number of his works. He also quibbles over time and technology.

Interesting...

Just finished a reread, and damn there is a lot of Ice&Fire imagery in this! One thing that I did not catch the first time, but suspect now, is that Morgan is not in fact from Avalon, but from the Alynne family.
Evidence:



So here we learn that Morgan is familiar with the Carin family, though we later learn that Beth was Voice Carin 60 years earlier. So Morgan has not interacted with anyone from Carinhall in 60 years.
We also learn that she had a Carin lover, Shawn, whom she met "every tenthyear, at Gathering" - meaning she met her at least twice, probably more often than that, and that she is familiar with the tradition of Gathering.
Main takeaway: as of 60 years ago, Morgan was attending Gatherings, not living in the spaceship.



She tells a wild tale of all her famous family members. However, we know the last sentence is a lie, so there is no reason to think the rest is true. I believe she learned all of her "off world" knowledge from whoever welcomed her into the spaceship 60 years earlier- or, perhaps, she figured it out on her own by reading and watching TV.



Tesenya, who is very old, tells a story of six members of House Alynne who went missing one winter and were later found dead, dressed in "flimsies". They had starved to death in the forest.

This story is questionable at best. If they were wearing flimsies in deepwinter, they would have died of hypothermia LONG before they starved. Also, if none of them lived, how would the name Morganhall have gotten back to Tesenya? Never mind the many starving predators that would have gotten to them if they were really out there for years.

But what we CAN safely take away from the story, IMO, is that some members of House Alynne disappeared one winter, and most of them were later found dead. If they were indeed dressed inappropriately, that would suggest they either went mad in the spaceship (an interesting prospect) and left it without dressing first, OR, there was conflict with whoever remained in the spaceship and they were kicked out to die. I propose that in either case, "Morgan" of House Alynne stayed behind. The timing seems ok; Tesenya is very old, and this would have been roughly 60 years ago. There must have been at least one survivor who shared the story of Morganhall, albeit a bit distorted.



Morgan becomes wistful when House Alynne is mentioned. She describes its beauty in detail, including sunrise and sunset- clearly, she knew it well. She asks Shawn about it, despite that not being the point of their conversation. Clearly, there is some sort of emotional attachment to this place/family.



Here Morgan is showing Shawn what the reader knows is a recording of a previous Gathering in the location that the spaceship is currently sitting. The ruined city is still whole, the river is unfrozen in summer, and the landing deck is full of spaceships.
At the time that the spaceship recorded this film, it was sitting next to a large, advanced, thriving city, full of people. Yet Shawn's planet in the present has NO technology, and no apparent memory of it. Also, the city is in complete ruins, and no bones are mentioned. Therefore, the recording must have been made much, much longer ago than 60 years. Even 100 years would not explain the complete loss of not only technology, but all memory of technology. No, the Morgan La Fey ship has been sitting alone for at least a few hundred years- which means, unless she is THAT old, Morgan herself was not the one who made these recordings. She arrived much later.



If she is indeed a space traveler from Avalon, why won't Morgan talk about it? What is she hiding (other than her real name)?



Alynne House was the best, huh? Funny how that one keeps coming up, when we haven't heard mention of any other native families aside from Carin...



Morgan lied so that Shawn would have the best magic experience - the way it was for her, at first. This is what really gives it away, IMO. It very strongly suggests that when Morgan first arrived, she was fooled as well. She learned to pretend, but it was better when it seemed real, so she wanted this for Shawn too.
Not to mention, even now, she refers to all the technology as "magic". I don't think she understands how it works at all, which also supports the idea of her not being the original owner of the ship.



Over Shawn's lifetime (let's say 60-80 years), the flowers have spread significantly from what she remembers. The vines, specifically, are twice as thick as they were before. What does this tell us? Well, if in 60ish years they can spread so much, and double in thickness... then they sure as hell weren't planted hundreds of years ago when the spaceship first arrived. No, it seems very likely that they were planted around the time that Morgan arrived at the ship, about 60 years before Shawn first meets her.

Lastly, of course, we learn that Morgan named herself after the spaceship. This makes no sense whatsoever if she arrived in the ship, but would work if she was a missing Alynne family member who had to think of some other name on the fly.

What do you think?

I'm still deciding if it actually matters, of course, lol. I do find it interesting that a person from a primitive culture would have appropriated this ancient, advanced technology and used it to fool others into thinking she could do magic. (She probably believed it herself, actually)
It reminds me a bit of Mel, pretending to understand more than she does, but potential BR parallels are more intriguing to me. Does he really know what he's doing? Or did he stumble upon the cave one day, realize the weirnet will truly give him a thousand eyes and one, and simply stay there? Now he is fumbling in the dark, just like Mel, recruiting other potential GS for unknown purposes, when maybe, just maybe, the cave was never meant for him.

Hmmm. Yes, but - I'm not sure you could use the hat-trick example and then say that therefore, rabbits in general are a symbol of trickery. Morgan did not lie about the flowers, and if Shawn had been paying attention, the flowers should have been her clue that this particular spaceship had not gone anywhere in a long time. If anything, I would categorize them as an ignored warning.

Where I'm going with this is that it was the TV, the images Morgan was showing Shawn, that were the true lie. Which then leads me away from Lyanna Stark and rather makes me wonder about all the characters being shown things by mysterious "magic" figures - Dany/Quaithe, Bran/BR, Aeron/Euron, etc. We have been warned many times that magic and prophecy are not to be trusted- yet still we try to figure out Dany's 3 mounts, the shadows in Bran's vision (), who Euron's fire wife will be, etc. We are waiting for Dany to be betrayed, b/c she was warned that it would happen. But what if the prophecies are wrong? Lies, (with a bit of truth in them to make them believable), used to manipulate the characters? I know I'm not the first to suggest this, but it feels to me as though Bitterblooms is exactly that type of story, so perhaps we should see it as a warning.

I do, however, agree with you that the color blue is linked to deceit in GRRM's world. There is the strange blue light that lures Shawn to the spaceship to begin with, and also a blue glow inside the ship, IIRC. The color blue is all over this story, and the whole story is about one big lie.