Hi all, just starting a thread for this to kick-off some discussion.
As part of the North Week, I put together a semi-full scale version of the Three-Eyed Crow's Cave (TECC) at /warp ravenhunt . I had a go at making it consistent with canon, I've copied out the book quotes below with relevant screenshots.
Canon
The Hill
Cave entrance
Tunnels
Three Eyed Raven chamber
(This chamber should probably be expanded in the real version, longer bridge, deeper chasm to river)
Three Eyed Raven
There's probably some more canon in AWOIAF about the children and their caves that I'll add to this thread too.
Next Steps
I'm not sure how exactly to approach this build within our project framework. Maybe it could be included as part of Otty's Mance's Camp project, or it could be a stand alone terra app, solo project or co-opted into the Nightfort server build. Open to ideas though. Someone who isn't currently attached to a solo project could potentially take this on and use /warp ravenhunt as a starting point. We're in a similar spot with the new Fist of the First Men that's been put together in test as well so it would be good to find a solution that lets us make some progress on these long overdue, important canon locations.
As part of the North Week, I put together a semi-full scale version of the Three-Eyed Crow's Cave (TECC) at /warp ravenhunt . I had a go at making it consistent with canon, I've copied out the book quotes below with relevant screenshots.
Canon
The Hill
- Shadows stretched against the hillside, black and hungry.
- All the trees were bowed and twisted by the weight of ice they carried. Some hardly looked like trees at all. Buried from root to crown in frozen snow, they huddled on the hill like giants, monstrous and misshapen creatures hunched against the icy wind.
- The hill was steep and thickly wooded. The snow had stopped three days ago, but none of it had melted. Beneath the trees, the ground was blanketed in white, still pristine and unbroken.
Cave entrance
- "The back door is three leagues north, down a sinkhole."
- "The cave is warded.
- Halfway up, between the weirwoods, that cleft in the rock."
- A fold in the rock
- "There's a passage there. Steep and twisty at first, a runnel through the rock. If you can reach it, you'll be safe."
- In the little cleft between the weirwood trees was a flickering glow, a ruddy light calling through the gathering gloom.
Tunnels
- A dark stone roof.
- The way was cramped and twisty, and so low that Hodor soon was crouching.
- Loose dirt crumbled at each touch and dribbled down into his eyes and hair, and once he smacked his brow on a thick white root growing from the tunnel wall, with tendrils hanging from it and spiderwebs between its fingers.
- The child went in front with the torch in hand, her cloak of leaves whispering behind her, but the passage turned so much that Bran soon lost sight of her.
- After they had gone down a little, the cave divided, but the left branch was dark as pitch, so even Hodor knew to follow the moving torch to the right.
- 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.
- Bran realized that the snakes were only white roots like the one he'd hit his head on. "It's weirwood roots.
- There were more side passages after that, more chambers, and Bran heard dripping water somewhere to his right.
- He saw eyes looking back at them, slitted eyes that glowed bright, reflecting back the torchlight. More children, he told himself, the girl is not the only one.
- 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.
- The heart tree at Winterfell had roots as thick around as a giant's legs, but these were even thicker. And Bran had never seen so many of them.
- There must be a whole grove of weirwoods growing up above us.
- The floor of the passage was littered with the bones of birds and beasts. But there were other bones as well, big ones that must have come from giants and small ones that could have been from children. On either side of them, in niches carved from the stone, skulls looked down on them. Bran saw a bear skull and a wolf skull, half a dozen human skulls and near as many giants. All the rest were small, queerly formed. Children of the forest. The roots had grown in and around and through them, every one. A few had ravens perched atop them, watching them pass with bright black eyes.
- The last part of their dark journey was the steepest. Hodor made the final descent on his arse, bumping and sliding downward in a clatter of broken bones, loose dirt, and pebbles.
- The caves were timeless, vast, silent. They were home to more than three score living singers and the bones of thousands dead, and extended far below the hollow hill. "Men should not go wandering in this place,"
- "The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a thousand thousand of your man-years."
- As Hodor (Bran) explored the caves. He found chambers full of bones, shafts that plunged deep into the earth, a place where the skeletons of gigantic bats hung upside down from the ceiling.
- He even crossed the slender stone bridge that arched over the abyss and discovered more passages and chambers on the far side. One was full of singers, enthroned like Brynden in nests of weirwood roots that wove under and through and around their bodies. Most of them looked dead to him, but as he crossed in front of them their eyes would open and follow the light of his torch, and one of them opened and closed a wrinkled mouth as if he were trying to speak.
- They came into an echoing cavern as large as the great hall of Winterfell, with stone teeth hanging from its ceiling and more poking up through its floor.
Three Eyed Raven chamber
- The girl child was waiting for them, standing on one end of a natural bridge above a yawning chasm. Down below in the darkness, Bran heard the sound of rushing water. An underground river.
- "Do we have to cross?" Bran asked, as the Reeds came sliding down behind him. If Hodor slipped on that narrow bridge, they would fall and fall. "No, boy," the child said. "Behind you”. (Means that the Three Eyed Crow's throne sits in front of the stone bridge)
- The great cavern that opened on the abyss was as black as pitch, black as tar, blacker than the feathers of a crow. Light entered as a trespasser, unwanted and unwelcome, and soon was gone again; cookfires, candles, and rushes burned for a little while, then guttered out again, their brief lives at an end.
- Under the hill they still had food to eat. A hundred kinds of mushrooms grew down here. Blind white fish swam in the black river, but they tasted just as good as fish with eyes once you cooked them up. They had cheese and milk from the goats that shared the caves with the singers, even some oats and barleycorn and dried fruit laid by during the long summer.
(This chamber should probably be expanded in the real version, longer bridge, deeper chasm to river)
Three Eyed Raven
- Before them a pale lord in ebon finery sat dreaming in a tangled nest of roots, a woven weirwood throne that embraced his withered limbs as a mother does a child.
- His body was so skeletal and his clothes so rotted that at first Bran took 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 and long enough to brush against the earthen floor.
- 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 that was fraying, and here and there the brown and yellow bone beneath was poking through.
- Seated on his throne of roots in the great cavern, half-corpse and half-tree, Lord Brynden seemed less a man than some ghastly statue made of twisted wood, old bone, and rotted wool. The only thing that looked alive in the pale ruin that was his face was his one red eye, burning like the last coal in a dead fire, surrounded by twisted roots and tatters of leathery white skin hanging off a yellowed skull
There's probably some more canon in AWOIAF about the children and their caves that I'll add to this thread too.
Next Steps
I'm not sure how exactly to approach this build within our project framework. Maybe it could be included as part of Otty's Mance's Camp project, or it could be a stand alone terra app, solo project or co-opted into the Nightfort server build. Open to ideas though. Someone who isn't currently attached to a solo project could potentially take this on and use /warp ravenhunt as a starting point. We're in a similar spot with the new Fist of the First Men that's been put together in test as well so it would be good to find a solution that lets us make some progress on these long overdue, important canon locations.
