The Big Picture
Melisandre predicted Arya’s bloody future, including her role in killing the Night King. The prophecy reveals Arya will shut brown, blue, and green eyes forever. Arya fulfills the prophecy by killing Walder Frey, Littlefinger, and the Night King, but not Cersei.
There are so many prophecies in Game of Thrones, that sometimes it’s hard to keep track. Many of them stuck with the fans throughout most of the series, so it’s difficult to single one out as the most important one. There’s one, though, that predicted one of the most important moments in the series when Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) kills the Night King (Vladimir Furdik) in Season 8 — and it’s not Azor Ahai nor any other of the most famous ones. It’s actually one from Season 3 when Melisandre (Carice Van Houten) briefly meets Arya and says the girl will “shut many eyes forever” — brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes. Let’s remember what exactly it’s about.
Game Of Thrones
Nine noble families fight for control over the lands of Westeros, while an ancient enemy returns after being dormant for a millennia.
Release Date April 17, 2011
Creator David Benioff, D.B. Weiss
Seasons 8
Studio HBO
Melisandre Predicted Arya Would Be the One To Kill the Night King
When Melisandre was introduced in Season 2, it was clear from the start she was not to be trifled with. She drinks a glass of poisoned wine and survives unscathed, gives birth to a shadow demon, and is always lighting up blades of swords everywhere. Melisandre is deeply attuned to the supernatural as a Red Priestess, so the things she says often carry the weight of prophecies. While she may have been wrong about Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) being the Prince That Was Promised, she did get her prophecy about Arya Stark right.
In Season 3, Episode 6, “The Climb”, Melisandre goes to the Riverlands to fetch Gendry (Joe Dempsie) from the Brotherhood Without Banners. She needs royal blood to perform one of her rituals to the Lord of Light, and Gendry is a perfect subject as a bastard of Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy). She just didn’t count on casually making the prophecy that would save the world a few seasons later. Getting Gendry from the Brotherhood is easy, as they are also servants of the Lord of Light and need money, but Arya, who’s also present, isn’t having any of it. She confronts the Melisandre, who is immediately taken aback by Arya and stares deeply into the girl’s eyes, predicting: “I see a darkness in you. And in that darkness, eyes staring back at me: brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes. Eyes you’ll shut forever. We will meet again.”
And they do. In Season 8, Episode 3, “The Long Night”, Melisandre arrives in Winterfell right on time to help in the fight against the army of the dead. She does what she can with her magic, but, as the battle expands to inside the castle, she is cornered in the great hall when Arya, Sandor Clegane (Rory McCann), and Beric Dondarrion (Richard Dormer) burst into the room fleeing from a horde of wights. Beric dies for the seventh and final time, and Melisandre declares his purpose is finally fulfilled. Arya talks to her, saying she was right about her prophecy and that she did shut many eyes forever, to which Melisandre recalls: “Brown eyes, green eyes, blue eyes.”
The change in the order of the colors is important in many ways, but, at that moment, it’s meant to trigger Arya’s realization that the White Walkers have blue eyes. Once the wights start coming down the door to the great hall, Melisandre gives Arya the nudge she needs to go to the godswood and save Bran (Isaac Hampstead-Wright) by asking her what Syrio Forel (Miltos Yerolemou) taught her back in Season 1, when she was first learning how to fight with a sword: “What do we say to the god of death?” “Not today,” Arya answers and bolts to the godswood, reappearing only when she stabs the Night King. In the previous episode, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” Gendry says to Arya that the White Walkers are death, so, in this context, the Night King is the blue-eyed god of death.
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In ‘Game of Thrones’, Arya Shuts Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes, but There’s One Color Remaining
This theory being brought back in Season 8 is a deep cut, especially because it was far from being the main event in “The Climb” — the episode where Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) climbs the Wall with Ygritte (Rose Leslie) and the wildlings, and Theon (Alfie Allen) is being tortured by Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon). But it does inform Arya’s future in major ways, killing the Night King being but one of the major events it alludes to. When they meet in Winterfell, Melisandre changes the order of blue and green eyes in the prophecy. Once “The Long Night” aired, this led to a lot of speculation, because Arya had already killed brown eyes before.
In Season 6, Episode 10, “The Winds of Winter,” it’s revealed that Arya finally made it back to Westeros after her stint training with the Faceless Men in Braavos. Her first order of business? Crossing off another name on her kill list and getting revenge for the Red Wedding. She goes straight to the Twins, where she kills Walder Frey (David Bradley) himself and gets revenge for the Red Wedding. Walder Frey, whose eyes are brown. This is another major kill, as House Frey was in charge of the Riverlands after the Red Wedding. With Walder Frey gone, Arya then proceeds to kill the rest of the Freys, thus giving the Riverlands back to House Tully – her mother’s house – and removing one of House Stark’s worst enemies. Before that, even, she had already gotten revenge against another man with brown eyes: In Season 5, Episode 10, “Mother’s Mercy,” she kills Meryn Trant (Ian Beattie) back in Braavos.
But the green eyes are a little more complicated. In the books, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish (Aidan Gillen) is said to have “grey-green” eyes, and he is indeed killed by Arya in Season 7, Episode 7, “The Dragon and the Wolf.” It’s never clear in the series that he has green eyes, so the book description is what’s taken into consideration. But the fact that Melisandre originally said “green eyes” last when first telling her prophecy made fans guess that, after killing the Night King, Arya would go on to kill the last name on her list, green-eyed queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). In Season 7, Episode 1, “Dragonstone,” Arya tells a group of Lannister soldiers (Ed Sheeran included) that she is on her way to King’s Landing. “I’m going to kill the queen,” she says, but the soldiers don’t take her seriously and everyone just has a good laugh. Unfortunately, though, that might as well have been David Benioff and D.B. Weiss themselves laughing, because not only would Arya not get to kill Cersei, but the queen would also have one of the most underwhelming deaths in Game of Thrones.
Prophecies Are Always Up to Interpretation, but ‘Game of Thrones’ Forgot About Many of Them
Image via HBO
Even though there really are too many prophecies in Game of Thrones, the series also never cared too much about addressing them or even following up on them. Melisandre’s prophecy about Arya is hardly among the most famous, or even among the ones the fans actually cared about when the series was still going on. The Azor Ahai prophecy, for example, is one that the series sidelined completely even with Melisandre mentioning it whenever she could. Cersei Lannister’s death itself had two prophecies that fans speculated were about — the Arya prophecy, and the Valonqar prophecy — but neither proved true in the end.
In this sense, it’s safe to say that Melisandre’s prophecy about Arya is the most important of the tv series because it not only came true but also predicted the ending of the series. Prophecies are always open to interpretation, and it didn’t end up being Azor Ahai who killed the Night King. But, perhaps Melisandre hit the nail right on the head with Arya.
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