Brynden Rivers, called Lord Bloodraven, was the sixth bastard of King Aegon IV Targaryen, born in King's Landing in 175 AC to the king's mistress Lady Melissa Blackwood. Counted among the Great Bastards for the high birth of his mother, he was legitimized by Aegon IV on the king's deathbed in 184 AC. An albino, he had milk-white skin and hair and red eyes, and across the right side of his face he bore a wine-red birthstain said to resemble a raven, the mark that gave him his byname. He was a shade under six feet, thin and gaunt, with a grim and sinister aspect, and he favored the colors of scarlet and smoke. Though never so tall or strong as his half-brothers Daemon Blackfyre and Aegor Rivers, he was reckoned far more cunning, and he carried the Valyrian steel longsword Dark Sister, though he preferred his tall weirwood longbow above all other weapons. From boyhood he was the rival of Bittersteel, for both men loved their half-sister Shiera Seastar, whose most ardent admirer Brynden became; she took him as her paramour but refused his every offer of marriage.
When Daemon Blackfyre rose against their trueborn half-brother King Daeron II, Brynden held to the loyalist cause and commanded his own corps of longbowmen, the Raven's Teeth. At the Battle of the Redgrass Field in 196 AC his archers seized the high ground of the Weeping Ridge and loosed from three hundred yards away, cutting down Daemon and his twin sons Aegon and Aemon. The volley was whispered to be driven by sorcery, and men named Brynden a kinslayer for it; in the duel that followed Bittersteel took Brynden's eye, then fled into exile in the Free Cities to keep the Blackfyre cause alive. Brynden rarely covered the empty socket thereafter, preferring to show his scar to the world. He rose to prominence at Daeron's court and, against expectation, was named Hand of the King by his nephew Aerys I in 209 AC, serving also as master of whisperers. As Hand he met the Great Spring Sickness that killed Daeron II, ordering the corpse-choked streets of King's Landing burned in the Dragonpit, and the smallfolk cursed him as a kinslayer through the drought and famine that followed. A reputation as a sinister sorcerer clung to him, and a riddle ran through the realm: "How many eyes does Lord Bloodraven have? A thousand eyes, and one." The song A Thousand Eyes, and One was made of him.
Through his thousand-eyed web of informers Brynden uncovered the plot hatched at the wedding tourney at Whitewalls in 212 AC to crown Daemon II Blackfyre, and he marched on the castle with his Raven's Teeth to end the Second Blackfyre Rebellion, taking the pretender captive rather than killing him so that the exiles could name no fresh king. He continued as Hand under King Maekar I, who, despite their long quarrels, accepted his service. When Maekar died in 233 AC, Brynden called a Great Council to settle the succession, then granted the Blackfyre claimant Aenys safe conduct to King's Landing only to have him seized and beheaded, an act of treachery that stained his honor. The new king, Aegon V, ordered Brynden arrested for the murder, and rather than be executed he was offered the black. He took the Night's Watch, escorted to the Wall in the same party as the maester Aemon and Ser Duncan the Tall, and was elected Lord Commander in 239 AC. In 252 AC he rode out beyond the Wall on a ranging and never returned.
Long after he was given up for dead, Brynden was found still living far beyond the Wall, the last greenseer, his withered limbs cradled in the roots of a weirwood throne in a cavern of the children of the forest. Known to the free folk as the three-eyed crow, he sent his ravens south through Bran Stark's dreams to draw the broken boy north, and there became his teacher in the arts of greensight and skinchanging, that the old powers of Westeros might not die with him.