Entertainment Weekly publishes a revealing photo of Bran Stark from Season 6

SPOILERS FOR GAME OF THRONES SEASON 6 AHEAD

Last we law Bran Stark, he had just met the Three-Eyed Raven in a giant weirwood tree north of the Wall. He was scraggly, with long hair, and was presumably going to stay with the Three-Eyed Raven for the long haul.

Now, Entertainment Weekly has posted the first photo of Bran Stark from Season 6, presumably from a sneak peak of the season they’ll have in a new issue released tomorrow. Behold:

Let’s unpack this thing.

• First, let’s take a moment to appreciate how different Isaac Hempstead Wright, now 16 years old, looks compared to how he looked when the show began. All the younger characters have grown up over the course of the show’s five seasons, but none more noticeably than Wright.

Bran Stark in Season 1

• Speaking of looks, it seems that Bran has had a haircut—look at the picture of him from Season 4 above and at the new one from Season 6. Maybe there’s a barber among the Children of the Forest who helped him out?
• At the end of Season 4, Bran was in a cave with the Three-Eyed Raven. In A Dance with Dragons, the Three-Eye Crow (the Three-Eyed Raven’s book equivalent) intends to train Bran to become a greenseer, which means, among other things, that Bran will be stuck in that cave for a good long while—like, possibly hundreds of years. The Three-Eyed Raven/Crow has been there so long that he’s practically a part of the weirwood tree, and it’s implied that Bran is in for the same fate.
• However, in this picture, Bran is on a horse outside the cave. What happened? Did the training not take? Is Bran leaving? Is he looking around at the world one last time before devoting himself to his studies? Is this an image from a vision Bran has, or a dream? And where’d that horse come from? Bran didn’t have one when he arrived at the giant weirwood tree—has someone come to find Bran? So many questions!

Bran has featured pretty heavily in the promotional material HBO has released for Season 6 thus far. We heard some new dialogue from him in the first Season 6 teaser trailer (“They have no idea what’s going to happen”). His visions, and his conversation with the Three-Eyed Crow, formed the foundation for that teaser. Perhaps he’s readying to leave the weirwood cave to warn people about “what’s going to happen?”

In any case, after sitting Season 5 out completely (and being in transition for Seasons 3 and 4), it look like Bran may play a big part come Season 6.

UPDATE: Isaac Hempstead Wright teases Bran’s role in Season 6 in a new interview.