Aeron Greyjoy
The Damphair: Balon's youngest brother, once a drunkard, now the sternest priest of the Drowned God on the Iron Islands (book only).
The fuller tale
The youngest of Balon’s brothers was, in his first life, the least of them: Aeron the drunk, Aeron of the japes, a wineskin with a man attached, famous the length of the islands for nothing anyone would put on a grave marker. The Greyjoy Rebellion ended that man off Fair Isle, where his ship went down and the sea took him. What the sea gave back was somebody else. Reborn on the shore — drowned, in the ironborn manner of speaking, and returned — he gave himself wholly to the Drowned God, and the wastrel became the Damphair: seaweed-haired, salt-soaked, clad in roughspun, the sternest holy man the Iron Islands have produced in generations.
His ministry is the Old Way with the bark still on it. He walks the shores of the islands drowning men in the cold surf and pumping the life back into them, dispensing the faith’s central promise — what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger — with a waterskin of seawater at his hip in place of the wine. The smallfolk and the drowned men love him; the lords find him useful and uncomfortable in equal measure; and Aeron, who once feared nothing because he noticed nothing, now fears exactly one thing in the world, and it sails a red ship.
His brother Balon’s fall makes Aeron briefly the most powerful man on the islands, and he spends that power on one great gamble: reviving the kingsmoot, the drowned-out ancient custom by which the ironborn chose their kings on the holy shore of Old Wyk. His purpose is transparent — anyone but Euron, the godless brother whose step on a stair was the sound of Aeron’s childhood terrors — and the gamble fails spectacularly. The Crow’s Eye comes to the moot with plunder, promises and a horn out of Valyria, and the assembly Aeron summoned to stop him hands him the driftwood crown instead.
After the moot the Damphair disappears from the page — gone to raise the faithful against the godless king, the islands assume — and the show barely needed him at all: he appears to re-drown Theon on the shore of Pyke in the early seasons, and later to preside over the beachside kingsmoot and pronounce the drowned blessing over the brother he could not prevent. In both tellings his significance is the same and easy to miss: Aeron is the ironborn’s conscience, the one man who believes every word of the creed the others merely exploit — and the tale’s quiet warning about what happens to true believers when something older and hungrier than their god comes home.
The page and the screen
On screen Aeron is two scenes and a liturgy; on the page he is a point of view, and the difference is the whole ironborn religion. His chapters open the islands’ story in the fourth book — the drownings, the creed, the moot politics, the dread of the rusted hinge that marks his memories of Euron — and they are the closest the saga comes to writing from inside a faith. A chapter released ahead of The Winds of Winter carries him further into the dark, a prisoner of his brother’s ship and his brother’s visions, and readers who have seen it tend to speak of it in the tone people reserve for things they wish they could unread.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.