Balon Greyjoy
Lord Reaper of Pyke, twice a would-be king, whose failed rebellion nine years past cost him his sons — all but the youngest, given to the Starks as a hostage.
A soul of House Greyjoy, born at Pyke.
The fuller tale
Season One
Lord Reaper of Pyke, and no gentler with his last living son than the years apart made him. Theon returns from the mainland as Robb Stark's envoy, offering the old alliance in exchange for ships against the Lannisters, and Balon receives him first with silence and then with contempt — a boy raised soft in a wolf's hall, come home to ask for a war fought on someone else's terms. He burns Robb's letter in the brazier, tells Theon that Ned Stark's roof cost him more than he knows, and turns instead to Yara, whose account of Pyke's readiness he trusts over her brother's. He means to have his own war, not Robb's.
Season Two
Sends Yara to take Deepwood Motte and lets Theon go raiding the coastline with lesser men and a smaller fleet, the difference in the assignments itself a verdict on which child he rates higher. When word reaches Pyke that Theon has seized Winterfell instead — undefended, held by boys, worth nothing to the war — Balon does not take it as conquest; he reads it as vanity dressed up as strategy, a raid that will draw the whole North down on a garrison of twenty men, and says so plainly. He sends no further ships to help hold what his son has taken.
Season Three
Melisandre leeches king's blood from Gendry over three names: Robb Stark. Balon Greyjoy. Joffrey Baratheon.
Season Six
Years off the page while the war in the south runs its course, and he returns to it standing on a rope bridge over the sea, mid-storm, arguing with the brother he exiled long ago. Euron has come home from years of piracy to Pyke, mocking the driftwood crown and the war it bought, and Balon meets the old resentment with the flat authority of a man still used to being obeyed. Euron does not argue back. He puts a hand to his brother's chest and drops him into the sea, and the storm covers the sound of it; Pyke wakes to a Kingsmoot instead of a king.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell from a bridge (S6·E2)
The Lord Reaper of Pyke met his long-lost brother Euron on a rope bridge in a storm and told him to get off his islands. Euron threw him from the bridge into the sea he'd made his god.
On the page. Fell from a storm-swept bridge (AFFC, ch. 2)
The Lord Reaper of Pyke walked his rope bridges in a storm as he always had, and the sea took him at last — the day before his brother Euron's Silence sailed into the harbor. The ironborn do not much believe in coincidence.
In the show, Balon meets a hooded figure on one of Pyke’s rope bridges in the middle of a storm and finds his brother Euron under the hood — the brother he exiled, come home smiling. Balon tells him to get off his islands; Euron mocks the old man’s failed rebellions, announces himself as the storm, and hurls him from the bridge into the sea their god lives in. The kingsmoot that follows crowns the killer.
In the books he simply falls — a frayed rope bridge, a howling gale, a body washed up bloated and broken two days later — and the timing does the accusing: the Silence, crewed by mutes and captained by his banished brother, appears the very next day. No one saw anything. On the Iron Islands, where the Drowned God takes whom he pleases, hardly anyone believes it was the god. Either way the throne of salt and rock is empty, and every terrible thing the Greyjoys do afterward pours through the gap he leaves.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
A Feast for Crows 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings agree on the man and differ on the murder. The show puts his death on screen and in the family: a confrontation on a rope bridge in a storm with the exiled brother he banished, ending with Balon thrown to the sea. The books stage the same fall with no witness at all — the old king crossing his swaying bridges in a gale as he always did, found broken on the rocks days before Euron’s Silence just happens to sail into Lordsport — and let the ironborn do the math themselves. Aeron believes his brother arranged it; readers have gone further, noting how conveniently death travels ahead of the Crow’s Eye. The show spends the ambiguity to buy a scene; the books keep it, and it curdles the whole kingsmoot.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.