Gregor Clegane
The Mountain That Rides: Sandor's monstrous elder brother, near eight feet of murderous rage, Tywin Lannister's favorite instrument of terror.
A soul born at Clegane's Keep, sworn to House Clegane.
The fuller tale
Season Four
Cersei names her champion: Ser Gregor Clegane. The Mountain.
Where they stand. King's Landing.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Ended with his brother in the ruin of the Red Keep (S8┬ÀE5)
The Mountain ÔÇö or the silent thing Qyburn made of him ÔÇö met his brother on the stair as the Red Keep came down. Blades meant nothing to him anymore; the long fall into wildfire settled what steel couldn't.
How he ends depends on which death you count. In the books he is officially dead already: Oberyn Martell's manticore-envenomed spear killed him by inches in the black cells, his screams administrated by Qyburn, his outsized skull delivered to Dorne to settle a princess's ghost ÔÇö and the books maintain, with a straight face no reader believes, that the wordless giant serving Cersei thereafter is someone else entirely, his true state a question the published novels have deliberately never answered. The show closes the account in person. As the Red Keep falls, the thing that was Gregor abandons Cersei and Qyburn on the great stair at the sight of his brother ÔÇö swatting his own maker dead against the stones when Qyburn objects ÔÇö and meets Sandor in the duel four decades of cruelty had scheduled. He cannot be killed by anything Sandor does: stabbed through the body, blinded in one eye, he simply continues, thumbs seeking his brother's skull in an echo of Oberyn's ending. Sandor's last strength settles it the only available way ÔÇö a charge that carries them both through the ruined wall and down together into the wildfire-laced inferno consuming the keep. The Mountain dies as he lived, unkillable by rules and killed by his brother's refusal to obey any; the fire that made the Hound unmakes them both, and House Clegane's ledger, opened over a wooden toy, closes in flame.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings differ mainly in how much dying he does. The books chronicle the poisoning in luxuriant, screaming detail ÔÇö weeks of Qyburn-supervised agony filling the Red Keep, a skull duly sent to Dorne as diplomacy, and a strict official fiction thereafter: Gregor Clegane is dead, and the enormous Ser Robert Strong is an unrelated knight of whom no one is permitted to ask questions, his helm never lifted on the page even once. The show, impatient with the pretense, keeps his name, shows his changed face, and gives the revenant seasons of visible service ÔÇö Unella's warden, the walk's shadow, the head-crushing of rebellious smallfolk ÔÇö where book Strong has yet to do anything but stand and terrify. The books also keep his pre-poisoning resume longer: the second Harrenhal occupation, the sack of Saltpans blamed on his dead face's helm, and the full horror of his household's attrition arrive there as testimony the show compresses or cuts. Both versions agree on the essential accounting: Elia, the babe, the brazier, and the bill unpaid.
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.