Sandor Clegane
The Hound: a huge, scarred, foul-tempered warrior sworn to the royal household, who despises knights and their vows ÔÇö his brother burned the belief out of him young.
A soul born at Clegane's Keep, sworn to House Clegane.
The fuller tale
Season Six
In The Broken Man ÔÇö Buried the only man who ever talked to him like a person.
Season Seven
In Dragonstone ÔÇö Buries the farmer he robbed, and mumbles half a prayer. In Beyond the Wall ÔÇö Carries the wight in a crate and grudges every mile.
Where they stand. Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and King's Landing.
Season Eight
In The Bells ÔÇö "Go home, girl." The last kindness of the Hound.
Where they stand. Winterfell and King's Landing.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell with his brother at King's Landing (S8┬ÀE5)
The Hound climbed the falling Red Keep for the only appointment he'd ever kept faith with. He drove his undead brother through the crumbling wall, and they fell together into the fire that had shaped his whole life. Cleganebowl ended in flame.
The show gives him the ending the fandom named before the writers did: Cleganebowl. Riding south with Arya for their separate reckonings, he enters the Red Keep as Daenerys tears it down, meets his brother on the great stair ÔÇö Gregor abandoning his queen at the sight of him, the one loyalty in the Mountain deeper than Qyburn's necromancy ÔÇö and fights his last duel in the collapsing dark. It is horror as much as combat: Gregor no longer bleeds, no longer feels, shrugs off a sword driven through his body, and sets to crushing Sandor's skull with the same hands that did Oberyn's; the Hound, half-blinded and dying, reaches the only verdict left. He drives himself and his brother through the crumbling wall together, and the two of them fall from the burning keep into the firestorm below ÔÇö the burned boy choosing, at the end, to finish it in the flames he spent a lifetime fearing, so long as they took Gregor too. Arya, who lived because he turned her back on the stairs, later honors him in the only currency he respected: silence and survival. In the published books Sandor's account stands very differently ÔÇö left for dead by the Trident, mourned by no one official, and all but revealed to be alive as the gravedigger of the Quiet Isle, his rage buried under a novice's hood; the books have no Cleganebowl yet, only the fandom's long wager that the brothers' ledger must someday be settled.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 2 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The books break his story earlier and stranger. Their Sandor never has a Blackwater reconciliation tour: wounded on the road and left dying by Arya, he is reported dead thereafter ÔÇö his helm scavenged and worn by butchers whose crimes attach to his name ÔÇö while on the Quiet Isle, where Brienne's hunt eventually leads, an Elder Brother says with careful precision that the Hound is dead, and at rest, in the same breath as a very large, limping novice digs graves in the background. Readers call him the gravedigger, and the books have kept the peace of that near-confirmation for decades: book Sandor, the strong implication runs, is alive, but the Hound ÔÇö the persona, the rage ÔÇö was the thing that died by the Trident. The show's Brother Ray interlude is a translated homage to exactly that idea, with the crucial divergence that television digs its gravedigger back up and rearms him. The books also weight his bond with Sansa more heavily than the show ÔÇö the unkissed kiss she misremembers into being, the bloody cloak she keeps ÔÇö threads the novels have never resolved, and television largely dropped.
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.