Sandor Clegane
The Hound: a huge, scarred, foul-tempered warrior sworn to the royal household, who despises knights and their vows — his brother burned the belief out of him young.
A soul born at Clegane's Keep, sworn to House Clegane.
The fuller tale
Season One
Joffrey's sworn shield and the fire-scarred terror of every hall he walks into, though the fear he inspires sits oddly next to how plainly he despises the boy he serves. He runs down Arya's friend Mycah on Joffrey's order without a flicker of hesitation, and later, ordered into the melee against his own brother Gregor, is pulled off only when Ned Stark calls a halt — the closest thing to protection Sansa Stark has in that court, offered in a growl rather than a courtesy.
Season Two
Stands over Sansa more than once when the mob or the court would otherwise have her, protection dressed up as indifference. At the height of the Battle of the Blackwater, with wildfire turning the bay green and his men breaking around him, something in him breaks too — he walks off the field and out of the Kingsguard, offering to take Sansa with him. She refuses, and he goes alone.
Season Three
Caught by Arya Stark's makeshift company not long after deserting, then handed over to the Brotherhood Without Banners, who try him for his crimes and let a trial by fire decide it — he beats Beric Dondarrion in single combat and walks free, dragging Arya along as a hostage worth ransoming. The road turns them into something neither expected, closer to companions than captor and captive, right up until the Twins, where the slaughter of the Red Wedding reaches them before they do.
Season Four
Still hauling Arya toward whatever relative will pay for her, the two of them living hand to mouth on a country gone lawless — he kills a man twice his size without much ceremony and takes his boots. At the Vale's gate he runs into Brienne of Tarth, sworn to find Sansa's sisters, and the two fight over which of them has the better claim to Arya; he loses, badly, and is left for dead on a hillside while she walks away without him.
Season Six
Alive after all — the axe blow that should have finished him only leaves a body to be found by a wandering septon running a quiet farming community, and for a while Sandor lets himself believe there might be a version of his life that doesn't end in someone's blood. It doesn't last. The men who slaughter that community while he's away burying a corpse take the fantasy with them, and something in him that had gone quiet for a season wakes back up — he picks up an axe, falls in with the Brotherhood Without Banners, and starts hunting the killers down one by one, without much interest in taking them alive.
Season Seven
At Dragonstone, staring into Melisandre's flames at Daenerys's court, he sees something in the fire he cannot explain and doesn't want to, and delivers the message to Jon anyway, gruffly, because the alternative is pretending he saw nothing at all. Not long after, he travels north beyond the Wall with Jon's party to snatch a wight for proof, an expedition that tests every scrap of self-preservation he has left and puts him, of all people, on speaking terms with a giant.
Season Eight
Fights through the long night at Winterfell and comes out the other side with no further use for surviving it than settling one thing — his brother. He walks south into King's Landing as the city burns around him, past armies and dragonfire alike, for a reckoning with Gregor that has been owed since before either of them can properly remember, and the two of them go down together into the fire.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell with his brother at King's Landing (S8·E5)
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 — Gregor abandoning his queen at the sight of him, the one loyalty in the Mountain deeper than Qyburn's necromancy — 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 — 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 — 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 — his helm scavenged and worn by butchers whose crimes attach to his name — 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 — the persona, the rage — 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 — the unkissed kiss she misremembers into being, the bloody cloak she keeps — 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.