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.
The fuller tale
Sandor Clegane's face is his biography. When he was a boy of six or seven, his elder brother Gregor caught him playing with a discarded toy — a wooden knight — and held his face in the brazier's coals for the crime of touching what was his; their father called it a bedding fire, and the household learned what the Cleganes' loyalty was worth. The burns took half his face, and the lesson took the rest: knights are killers with vows, the vows are lies, and the strong do what they please. He grows into one of the deadliest swords in Westeros and builds his whole identity as a rebuke to chivalry — the Hound, the Lannisters' leashed killer, who wears no knighthood, swears no oaths, and tells anyone who romanticizes the business exactly what a sword is for. Hate, he tells Arya, is as good a thing to keep a man going as any; no one in the saga is more honest about what he is, which is the first hint that what he is might not be the whole story.
The court years put him beside the realm's cruelest child, and the cracks begin showing there. As Joffrey's sworn shield he does the ugly work — Mycah is his, and the story never lets him off that hook — but the audience is invited to watch what he declines to do: alone among the court, he never strikes Sansa Stark, covers her with his cloak when the Kingsguard strips her, pulls her from the mob during the riot when no one orders it, and keeps offering her, in his rasping way, the only honest counsel in the Red Keep — the world is built of killers, and she had better learn to look at them. The Blackwater breaks the arrangement: sent out into a battle that is all fire, the burned man's one terror, he shatters, tells the king and the city what they can do with themselves, and walks out of the Lannister story with a wineskin and nothing else.
The road remakes him. Captured by the Brotherhood Without Banners and tried by fire against Beric Dondarrion — the flames he fears against the fanatics he despises, and the fear wins him the duel anyway — he ends up saddled with the strangest cargo of his career: Arya Stark, half prisoner, half apprentice, wholly unimpressed. Their seasons together are the show's finest double act — the girl with the list and the man on it, trading brutal tutorials and mutual contempt that erodes, mile by mile, into something neither will name — and they arrive at the Twins in time to watch the Red Wedding close every door they were riding toward. The partnership ends at the foot of the Vale's hills: Brienne of Tarth, come for Arya, breaks him in one of the saga's great duels, and the girl he carried across a war looks at his ruin, listens to him beg for death — dig deep with the list of his sins, then with honesty — and walks away, leaving the coin she owes him unpaid on principle.
The show resurrects him twice, once in body and once in purpose. Found and nursed by a rural septon building a chapel among his flock — the gentle ex-soldier Brother Ray, who preaches that it is never too late to come back — Sandor hauls timber in silence and almost believes it, until the world demonstrates its counterargument by slaughtering the entire congregation while he is chopping wood. The axe he picks up leads him back into the story by the only road he respects: killing the men who deserve it. He falls in with the Brotherhood he once fought, drinks in their fire-god's visions despite himself — the flames he fears show him the Wall — and marches north into the wars for the dead, where the show hands him its quiet running joke and its quiet thesis: the man who believes in nothing keeps showing up for everything, the Long Night included.
What distinguishes Sandor among the saga's killers is that his cynicism is a wound, not a philosophy. He tells everyone the world is savage because his brother taught him so in a brazier and every institution since has confirmed the syllabus — and then he spends the entire story quietly contradicting himself: protecting the Stark girls at cost, mocking knighthood while out-knighting every white cloak in the capital, urging the people he cares for away from the revenge that owns him. The show's last movement gives him both gestures in a single season — the north-bound comradeship where old enemies become the nearest thing he has to friends, and the final ride south beside Arya, ending at the moment the whole series had been keeping for him: on the stairs of the collapsing Red Keep, he stops the girl with the list, tells her to look at what a life of vengeance has made of him, and sends her back to live. It is the tale's sharpest mercy, delivered by its least sentimental man, minutes before he climbs toward the appointment his face has been keeping since childhood.
The page and the screen
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.
In the show, season by season
Season Six. In The Broken Man — Buried the only man who ever talked to him like a person.
Season Seven. In Dragonstone — Buries the farmer he robbed, and mumbles half a prayer. In Beyond the Wall — Carries the wight in a crate and grudges every mile.
Season Eight. In The Bells — "Go home, girl." The last kindness of the Hound.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: 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.