The High Sparrow
A humble, barefoot holy man who rises from tending the poor to lead the Faith of the Seven, preaching that even the highborn must answer to the gods.
A soul born at Of the smallfolk, sworn to The Faith of the Seven.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died in the Great Sept (S6┬ÀE10)
The barefoot septon brought queens to their knees and believed the Mother's mercy would shield him from one more. Cersei did not come to her trial; the wildfire came instead, and the Sept of Baelor rose into the sky.
He dies in the sept he ruled, refusing to believe the obvious. On the morning of Cersei's trial the Great Sept of Baelor fills with the Faith, the Tyrells, the court and the crowd ÔÇö everyone except the accused. Margaery Tyrell, the one player present who truly understands Cersei, reads the empty seat correctly and demands the sept be emptied; the High Sparrow, serene in the conviction that no one would dare defy the gods' justice, has the Faith Militant bar the doors. Beneath their feet, Qyburn's little birds have already done their work among the old wildfire caches, and Lancel Lannister is bleeding toward a guttering candle he will not reach. The green light takes the High Sparrow first and mid-gesture ÔÇö the man who brought queens to their knees vaporized with his whole revolution, his army, his hostages and his case files in a single bloom that rewrites the city's skyline. In the published books he is alive and at his zenith, both trials pending; the show's ending is its answer to his doctrine ÔÇö the gods may well judge the proud, but in King's Landing, Cersei schedules first.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The books keep him older, harder and considerably less knowable. Their High Sparrow is a small, grey, flint-eyed ascetic ÔÇö no cobbler's-son confession, no supper-table charm offensives ÔÇö whom readers see only through hostile eyes: Cersei's, as she arms him in a fit of tactical genius she mistakes for piety, and Jaime's, in a single audience that leaves the Kingslayer unsettled by the first churchman he cannot read. His book campaign runs the same sequence ÔÇö debts, Militant, Margaery, Cersei, the walk ÔÇö but stops earlier: as of the published novels he holds both queens' trials in preparation, faces Cersei's champion Ser Robert Strong in the arithmetic he may not have done, and remains alive, in power, and unexploded. The show's supper-table intimacies with Olenna and Tommen are its own invention, as is his name-brand humility; the books never even grant him the dignity of the definite article, calling him what Cersei calls him, with contempt that curdles into fear.
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.