Thoros of Myr
A fat, hard-drinking red priest of R'hllor with a fondness for flaming swords, riding with the brotherhood in the war-torn Riverlands.
The fuller tale
Thoros came to Westeros to convert a king and stayed for the wine. A Myrish priest given to the red temple as a boy — an eighth son, tithed like a tax — he was sent to the royal court to preach R'hllor to a realm that worships politely and believes nothing, and discovered he fit right in. He became King Robert's favorite drinking companion, a fixture of tourneys, and famous for a trick that was pure showmanship: coating his blade in wildfire and riding into melees with a burning sword, which horrified horses, scandalized purists, and won him the first-through-the-breach honor at Pyke in the Greyjoy Rebellion. As faith went, he was frank about having none to speak of.
The god disagreed. Sent along on Beric Dondarrion's doomed mission to the Riverlands, Thoros knelt over his friend's body at the Mummer's Ford and mumbled the funeral rite of a faith he had stopped believing — the old words, the last kiss — and Beric breathed. No one was more appalled than the priest. The drunk of King's Landing became, without ever quite drying out, the real thing: the fire in the hollow hill, the trials of the Brotherhood, and six more resurrections he performs like a man paying installments on a miracle he never asked to be issued.
He is the story's warmest argument about faith — a priest whose belief arrived after his powers, in inverse order to every charlatan in the tale — and its running commentary on them: Thoros will tell anyone, cheerfully, that he was a bad priest and that the god apparently prefers bad priests, honest ones. The show carries him beyond the Wall on the wight hunt, flask in hand to the end; the books keep him in the Riverlands, where the light he kindled has fallen into colder hands, and the fat priest of the hollow hill grieves for the Brotherhood he midwifed into being.
The page and the screen
The show gives Thoros the ending; the books, so far, give him the aftermath. In the published books he is alive in the Riverlands, sidelined and sorrowing under Lady Stoneheart's leadership — he refused to give the kiss of fire to Catelyn Stark's body, a line he would not cross and Beric would, and the Brotherhood that resulted no longer answers to anything Thoros recognizes as the Lord's work. The show, having cut Stoneheart, promoted him instead into the northern war and the wight hunt, an expedition with no book counterpart. His backstory is book-enriched too: the tithed eighth son, the wildfire-sword tourney career, and the friendship with Robert are all page material the show only gestures at.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Died beyond the Wall (S7·E6)
The red priest who brought Beric back nineteen times took a wight bear's jaws in the blizzard beyond the Wall, and the cold finished what the claws began. There was no one left to say the words over him.
His death belongs to the show alone. On the wight hunt beyond the Wall, in the whiteout beyond Eastwatch, the party is ambushed by an undead bear, and Thoros takes its jaws across the ribs saving the Hound. He is cauterized with his own flaming sword, drinks to the pain, and walks on — but the wounds and the cold work together through the night on the frozen lake, and when the dawn comes, the priest does not. Beric burns the body where it lies: with Thoros gone, the Brotherhood's resurrections are spent, and every life left in the party is down to its last. In the published books Thoros is alive — a diminished, grieving figure by the Brotherhood's fires, but breathing, with all his flock's darkest chapters still unwritten around him.