Vardis Egen
The captain of House Arryn's household guard, a seasoned knight sworn to Lady Lysa and the little lord of the Eyrie.
A soul born at The Vale.
The fuller tale
Season One
Tyrion demands trial by combat; the sellsword Bronn fights for him and Ser Vardis falls through the Moon Door.
Where they stand. The Eyrie.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell in a trial by combat (S1┬ÀE6)
Lysa Arryn's household knight was named her champion in Tyrion's trial by combat at the Eyrie. Bronn wore him down in his heavy plate, opened his throat, and sent him out the Moon Door.
On the page. Fell in the Eyrie's trial by combat (AGOT, ch. 40)
Lysa's household knight fought her sister's trial by combat in full plate against a sellsword who refused to stand still. Bronn wore him down around the Moon Door's mocking statue and opened his throat when the armor finally told.
He dies at the Moon Door, in the duel that frees Tyrion Lannister. Both tellings run the same cruel experiment: Ser Vardis in full plate against Bronn in boiled leather, formal skill against professional survival. Bronn gives ground, circles, uses statue and stair and open floor, and lets sixty pounds of armor fight the fight for him; Vardis chases, slows, staggers ÔÇö and when the weight has finally hollowed him out, the sellsword closes and opens his throat. In the show his body is then tipped through the Moon Door itself, six hundred feet of the Vale's own justice swallowing the Vale's own champion, while Lysa protests that the fight lacked honor and Bronn supplies the duel's epitaph: the dead man had it. The books leave the corpse on the High Hall's floor by the weeping statue, which amounts to the same verdict delivered indoors. Either way, the gods' judgment goes to the man who never asked for it, and the Eyrie's captain becomes the price of his lady's tantrum.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The duel is one of the saga's cleanest page-to-screen translations ÔÇö armored propriety worn down by unarmored patience ÔÇö though the settings differ instructively: the show stages it on an open terrace with the sky for a fourth wall, while the books fight it in the High Hall around a mocking statue of the weeping Alyssa Arryn, whose marble Bronn uses for cover in a detail adaptation traded for cliff-edge spectacle. Book Vardis is given slightly more interiority ÔÇö his visible reluctance to fight, his awareness that Lysa's pride has purchased his risk ÔÇö and slightly more history, as a remembered fixture of Jon Arryn's King's Landing household. His function is identical in both: he is the honest retainer spent by a foolish liege, and the first demonstration in the story that Bronn's arithmetic beats chivalry's poetry every time the two are left alone together.
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.