House Lannister
The richest house of the sunset kingdoms until the Sea Snake sailed, lords of Casterly Rock and the gold beneath it. A golden lion on crimson, descended from Lann the Clever, they hold the Westerlands and command wealth enough to buy armies ÔÇö this generation led by twins: Jason, who raises the banners, and Tyland, who counts the crown's coin.
The fuller tale
Casterly Rock is still, at the DanceÔÇÖs opening, one of the two or three wealthiest seats in Westeros ÔÇö gold enough under the hill to have bankrolled the realm more than once ÔÇö though the house that mines it has recently had to watch a sea lord out-earn it for the first time in living memory. Hear Me Roar is the sigilÔÇÖs boast; a Lannister always pays his debts is the saying with the sharper edge, and this generation is about to learn how it feels to be the one collecting rather than paying.
The Rock is ruled in this era by twin lords, Jason and Tyland, who divide the houseÔÇÖs ambitions neatly between them: Jason wants a crown of his own reflected glory, a marriage into the royal line and a war that lets the West prove its worth in the field; Tyland wants the ledgers, and takes the office of master of ships and coin in the green council itself, fighting the war from behind a desk in KingÔÇÖs Landing rather than from a saddle.
Jason gets his field and loses everything to it. He marches the western host east to link with the green armies gathering in the riverlands, meets Daemon TargaryenÔÇÖs coalition of rivermen at the Red Fork, and dies there when his own line breaks ÔÇö cut down, in the chronicleÔÇÖs telling, by an unheralded squire the smallfolk immediately nickname Longleaf the Lionslayer, an ignoble end for a lord who wanted nothing more than a glorious one.
His death leaves the Westerlands leaderless at the worst possible hour, and Dalton GreyjoyÔÇÖs ironborn ÔÇö bought by the Blacks and unbothered by irony ÔÇö take the opening, running their longships along an undefended coast and sacking Lannisport itself while the RockÔÇÖs heir is still a child too young to answer. For once in the story, the lions are the ones being reaved rather than doing the reaving.
TylandÔÇÖs war is quieter and, in the end, crueler: captured when the capital falls to Rhaenyra, he is handed to torturers hunting for the crownÔÇÖs hidden treasury and kept in the dungeons through the worst of the warÔÇÖs reversals, released only when the tide turns again ÔÇö scarred badly enough that the marks outlast the war itself, and restored, eventually, to enough trust that he ends his career as Hand of the King, a Lannister who paid a debt the house never agreed to owe and collected on it anyway.
The page and the screen
Jason LannisterÔÇÖs death changes killers between page and screen ÔÇö Fire & Blood credits an obscure squire, Pate of Longleaf, with the kill and the mocking epithet that follows him, while the show hands the moment to Cregan StarkÔÇÖs northmen instead, folding the WestÔÇÖs humiliation into the NorthÔÇÖs growing role in the story rather than leaving it to an anonymous foot soldier the book never mentions again.
