House Clegane

House Clegane’s founding is recorded with unusual precision for so minor a house, for the simple reason that it happened recently enough — within a few generations’ memory — and dramatically enough to be worth telling twice. A kennelmaster in Lord Tytos Lannister’s service threw himself between his lord and a lioness during an autumn hunt, losing a leg and three of his hounds to save the life of the man who would one day father Tywin Lannister.

Tytos rewarded the man with a knighthood, a modest keep, and lands enough to support it — small mercy from a house whose gold could have bought a hundred keeps without noticing, but a fortune to a one-legged kennelmaster all the same. The new-made Ser Clegane took the three dogs he had lost for his sigil, set on the yellow of the grass they had died in, and Casterly Rock had itself a landed knight rather than a lord — sworn directly to the Rock, never quite of the nobility that surrounded it.

Whatever quiet respectability three generations might have built for House Clegane, Ser Gregor Clegane — a knight of monstrous size and monstrous reputation even among men who had seen a great deal of the realm’s violence — spent in a single sack of a city. In the chaos of King’s Landing’s fall to Tywin Lannister’s men, Gregor is remembered, and this chronicle records it without pleasure, for the deaths of Princess Elia Martell and her children — a crime the smallfolk have never let Casterly Rock forget, whatever account of his orders that day Lord Tywin himself might give.

The household Gregor left behind him tells its own quiet, unresolved story: a sister dead young under circumstances the family called misfortune, a father dead in a hunting accident the same year his younger son left home for good, two wives dead of injuries their household would not detail. No charge was ever brought. The Citadel notes, in the driest terms its style permits, that this is either a family plagued by extraordinary bad luck or one that has simply never been asked hard enough to explain it.

Gregor’s younger brother Sandor left Clegane’s Keep the day their father died and never returned, taking service instead with House Lannister as a sworn sword — a decision the histories generally connect to a burn scar across half his face, inflicted by Gregor himself in childhood over a stolen toy, and to a fear of fire the grown man never troubled to hide.

Sandor Clegane, called the Hound, served as a sworn sword to two successive Lannister-backed kings before deserting his post at the height of the Battle of the Blackwater, when the wildfire the defenders unleashed proved more than his old terror of flame could withstand. He vanishes from the great courts’ record after that, though this chronicle notes — with appropriate caution about a rumor still unconfirmed — reports of a grave-digging brother on the Quiet Isle who answers, when pressed, to neither his old name nor a denial of it.

Gregor met his own end, or something very like it, as Cersei Lannister’s champion in a trial by combat against Prince Oberyn Martell of Dorne — a fight Gregor appeared to win before Oberyn’s poisoned spear opened a wound that should have killed him within days. It did not. A silent, immense figure in unremoved plate armor, serving the crown under the name Ser Robert Strong, has since taken the field in circumstances this chronicle will describe as unresolved rather than commit to an identity the Citadel cannot yet confirm.