House Dondarrion

House Dondarrion's founding legend does the family the courtesy of being memorable rather than plausible: a Storm King's rider, ambushed in a night storm on the Boneway, his horse killed and his sword broken, saved at the last by a bolt of purple lightning that struck down the men about to finish him. He delivered his message, and was made a lord for it, and his descendants have carried a forked purple bolt on black, speckled with stars, ever since — a sigil this chronicle finds unusually literal for a house that otherwise tells the story as though it happened yesterday rather than in an age no one now living can date.

Lord Beric Dondarrion held Blackhaven and the Boneway with the same unremarked competence as generations of Dondarrions before him, until Eddard Stark, newly Hand of the King, sent him south with a royal warrant to arrest Ser Gregor Clegane for the burning of villages along the Trident. The mission went as badly as sending a small party after Gregor Clegane generally does: ambushed at the Mummer's Ford by Clegane's own retainers, Beric was struck through the chest by a lance and, by every account this chronicle can locate, killed.

Beric did not stay dead — the first of what this chronicle, choosing its words with some care, will call several occasions. A red priest of R'hllor traveling with his company, Thoros of Myr, performed the last rites over him and found, to his own evident astonishment as much as anyone's, that the god he served had answered. Thoros would repeat the working five times more across the years that followed — six returns from death in all — and Beric paid a price the novels are candid about: less memory with each return, less of the man who had first ridden south from Blackhaven, until he described himself, by the end, as tired in a way sleep could no longer touch.

What became of Beric's company after his seventh and truly final death — given, this chronicle notes without further elaboration, to another mourner beside a riverbank rather than kept for himself this final time — belongs to a darker turn in the war's history than a house entry ought to summarize. Blackhaven itself stands without its lord, held by whatever household remains, while the Brotherhood Without Banners that Beric raised continues under other hands entirely.