Melisandre

She was born somewhere no source names. As a child she was sold into slavery under the name Melony, to the Red Temple, and there, while learning the faith of R'hllor, she began to sense her own power. In time she travelled to Asshai, the city by which she is known in Westeros, and came to master the Common Tongue, High Valyrian, and the speech of that city.

She is a woman with a heart-shaped face, hair and eyes the colour of burnished copper, very pale skin, and a voice unlike any other in the realm. She always wears red or crimson, and never removes a gold necklace set with a ruby that glows when she works magic — and that can burn her if the spell demands too much. A constant heat comes off her body, and she has no need to eat: her god sustains her, she says, though she keeps that truth to herself.

She considers herself the finest of her order at reading the flames, and unlike others with the same gift, she never seems to doubt what she sees there. She takes care to appear always serene and mysterious, and reinforces her magic with smoke and powders hidden in her sleeves.

Before the war for the Iron Throne broke out, Melisandre crossed the sea alone to Dragonstone. She was searching for Azor Ahai reborn, the prince her faith promises will lead the fight against the Great Other, and she was certain that island — amid salt and smoke — was the place of his rebirth.

In Lord Stannis Baratheon, the island's lord, she believed she had found the man she sought, and she settled at his side. She also won the trust of his wife, Selyse Florent, who became her steadiest ally at court. In King's Landing, word of a shadowbinder summoned from Asshai to Dragonstone begins to reach Varys.

At Dragonstone, Melisandre converted Selyse to the faith of R'hllor and, with her backing, pushed to burn the statues of the Seven and bring the whole island over to her religion. Half the court never came to trust her: someone even tried to poison her, the castle's old maester, who slipped the strangler into her wine without managing to kill her.

Outside the castle gates, before the assembled court, she drew a sword from the flames and proclaimed it Lightbringer, the legendary weapon of Azor Ahai, and with that act declared to everyone that Stannis was the promised prince.

Renly Baratheon, Stannis's brother and lord of Storm's End, had also proclaimed himself king and won the favour of most of the Reach's strength. When Stannis marched against him, Melisandre went with him as his own standard-bearer and pressed him to give Renly one last chance to bend the knee before the two brothers clashed. She claimed to have already seen his death in the flames, and that same night, outside the fortress, she gave birth to a shadow begotten by Stannis that killed Renly.

After that death only Melisandre could settle Stannis's sleep, which nightmares had begun to trouble. Many lords of the stormlands joined his cause, but Ser Cortnay Penrose, castellan of Storm's End, refused to yield the castle. Stannis had Ser Davos Seaworth bring Melisandre beneath the walls at night, and she birthed a second shadow that killed Penrose. Soon after, Lord Elwood Meadows surrendered the fortress, and Melisandre then urged burning the castle's ancient godswood as well.

With Storm's End taken, Stannis prepared to march on King's Landing. Lord Bryce Caron convinced him that bringing Melisandre to that battle would feed rumours that he owed his crown to sorcery, so she returned to Dragonstone while the king marched without her. Stannis lost the Battle of the Blackwater when the combined armies of Tywin Lannister and Mace Tyrell arrived to relieve the city; Ser Garlan Tyrell led the vanguard wearing Renly's green armour, and so, in a way no one expected, Melisandre's vision of "Renly" defeating Stannis's forces came true after all.

After the defeat at the Blackwater, Melisandre wanted to sacrifice Edric Storm, King Robert Baratheon's only acknowledged bastard, to wake, as she claimed, the sleeping dragon of Dragonstone. Stannis refused to hand him over, though he did allow his own blood to be drawn and burned in the fire so that, Melisandre said, the other rival kings would die: Balon Greyjoy, Joffrey Baratheon, and Robb Stark.

When word came that the Night's Watch was fighting the Free Folk at the Wall, Stannis decided to march north with Melisandre among his ranks. They won the first battle against the wildlings, and in it Melisandre herself burned Orell alive after he had slipped into the skin of his eagle. After the victory they settled into the Watch's castles.

With Edric Storm beyond her reach, Melisandre pressed Stannis to sacrifice Mance Rayder's son instead, to achieve what she had sought before. Before she could get to the child, Lord Commander Jon Snow secretly swapped him for Gilly's own son — Gilly being the girl who had become friends with Samwell Tarly — keeping the wildling prince safe in Oldtown, out of her reach.

Melisandre stayed at the Wall when Stannis marched south to face the Boltons; she felt her powers grew stronger there, and she never stopped seeking answers in the flames. Once she saw a pale corpse with a thousand red eyes beside a boy with a wolf's head, and took them for servants of the Great Other. When she asked to see Azor Ahai hoping to find Stannis, she saw only Jon Snow instead, ringed by skulls, his face shifting between a man's and a wolf's; she warned him of enemies and of "knives in the dark," and of his sister Arya fleeing a wedding on a dying horse toward Castle Black. Jon refused to listen, and when the vision of the girl on horseback did come true, the girl turned out to be Alys Karstark, not Arya.

When Mance Rayder was condemned to die, Melisandre used a spell to make him appear as Rattleshirt, while the real Lord of Bones took Mance's face and died in his place. Some time later she revealed the truth about Rattleshirt to Jon and sent him to Winterfell to rescue the girl they believed was Arya Stark, not knowing it was actually Jeyne Poole; with that gesture she was trying to earn the Lord Commander's trust. She also foretold the deaths of three rangers, and when Weeper returned to the Wall with their heads on spears exactly as she had said, Jon began to take her visions more seriously, though he still did not fully trust her.

Melisandre also warned Jon that the next attack would come at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, though she admitted the towers in her vision did not quite match that fortress's own. When Jon considered sending men on a rescue mission, she urged him not to: she had seen that none of the ships he sent there would return.

In the television version of the story, Melisandre does not survive to the war's end: she dies in the year 305 after the Conquest. The novels, by contrast, have not reached that point in the story, and in them Melisandre remains alive at the Wall.