House Dondarrion of Blackhaven

The story of House Dondarrion begins with a messenger of the Storm King, ambushed one night by two Dornishmen. An arrow brought down his horse and his sword shattered as he fell; he thought himself already dead.

Then a bolt of purple lightning split the sky and struck down the two men who meant to kill him. The messenger delivered his warning in time, and the Storm King made him a lord for it — and so House Dondarrion was born, with the lightning bolt as its sigil.

During the War of Conquest, as Aegon Targaryen forced the iron crown onto the Seven Kingdoms, a Dondarrion known only as the Bastard of Blackhaven fought at the Last Storm.

There he died at the jaws of the dragon Meraxes, one of the three beasts Aegon and his sisters brought to war.

Generations later, a Vulture King cut off Lord Harmon Dondarrion's nose and burned Blackhaven to the ground. Harmon got his revenge fighting alongside Lady Ellyn Caron and Lord Samwell Tarly the Fierce, until that Vulture King was finally brought down in the Second Dornish War.

Later still, Lord Simon Dondarrion, as skilled with a harp as with a sword, helped defeat another Vulture King in the Third Dornish War. One of his kin served as a companion to Queen Alysanne Targaryen, and the first Coles in the region began as stewards in Dondarrion service.

When King Baelor I Targaryen and his uncle, Prince Aemon Targaryen known as the Dragonknight, returned from Dorne, they found shelter under the Dondarrion roof at Blackhaven.

Three years before the Tourney at Ashford, Ser Arlan of Pennytree and his squire Duncan the Tall served under Lord Caron and a Lord Dondarrion, who raised eight hundred knights and nearly four thousand foot to fight a Vulture King in the Red Mountains.

At Ashford, Duncan recognized the purple lightning on the Dondarrion banner from that campaign. When he tried to use the story to get Ser Manfred Dondarrion to vouch for his knighthood, Manfred refused him — even after admitting he'd heard the very same tale from his own father.

Jeyne Poole falls hopelessly for Lord Beric Dondarrion the moment she sees him at the Tourney of the Hand, where a hedge knight unhorses him and he later falls to Thoros of Myr as well.

Soon after, Eddard Stark, Hand of the King, chooses Beric to lead a hundred men sent to capture Ser Gregor Clegane. The party is ambushed by Clegane and Lannister men at the Mummer's Ford, and only a few survive under Beric and Thoros.

In the Riverlands, the Mountain's men go hunting for a band of outlaws that has begun harrying them. Ser Burton Crakehall boasts of having killed Beric Dondarrion, only for Beric to reappear and kill him instead.

Arya Stark comes across that Brotherhood Without Banners and meets Beric, watching him die in a trial by combat against Sandor Clegane. Thoros of Myr brings him back before her stunned eyes, and she learns that Beric's own squire, young Lord Edric Dayne, once pulled his body from the Mummer's Ford, and that Thoros revived him then by accident. Thoros admits he has now brought Beric back six times, and Beric speaks of how wearying it is to keep on living this way.

Brienne of Tarth later learns that when the Brotherhood found Catelyn Tully's body on a riverbank, Lord Beric gave her his last breath in a kiss of life to bring her back, and died himself for good in the bargain. The outlaws are now led by the revived Catelyn, known as Lady Stoneheart, and no one knows who remains as heir to Blackhaven.