Jaime Lannister

Eldest son and heir of Tywin Lannister, Jaime was named to the Kingsguard at seventeen — an honour that made him the realm's youngest knight of the order and robbed his father of an heir in the same stroke. He served Aerys II closely enough to hear the Mad King's plan to burn King's Landing with the wildfire beneath it.

When the Lannisters took the city he killed the king he had sworn to protect, and wore the name Kingslayer for the rest of his life — the one man in the realm who did the right thing and was hated for it. He kept Cersei in his heart and everyone else at sword's length, until Bran Stark's window and the war it caused dragged his family's secrets into daylight.

Captured at the Whispering Wood and sent north to ransom the Stark girls, he lost his sword hand to captors who thought to cripple the Lannisters' best blade — and began, haltingly, to become something else: keeping faith with Brienne, taking Riverrun without a slaughter, and turning back toward the city where his story both starts and, in every telling that ends among the ruins of the Red Keep, finishes.