A young marcher lord of the stormlands, Lord of Blackhaven and head of his house, with red-gold hair and a sigil of a forked purple lightning bolt on a black field studded with four-pointed stars. Betrothed to Lady Allyria Dayne of Starfall, he was renowned in the lists as a comely and gallant young knight before the troubles of 298 AC, where he unhorsed Ser Jaime Lannister at the Hand's tourney in King's Landing and turned the deciding course against Thoros of Myr, the red priest who would in time become his closest companion. When word came that Ser Gregor Clegane was raiding in the riverlands beneath a peasant's cloak, Lord Eddard Stark sent Beric forth from the Iron Throne with a hundred men to bring the Mountain to the king's justice, and Thoros rode with him.
The company was ambushed at the Mummer's Ford and broken; thereafter Lord Beric and his survivors took to the woods as the Brotherhood Without Banners, raising the smallfolk against lions and wolves alike under the cry of the old king's peace. He has been slain six times in the fighting that followed (by Gregor's lance in his chest, by an axe, by an arrow through the eye, by a noose, and by other strokes besides), and each time Thoros, in his cups, has called him back with the kiss of the Lord of Light, until the man who rises is a little less the man who fell, his hair white, his face a ruin of healed wounds, his memories thinning away. After his seventh death, beneath the hollow hill, he gave the fire within him over to the lady Catelyn Stark, that she might rise in his stead, and at last lay still.