Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale, and Warden of the East, foster-father to half the Seven Kingdoms and Hand of the King for seventeen years before his death set the realm to burning. Born to Lord Jasper Arryn in the Vale, he came young to the lordship after the deaths of his father and his younger brother Ser Ronnel, and reckoned the keeping of the falcon throne his first and only duty. Twice he was wed without issue (first to Jeyne of House Royce, who died in childbed with a stillborn daughter, then to a cousin Rowena Arryn, who was taken by a winter chill), and twice he was left to look elsewhere for an heir, naming first his cousin Ser Elbert and then Elbert's gallant son Ser Denys as the next in line for the Eyrie.
When King Aerys II called for the heads of his two wards, Eddard Stark of Winterfell and Robert Baratheon of Storm's End, Lord Arryn refused, raised the falcon banners of the Vale, and so began the war that ended House Targaryen. He bound the rebellion together with Tully marriages at the Twins for his own house and for Riverrun, taking Lysa, the younger daughter of Lord Hoster, to wife when half his life lay behind him; the marriage gave him at last a sickly son, Robert, born in King's Landing and named for the friend he had set upon the Iron Throne. As Hand to King Robert he ran the realm in all but name, while the king hunted and whored and drank the kingdom's coin away.
In the spring of 298 AC, having found at last the truth that the queen's three golden children were not his king's at all but Jaime Lannister's, Lord Arryn fell suddenly ill of a burning in the belly and died in three days. The maesters named it a natural fever; only later did Catelyn Stark have from her sister the secret that Lysa Arryn herself had put the tears of Lys into her husband's wine, on the counsel of Petyr Baelish, to keep their son out of fostering with Stannis Baratheon and to clear the way for the schemes that have not yet stopped unspooling. He was buried in the high cold of the Eyrie, and his death is the spark from which A Game of Thrones takes flame.