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The following contains MAJOR SPOILERS for both HBO’s House of the Dragon and George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood.
In its first two seasons, House of the Dragon has certainly made plenty of changes to the story depicted in Fire & Blood, George R. R. Martin’s wide-ranging history of the Targaryen family, and the civil war that tore them apart. From deepening the relationship between rivals Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) to giving Laenor Velaryon (John Macmillan) a quasi-happy ending, the show has consistently made choices that purposefully complicate its characters, adding unexpected layers and nuance to almost every major player onscreen. But the show’s most interesting deviation from its source text has to be its treatment of Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban), daughter of Alicent and sister-wife of Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney), whose dreams have predicted many of the key moments of the series to date.
Fire & Blood never mentions Helaena having any sort of prophetic visions at all, but here she is reimagined as a link in a long chain of Targaryens gifted with what is known as dragon dreams. A form of second sight that’s similar to “greensight” from Game of Thrones, this particular ability manifests in individuals of Valyrian descent known as “dreamers,” who can see the future in their dreams. The power has passed down through generations, though there doesn’t seem to be any real pattern when it comes to who inherits this ability and who doesn’t.
Despite the potential inherent in such a gift, dragon dreams are not always straightforward, and can often be misinterpreted. But there’s no denying that House of the Dragon’s choice to reimagine Helaena as a dreamer is a big, important shift for the character that the show has only just begun to explore, Helaena does little more than suffer: After being forced to choose which of her sons lives or dies—in Fire & Blood, she technically has two—during the infamous Blood and Cheese incident, Book Helaena loses her will to live. She stops eating, won’t share a bed with her husband, refuses to ride her dragon Dreamfyre, and slowly descends into a version of the madness that haunts so many other members of her family. Taken captive by the Blacks after the fall of King’s Landing, she eventually dies by suicide.
Thankfully, House of the Dragon seems primed to give Helaena a more satisfying (if probably no less tragic) arc. While it’s unlikely the show will be able to subvert the heartbreaking manner of her death entirely, there’s every reason to hope the context and manner of it will be changed or complicated significantly. Because in the world of the television show, Helaena is not damaged or broken. She’s suffered heartwrenching losses yet remains surprisingly powerful, possessing a gift that only select Targaryens—people with famous names like Daenys the Dreamer, Aegon the Conqueror, or Daenerys Stormborn—can equal. And like them, we’ve already seen that her visions can not only reveal the future but directly shape the world of the show going forward.
Here are all the prophecies Helaena has made so far in House of the Dragon, and how they connect to the rest of the show.
He’ll Have to Close an Eye
Aemond (Leo Ashton) was teased relentlessly as a child for not having bonded with a dragon yet. In season 1’s “The Princess and the Queen,” his siblings and cousins even go so far as to dress a pig up with makeshift wings to mock his lack of a mount. Allicent’s so busy comforting her son that she pays no mind to her daughter, who’s examining a millipede in the background. (Helaena has an established and bizarre fascination with insects that plays into more than one of her prophecies.)
“He will have to close an eye,” she mutters, just as her mother assures Aemond that he’ll get a dragon of his own one day. In the very next episode, both those things come to pass almost simultaneously: Aemond claims Vhagar on the night of Laena Targaryen’s (Nanna Blondell) funeral and loses an eye in a fight with Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) afterward.
The Last Ring Has No Legs
Beyond casually predicting her brother’s loss of an eye, Helaena makes an interesting observation about the millipede she’s studying in season 1’s sixth episode. “This one has 60 rings and two pairs of legs on each,” she says. “That’s 240…It has eyes… though…I don’t believe it can see…It is beyond our understanding. The last ring has no legs at all.”
This is one of Helaena’s comments that may well have a double meaning—-and has been a source of much speculation among fans. It most likely refers to Aegon, who has already been scarred and broken by events in season 2. He will face further injury as the Dance of the Dragons continues, ultimately losing the use of his legs after jumping from dragon back in an aerial battle against Baela Targaryen (Bethany Anthonia) and Moondancer. He will also be the last of Alicent’s sons to die, making him the literal last ring in that particular family chain.
The more intriguing interpretation, however, is that Helaena has somehow seen down through the centuries to predict the ascension of Bran Stark to the Iron Throne. Bran the Broken, of course, famously cannot walk after getting shoved out a window by Jamie Lannister in Game of Thones’ first season. Even the numbers add up—240 and 60 add up to 300, roughly the years that pass between the start of Targaryen rule in Westeros and the end of the Iron Throne—-as well as the concept of hereditary kings—as we know it.
Spools of Green and Black
“Hand turns loom, spool of green, spool of black; dragons of flesh weaving dragons of thread,” Helaena intones while studying a spider at Laena Targaryen’s funeral on Driftmark. And, yes, fine, on the surface, this may all sound like nonsense, but it’s actually one of her clearer prophecies when it comes to interpreting its meaning: She’s foretelling the Targaryen civil war.
The “hand” in question is clearly Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), the Hand of the King who is busily turning the loom of fate by manuevering his daughter into Viserys’s bed and his grandson onto the Iron Throne. The spools of thread are the factions that divide the Targaryen family: the greens for Alicent and the blacks for Rhaenyra. Both sides have dragons, but it’s a toss-up as to whether the “dragons of flesh weaving dragons of thread” is meant to reference the conflict between Alicent’s trueborn Targaryen children and Rhaenyra’s illegitimate ones, or a nod to Daemon (Matt Smith) and Rhaenyra’s decisions to marry each other to strengthen their corner of the family line. (Which they really get an awful lot of crap for given the fact that Alicent goes on to marry Helaena off to her own brother without a second thought.)
The Beast Beneath the Boards
One of Helaena’s more straightforward predictions is made in the season 1 episode, “The Lord of the Tides,” as she repeatedly insists that her family must “beware the beast beneath the boards.” In the following installment, “The Green Council,” she once again warns that “there’s a beast beneath the boards.” But Alicent, Otto, and the rest of the Greens are all too busy dealing with Viserys’s death and plotting to put Aegon on the throne in Rhaenyra’s place to listen.
Before the episode is over, Helaena’s once again proven right. There is a beast beneath the boards: Princess Rhaenys’s (Eve Best) dragon Meleys, who bursts from beneath the Dragonpit with her rider just in time to disrupt Aegon’s coronation The duo then flies off to fill Rhaenyra in on what the Hightowers are planning. If there was any justice this moment should have been a huge wake-up call for Team Black to take Helaena and her warnings more seriously. But, as Allicent learns to her sorrow in the second season, Westeros isn’t a place that particularly values the contributions of women when it comes to issues of war or statecraft, and Helaena’s voice remains largely ignored.
Blood and Cheese
The second season premiere of House of the Dragon contains one of the show’s most heinous deaths—-and in a franchise like this, that’s saying a lot. What makes it even worse is that Helaena saw it coming, even if she wasn’t able to precisely articulate the specifics of the threat.
Having mentioned her dislike of rats at several points in the series’ first season, she brings up her fear again in the season 2 premiere. Aegon dismisses her concerns, insisting that King’s Landing will be safe so long as Vhagar is there to protect it. But that’s not what Helaena means. “I’m afraid … Not of dragons. Of rats,” she says, foreshadowing Daemon’s hiring of a pair of second-rate assassins known as Blood and Cheese—one of whom worked as a ratcatcher in the Red Keep— to kill Aemond in retaliation for Luke’s death.
The inept duo never finds the prince, but they do stumble upon Helaena and her six-year-old twins, Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. After forcing the young queen to identify which of her children was Aegon’s heir, young Jaehaerys is brutally killed as Helena flees with her daughter to the grisly sounds of her son’s head being cut off.
Eagle-eyed viewers may have also noticed that during the scene in which Helaena mentions being afraid of rats, she’s embroidering something that looks suspiciously like a funeral shroud. Even though she couldn’t articulate the meaning of her vision, her body somehow seemed to know what was about to happen and tragically helped her prepare her accordingly.
Rook’s Rest
Though Helaena doesn’t make a specific prediction that applies to the battle at Rook’s Rest, we learn that she did see the events that transpired there in a dream. When Aemond attempts to pressure her into joining them in battle on Dreamfyre, Helaena refuses, telling her brother that she knows he turned Vhagar’s fire on Aegon.
Whether this means she has seen other things that have taken place during the war so far is unclear, but the confirmation that she can also dream current events—either while they happen or shortly afterward—is a rather thrilling expansion of her abilities. How might the Greens be able to use her powers in the future? (Provided, of course, that any of them take her and her abilities seriously.)
Aegon Will Be King Again
The season 2 finale contains Helaena’s most coherent and direct bit of prophecy yet. After informing Aemond that she knows he tried to use the chaos at Rook’s Rest to commit some light regicide, she informs him that all his efforts to usurp his brother’s throne will come to nothing. “Aegon will be king again,” she says. “He’s yet to see victory. He sits on a wooden throne.”
The “wooden throne” could refer to the wooden crate-like carriage that Aegon and Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) are busy fleeing King’s Landing in, but it more than likely points to a further physical humiliation that awaits in his future. After losing the use of his legs in an aerial battle with Baela and Moondancer, Aegon will have to be carried about in a wooden litter and—because he cannot climb the steps to the Iron Throne—forced to rule from a cushioned (yes, wooden) seat at its base.
Swallowed Up in the Gods Eye
Helaena delivers two devastating prophecies to her brother in the season 2 finale—not only will Aegon reclaim his throne, but Aemond himself will die. And she’s remarkably clear about the specifics of how that will happen. “And you….you will be dead,” she says. “You are swallowed up in the Gods Eye, and you are never seen again.”
The Gods Eye is the name of the large lake that sits just south of Harrenhal. It’s the largest in the Seven Kingdoms and gets its name from the small island in the middle, which looks like a god’s eye when seen from above (presumably on dragonback). And it is where not one but two fan favorites will meet their ends. Aemond ultimately heads to Harrenhall—as he says he intends to do at the end of the finale—where he finally clashes with his uncle Daemon in the duel that both men (and, heck, the entire House of the Dragon audience) have been waiting for. Aboard Vhagar and Caraxes, the two face off in an aerial battle high above the Gods Eye in one of the most vicious fights of the entire Dance. Both men and their dragons are killed, locked together as they crash into the waters of the lake below.
Helaena doesn’t get everything 100% right here, however, as it’s technically Daemon who is never seen again. Vhagar’s body is discovered years after the battle at the Gods Eye, with Aemond’s armored corpse still strapped to her back, and Dark Sister, Daemon’s Valyrian steel sword, in his eye socket.
The Song of Ice and Fire
Helaena isn’t the only person who’s been seeing visions this season on House of the Dragon. During his sojourn at Harrenhal, Daemon has been regularly haunted by ghosts both literal and figurative. His waking and sleeping hallucinations have involved everything from beheading a young Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) and chatting with his dead wife Laena to sleeping with his own mother, Alyssa Targaryen (Emeline Lambert). But with a little help from Harrenhal’s weirwood tree, Daemon’s visions of the past transform into a dark and foreboding look at the future to come.
In it, he sees everything from White Walkers and Brynden Rivers, the future Three-Eyed Raven, to the fiery births of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons and presumably his own drowning in the Gods Eye. But that’s not all—he also sees Helaena, who appears at the vision’s end to tell Daemon that he is but one small piece of the Song of Ice and Fire. “It’s all a story and you are but one part in it,” she tells him. “You know your part.” (Whether this means Helaena has also seen Aegon’s dream for herself is unclear, but here’s hoping!)
Daemon is ultimately so freaked out by the promise of these dark apocalyptic events that he immediately repledges his fealty to his wife Rhaenyra, who he saw sitting on the Iron Throne in the final image of his vision. Can this change of heart be credited to Helaena? Not entirely, as I’m sure the ice zombies definitely helped in that regard. But it certainly seems apparent that Helaena’s dreams—and her growing confidence when it comes to both understanding and interpreting them—have the potential to directly shape events in the world around her. How will those visions impact the events of season 3? We’ll have to wait and see.
The post Breaking Down All of Helaena’s House of the Dragon Prophecies appeared first on Den of Geek.
