This article was originally published on October 24, 2022. We’re updating it as events unfold in House of the Dragon’s second season.
For any viewers who thought House of the Dragon lacked action in its first season, rest assured: There’s potential for battle after battle that could blow Blackwater, Hardhome, and the Long Night out of the water — plus enough character deaths to make Game of Thrones seem downright merciful.
George R.R. Martin has said it will take four ten-episode seasons to fully tell the story of the Dance of the Dragons, and while Warner Bros. might not have committed to a 40-episode run yet, we’ll assume GRRM is right. Due to the nature of adaptation, not everything in source material Fire & Blood or A World of Ice & Fire will make it into the show, and there will likely be some new scenes, characters, or plotlines that aren’t in the books. (For example, Rhaenys’s dramatic escape from the Dragonpit in episode nine was a show-only invention.) All that said, here’s an overview of what to expect in the rest of season two (and beyond) on House of the Dragon.
And, oh yeah: spoiler warning. We’re going to essentially spoil the entire show. (Though Joffrey Baratheon openly talked about who won the Dance of the Dragons back in a season three episode of Game of Thrones, so how much are we spoiling, really?)
The Dance Moves Already Made in Season Two
Here’s how it went down in the books.
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The War Kicks off With Some Child Murder
Season one of House of the Dragon ends with Aemond killing Lucerys while he attempts to flee Storm’s End in the rain. Daemon doesn’t take kindly to the killing of his stepson, so he calls in a favor from Mysaria, the White Worm. She hires a butcher and a ratcatcher (known as Blood and Cheese, respectively) to sneak into the Red Keep and the chambers of King Aegon’s sister-wife, Helaena. This is where things go a bit differently (and with even more brutality) in the source material: The killers hold her children, Jaehaerys and his younger brother, Maelor (who does not exist in House of the Dragon, at least yet), at knifepoint and force Helanea to choose which will die. She agonizes but eventually says Maelor rather than have them both killed. Instead, Blood and Cheese kill Jaehaerys and then flee, leaving Helaena distraught.
In a very Westeros version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, child-murder begets child-murder, and so King Aegon retaliates by sending Ser Arryk Cargyll to Dragonstone to impersonate his identical twin brother Ser Erryk and kill Rhaenyra’s children or the queen herself; maybe both. However, Erryk spots Arryk and the twins die fighting each other.
Jaehaerys will, uh, not be the only child who dies in the Dance, so if the kid-death isn’t really your thing, the rest of House of the Dragon might not be for you. But, hey! The good news is that there should be no more graphic birth sequences.
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As Things Heat Up, Battle Lines Are Drawn
The books House of the Dragon is based on say that the number of battles during the Dance “cannot be readily counted, for they were almost beyond number,†so it’s doubtful HBO will spend time and money on every last encounter. But there are some major ones with huge implications that will likely make it on the screen.
At the outset of the Dance, the Greens occupy King’s Landing while the Blacks operate out of Dragonstone. The Greens count major houses like Baratheon, Hightower, and Lannister (and many others) among their supporters, while the Blacks boast the support of Arryn, Stark, Greyjoy, and Velaryon (and many others). The Blacks gain control of the Riverlands early on in the war, and King Aegon realizes things are off to a bad start. As we saw in season two’s episode two, under slightly different circumstances, Aegon fires Otto as King’s Hand and gives the role to Ser Criston Cole, who makes an offensive push.
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The Battles Begin in Earnest, and There Are Casualties
Rook’s Rest, the seat of one of the Black-allied houses, is under siege by the Greens. Princess Rhaenys and her dragon Meleys come to the rescue, but King Aegon and his dragon Sunfyre and Prince Aemond on Vhagar, the largest living dragon, are there to meet her. To her credit, Rhaenys charges into the fight despite being outnumbered two-to-one, but both she and Meleys die. (She should’ve taken the shot when she had the chance.) However, Rhaenys still manages to fuck up the king pretty bad: Aegon’s body has been broken and burned to the point where his armor is melted into his flesh.
The Moves and Twists Still to Come in the Dance
Last chance to leave before potential spoilers.
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The Search for Dragonriders
Despite the loss of Rhaenys and Meleys, the Blacks still have significantly more dragons than the Greens — 13 rideable dragons compared to the Greens’ five (down to four after Sunfyre’s injuries). What they lack are riders for the dragons on Dragonstone whose previous riders died, as well as a couple of “wild†dragons that live freely on the island. Anybody who manages to tame and ride these dragons gets a noble title on the spot.
Two boys, Addam and Alyn (who have appeared already this season, apparently aged up, as strapping young men), come forward when their mother claims they are the bastard boys of Laenor Velaryon. Lord Corlys, now Hand of the Queen, formally adopts them into House Velaryon, leading some to suspect that they are not actually Laenor’s children (remember: gay) but children of Corlys himself. In any case, Addam claims Laenor’s old dragon. A baseborn girl named Nettles tames the wild dragon named Sheepstealer by being nice to it, essentially, while a drunk named Ulf the White and a blacksmith’s bastard named Hugh Hammer manage to ride Silverwing and Vermithor. Remember all these names, because they’re going to end up causing headaches for the Blacks.
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More Battles, More Deaths
Among the battles we can probably expect to see (or at least hear about) is the Battle of the Gullet, where Corlys’ fleet gets attacked by the Triarchy, the trio of city-states from Essos that have allied with the Greens. Aegon the Younger, the eldest child of Rhaenyra and Daemon, manages to escape, but his dragon, Stormcloud, is fatally wounded. His younger brother Viserys is captured but believed to be dead. Prince Jacaerys, Rhaenyra’s firstborn, is killed when his dragon flies too low and crashes, upon which he’s peppered with deadly crossbow fire. Rhaenyra has now lost three sons as far as she knows.
The Battle of the Honeywine is notable for being the fight where Daeron Targaryen — King Aegon’s youngest brother who was, weirdly, not mentioned at all in season one — proved himself making inroads into the Riverlands on behalf of the Greens. The Battle of the Lakeshore follows, and while it was the biggest and bloodiest battle of the Dance, none of the major characters die during it, so it’s possible that it won’t be a huge focus of the show despite the scale. There are smaller battles with bigger stakes — and the small battles are still huge.
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Queen’s Landing
Prince Aemond, now functionally ruling in his injured brother’s stead, makes a move on the massive Black stronghold of Harrenhal. However, he finds it undefended because Rhaenyra and the Blacks have used the opportunity to seize King’s Landing while Aemond’s host is away. Many gold cloaks, still loyal to Daemon from his time leading the City Watch, helped make this a relatively bloodless conquest. King Aegon, his surviving children, and Larys Strong manage to escape, but Otto Hightower is executed and Tyland Lannister is blinded and tortured because he refuses to give up the location of crucial gold that would help the Blacks’ cause. Rhaenyra spares Alicent’s life, keeping her prisoner and summarily rejecting a proposal to split the Seven Kingdoms in two.
There’s another child death, too. When the Greens try to get Maelor, now Aegon’s heir, to safety in Oldtown as King’s Landing falls to the Blacks, the infant is literally torn apart by an angry mob while en route.
Ser Criston Cole goes out like a chump while leading Green forces south from Harrenhal, when Riverlords loyal to Rhaenyra ambush his men in a battle known as Butcher’s Ball. Criston challenges the leaders to single combat, but instead of agreeing to a one-on-one duel, the Blacks just shoot arrows at Criston, killing him and routing his men. Lmao, owned.
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Betrayal After Betrayal
Having lost King’s Landing (and their house leader’s head), the Hightowers send a massive army towards a small city in the Reach called Tumbleton, which the Blacks control. Rhaenyra sends Ulf the White and Hugh Hammer to defend Tumbleton, but upon seeing how much bigger the approaching army is, Ulf and Hugh simply… change sides. Foreverafter, they were known as the Two Betrayers.
This, as you might imagine, doesn’t sit well with Rhaenyra. She doubts the allegiance of the other two new riders, Addam and Nettles, and orders them both arrested. Corlys, who vouched for them, tips Addam off, allowing him to flee with Seasmoke. Rhaenyra arrests Corlys in response.
Nettles, meanwhile, has been spending a lot of time with Daemon. (Nevermind that he is married to Queen Rhaenyra!) Upon hearing the order for Nettles’ arrest, Daemon instead lets her escape and she and Sheepstealer fly off to the Vale of Arryn. (History records that the pair was seen once more, hiding in a cave four years later, and after that they flew away never to be seen again.) All of these betrayals continue to enrage Rhaenyra, and rather than return to her side, Daemon instead issues a challenge to Aemond: Meet me at Harrenhal, let’s have a last duel.
While all this is happening, King Aegon is heading to the last place that Rhaenyra would think to look for him: Her former seat of power, Dragonstone. He spends some time in a remote fishing village on the island, and his injured dragon Sunfyre eventually finds his way to the king’s side, with some difficulty. Soon after, the Greens take Dragonstone without much difficulty. Only Daemon’s daughter, Baela, puts up a fight on her young dragon Moondancer. Though much younger and smaller than the maimed but still formidable Sunfyre, Moondancer is able to hold her own before eventually falling. Baela survives and is taken captive, but Aegon — who, remember, was already seriously burned and wounded fighting Rhaenys — needs to leap from his dragon at the last minute, breaking both of his legs.
Crucially, Rhaenyra and the Blacks have no idea that Aegon has taken over Dragonstone.
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The Death of the Dragons
Aemond accepts Daemon’s challenge, flying on Vhagar to Harrenhal for an epic duel that will be known forever after as the Battle Above the Gods Eye. It’s an incredible battle and it only ends when Daemon leaps from his dragon, Caraxes, onto Vhagar and drives his Valyrian Steel sword Dark Sister into Aemon’s one good eye. The dragons and their riders plummet into the lake below them and all four die — though Daemon’s body is never found.
On the same day as the Battle Above the God’s Eye, there’s chaos in King’s Landing, too. Rhaenyra’s imprisonment of Corlys prompts the Velaryon fleet to switch sides, abandoning the queen. Helaena falls from from the tower where she’s being kept and dies impailed on spikes below in what’s either a murder or a suicide, the sources don’t agree. And, a mob of commoners riled up by a man known as the Shepherd decide that enough is enough: Time to get rid of these dragons. (The collateral damage from Rhaenys’s dramatic entrance in season one’s ninth episode, though a show-only invention, probably helped turn the commonfolk against dragons.)
The mob storms the Dragonpit, and although the dragons and the guards are able to kill a lot of them, the commonfolk manage to kill three dragons within. Prince Joffrey Velaryon, Rhaenyra’s third-oldest son, attempts to ride Rhaenyra’s dragon Syrax to the Dragonpit so that he can save his own dragon, Tyraxes. However, riding another person’s dragon is no simple matter, and Joffrey is thrown to his death. Before the night is over, Syrax will die, too.
Rhaenyra, recognizing that the city has been lost, sells her crown for passage on a ship and flees back to safety. Back to… Dragonstone.
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The End of the Dance
There’s one more major battle in the Dance, a fight known as the Second Battle of Tumbleton. Prince Daeron — who, again, really should have been mentioned in the first season given his importance later on in the Dance — is the heir to the throne since Aemond is dead and Aegon is MIA. Hugh Hammer, one of the Betrayers, decides not to quit while he’s ahead and makes a bid for the throne by right of conquest, prompting Daeron to conspire on Hugh’s life. Before he can act, though, Addam Velaryon comes riding in with an army of four thousand soldiers loyal to the Blacks. (He does this even though Rhaenyra has ordered his arrest. What a good guy.) The fighting claims the lives of Addam, Daeron, Hugh, and three dragons. Ulf the White, the other Betrayer, is killed with poison afterwards.
The outcome of the battle doesn’t really mean anything for Rhaenyra, though. She and her son Aegon III arrive at Dragonstone only to discover that King Aegon II is there waiting for them. King Aegon’s dragon is dying, but he gives Sunfyre one last meal: With her son watching, Aegon feeds Queen Rhaenyra to his dragon.
The queen’s death does not mean the end of the Dance, however. The Blacks still have allies — including a massive host of Northmen led by Lord Cregan Stark — and they’re advancing on the Greens. Although he bested his rival claimant, Aegon has very few resources left available to him, so the writing is on the wall. Even so, Aegon will not admit defeat, and the Dance only ends when Aegon’s own men poison him.
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The Aftermath
So after all that, it’s Rhaenyra and Daemon’s first child together, Aegon III, who sits on the Iron Throne. Of the major characters we met in the first season of House of the Dragon, only Aegon III, Alicent, Coryls, a mutilated Tyland Lannister, Baela, and her sister Rhaena are still alive. Larys Strong will be executed when Cregan Stark, who is kind of annoyed that he and his men marched all the way south only for the king to have been killed by his own supporters, names himself Hand. He orders a bunch of people executed and then leaves after one day. The young King Aegon III, a child who is understandably scarred from seeing his mother be eaten alive in front of him, does not live a very happy life and is not a very effective king. The Targaryens would rule for almost another two centuries before Robert’s Rebellion, though they would do so without dragons, as their numbers never recovered from the Dance. Eventually, they dwindle to nothing.
Great war, everybody. Totally worth it!