If You Want To Know The Future Of House Of The Dragon, Just Listen To Helaena Targaryen
This post contains spoilers for all recent episodes of "House of the Dragon."
"House of the Dragon" has a lot of characters on its roster, and not all of them seem to matter in equal measure. But just as Bran ended up winning the game of thrones after spending a whole lot of that series' runtime on the sidelines, a seemingly unimportant "House of the Dragon" character may actually be the key to the show's future.
Helaena Targaryen, played by Evie Allen, has only appeared on the fringes of the Targaryen-Hightower drama so far. She seems to be a rather introverted child, and while it's unclear whether she's coded as neurodivergent or simply eccentric, she has little use for the infighting of her siblings or the conflict of her extended families. In fact, she spends much of her time looking at insects, spouting fragmented and seemingly meaningless phrases along the way.
Except, it's quickly becoming clear that her utterances aren't actually meaningless: there's a good chance they might actually be prophecies. In the show's sixth episode, Alicent (Olivia Cooke) half-listens to her daughter as she holds what appears to be a millipede, counting its legs and sharing her observations out loud. "This one has 60 rings and two pairs of legs on each," she says. "That's 240." This seems to be simple mathematics, but her words soon take a turn for the enigmatic. "It has eyes, though I don't believe it can see," she adds, and when her mother asks why, she says, "It is beyond our understanding." Helaena's words here sound more like a riddle than a scientific observation, and before the scene ends, she says something that's truly perplexing — until the next episode, when it starts to make sense. "The last ring has no legs at all," she explains, still looking at the bug in her hand.
Helaena's gift of prophecy
Then, just as her mother gets distracted with a conversation with her brother, she adds, "He'll have to close an eye." In the very next episode, that same brother, Aemond (Leo Ashton), loses an eye during a fight with his dark-haired nephews, all in pursuit of a dragon. Lest there be any doubt that Helaena's observation predicted this, she says the line about closing an eye right after Aemond complains to his mother about wanting a dragon.
The girl's knack for prophecy continues into the next episode, where she carefully observes a spindly-legged spider during the funeral for Lady Laenna (Nanna Blondell). While her brother — and betrothed — Aegon (Ty Tennant) calls her "an idiot," Helaena is casually predicting a civil war. "Hand turns loom. Spool of green, spool of black," she says idly, before finishing, "dragons of flesh weaving dragons of thread." While this may not mean much to folks who haven't read George R.R. Martin's "Fire & Blood," it's a pretty revealing line for those who have.
During the upcoming Dance of the Dragons, a civil war that will tear the Targaryen family apart, the members of House Targaryen split into two factions: the Greens and the Blacks. The line "hand turns loom" likely refers to Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), the scheming once and future Hand of the King whose machinations lead right into the bloody conflict. And while her last line is a little more vague, it likely refers to the conflict between the kids who are Targaryen by blood — "dragons of flesh" — and Rhaenyra's (Emma D'Arcy) illegitimate heirs — "dragons of thread," whose claim to the throne seems to be hanging by a thread.
She foresees everything, but no one's listening
If Helaena's words really are the line-by-line prognostication they seem to be, then it stands to reason that her millipede scene has meaning as well. If she's talking about The Iron Throne, as she often seems to be, her line about the last ring having no legs at all could be a reference to another event that has yet to pass — the ascension of the throne, far in the future, by Bran. Bran is a wheelchair user, and when he goes into his vision state, his eyes do not see, just like another line from her observations.
There are a few reasons Helaena could be thinking of Bran: for one, he shares a second sight similar to hers, although she seems to be one of the "dreamers" of Targaryen legend as opposed to a greenseer. There's even a chance that her numbers have meaning: 240 and 60, the numbers she mentions, add up to 300, exactly the number of years between the start of the Targaryen rule of Westeros and the coming of winter that marks the end of "Game of Thrones" and the Iron Throne as we know it.
Since the young Helaena of "Fire & Blood" is much less developed than the version we see on the show — she's described in childhood as "a pleasant, happy girl" who would make a fine mother — there's no telling exactly where Helaena's gift of prophecy will lead her. What is clear, though, is that no one around her seems to be listening to the warnings she shares, and their underestimation of her will surely have some dire consequences as the Targaryen civil war looms closer.