‘House of the Dragon’ Made Some Changes to the Story of Three Dragons Eggs We Know All Too Well

One of the key scenes in this week’s episode of House of the Dragon gave us a glimpse at a very important element of the future of House Targaryen.

Spoilers ahead for season 2, episode 3 of House of the Dragon, “The Burning Mill,” as well as for some lore notions from Fire & Blood

The scene in question saw Rhaenyra sending her three younger children—Princes Joffrey, Aegon, and Viserys—away to the Eyrie and then hopefully to the Free City of Pentos. And since the boys are all so young, she entrusts their care to Rhaena, one of Prince Daemon’s daughters in a complex dance of power and gender norms that was honestly fascinating to see.

Together with the four Targaryen royals, of course, travel their dragons. We don’t see either Tyraxes or Stormcloud—bound respectively to Princes Joffrey and Aegon—since they’re still so small they can travel in some cage-like contraption that is sure to have been very well received by everyone at HotD’s special effects department, but we did definitely hear them screech and roar as they’re carried out of Dragonstone.

What we do see, however, is Rhaenyra giving Rhaena four unhatched eggs to carry to the Eyrie with her—a way to ensure the future of House Targaryen and its dragons should the tide of war turn against the Blacks. And as I’m sure we can all agree, three of those eggs sure did look incredibly familiar.

Did Rhaenyra give Rhaena Daenerys’s eggs?

It has been by now confirmed that three of the eggs that Rhaenyra gives Rhaena for safekeeping are indeed the eggs that will end up being gifted to Daenerys Targaryen during the Game of Thrones timeline. It makes sense, after all. Rhaenyra ultimately wants her children to reach the safety of the Free City of Pentos, across the Narrow Sea. And it’s in that same city that Viserys and Daenerys will be taken in by the powerful Magister Illyrio Mopatis, who holds considerable sway over Pentoshi politics and who is also disgustingly rich.

It’s Illyrio who arranges Daenerys’s marriage to Khal Drogo and it’s always him who gifts her three precious dragon eggs, which is not hard to imagine he or someone from his family could have acquired in the more than 150 years that passed since the Dance of the Dragons to Robert’s Rebellion. Sure, Illyrio believes those eggs to simply be rare objects of great value and would have probably never imagined that Daenerys would have been able to actually awake dragons from them—but that’s what being the Prince That Was Promised does for you.

How do things go in Fire & Blood?

This decision by House of the Dragon’s showrunners does go against canon, even though the exact origin of Daenerys’s eggs has never been officially established but only speculated. The most popular fandom theory believes that those three eggs—which were laid by the dragon Dreamfyre, now bonded to Helaena Targaryen, rather than Rhaenyra’s dragon Syrax as the show implies—were stolen some eighty years before the start of the Dance from Lady Elissa Farman, who used them to buy a ship in the Free Cities and sail across the Sunset Sea.

And how did a noble lady get her hands on three dragon eggs, you might ask? Well, Lady Elissa was the known lover of Rhaena Targaryen, granddaughter of Aegon the Conqueror and eldest sister of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne—as well as Dreamfyre’s first rider. She’s actually one of the most fascinating Targaryen women to ever been put on paper, in my humble opinion, and I would really love to see her come to life on the screen sooner or later.

While it is a bit disappointing that the whole affair and falling out between Rhaena and Elissa didn’t have its chance to shine, making it so that Daenerys receives her eggs from Rhaenyra across the years is a very understandable choice to make. It ties the present of House Targaryen as we’ve seen it in Game of Thrones with its past, and also binds together two women who would be queens in their own rights against all odds.