Foreshadowing in House of the Dragon: A kingdom on fire

The first season of House of the Dragon is over, and the finale was full of allusions both to what came before and what’s to come.

Before we get to the future, let’s take a look at how the season finale, “The Black Queen,” called back to the start of the show. Rhaenyra’s horrific, stress-induced miscarriage harkens back to her mother Aemma’s battle in the birthing bed from the series premiere. Later, the princess will be coronated while she burns the body of her stillborn daughter, a reference to the moment in the first episode where there’s a funeral for her stillborn brother.

The parallels keep on coming. At the war council, Jacaerys Velaryon asks his mother to send him and his brother Lucerys as envoys to the great lords of Westeros. “Send us” he says, the exact same thing Rhaenyra said to her father as a young princess, when she was suggesting that he send dragonriders to help fight the Triarchy. In that same episode, she rides Syrax to Dragonstone in order to confront Daemon and alights on the castle bridge. She does that again in the finale, only this time the circumstances are very different.

So there were lots of callbacks in this episode. Will future episodes call back to this one? It’s as good a time as any to talk about what “The Black Queen” foreshadowed.

The whoopsie that led to war

Possibly the most foreboding moment in the entire series thus far comes when Aemond Targaryen loses control of his dragon Vhagar, who kills both the much smaller dragon Arrax and Aemond’s nephew Lucerys. In George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, there is no suggestion that Aemond doesn’t murder Luke on purpose. Then again, Fire & Blood is “written” after the fact by people with their own biases. There’s no way for history to know what exactly happened in the skies above Storm’s End.

And if Aemond did indeed lose control of Vhagar, he most certainly would never tell anyone. He wants to be seen as a great warrior and wouldn’t reveal that the most consequential event in the Dance of the Dragon was an accident. The show highlights that Aemond is nothing more than a kid playing with a nuclear bomb that he does not understand.

What does this mean for the rest of the series? Well, accident or not, Luke’s death means that each side is going to ready their nukes.

The sowing of the dragonseeds

During Rhaenyra’s war council, Daemon points out that there are riderless dragons on Dragonstone. He visits one in a cave: Vermithor, the dragon once ridden by his grandfather, King Jaehaerys Targaryen. Also, we see Jacaerys stepping up more as a leader here. All of this points towards what is likely to be a major focus of House of the Dragon season 2: the sowing of the seeds.

There are still a number of dragons that House of the Dragon hasn’t introduced audiences to. Some of the more terrifying, beautiful, and fearsome beasts have been lurking offscreen, hiding in the hills on Dragonstone. With Rhaenyra now fully bent on revenge, she and her blacks will hatch a plan to find riders to fly the dragons who otherwise would just be sitting there, not doing much of anything.

But as we’ve learned, dragons don’t follow orders just because you give them. The Blacks offer knighthoods to anyone who can claim a dragon and win it to their side. Many try, many die, and a few succeed. But will those lucky few — called the dragonseeds — want to follow Rhaenyra’s orders after they have control of one of these flying nuclear weapons?

There are four main dragonseeds in this story: Ulf the White, Hugh Hammer, Addam of Hull, and Nettles. All of them begin their time on the show fighting for the blacks, but a couple of them may get other ideas.

Dragons have officially been let loose on Westeros. The entire country will burn. We’ll just have to wait two years before we see it.

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