See Sunfyre's awesome saddle from House of the Dragon

A ton of work goes into every moment of House of the Dragon, HBO's opulent Game of Thrones prequel series. It goes well beyond the actors, directors and writers. Every piece of clothing the actors wear is painstakingly assembled by members of the costume team, the sets are put together by the art department, the dragons are rendered by armies of special effects artists, and so on. A lot of this flies by when we're watching the show, but all of it is of a very high quality and deserves to be noticed.

Take this dragon saddle, scultped by Aidan Pitchford and Sean Schofield. This is what King Aegon II Targaryen sits upon when he rides his dragon Sunfyre into battle in the best episode of the season, "The Red Dragon and the Gold":

That is an unaccountably beautiful prop, especially considering that we see it for maybe a few seconds of screentime. HBO probably could have gotten away with making something a lot more bare bones, but they sprang for the good stuff.

Pitchford posted these pictures on his Instagram, where he laments that it was "barely seen" in the show, "as is tradition." Hopefully a few more people will able to admire it now. It is indeed, as Pitchford says, "a cool thing." I wonder if anybody got to take it home.

In addition to Pitchford and Schofield doing the sculpting, damon.abba did the leatherwork and assembly while Pitchford, Brandon James Coomes and Kate Murray painted the saddle. Hopefully we'll get to see this saddle (or perhaps a dirtied, singed version of it) again. We're told several times in the second season of House of the Dragon that Sunfyre died at the Battle of Rook's Rest, but we never actually see the body and Sunfyre has a lot left to do in George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, so we have our doubts:

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