There's a battle on the beach in new set pics from House of the Dragon season 3!

HBO is in the thick of filming on the third season of House of the Dragon, and we're getting a lot of up-close looks lately; that's what happens when you film on location and there are curious shutterbugs in the area.

Today we have some of the most interesting images yet. They seem to concern a major action sequence called the Battle of the Gullet, which we're likely to see very early in the new season. Be warned that there will be SPOILERS for George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood from here on out.

Season 2 ended with a bunch of armies and navies on the precipice of conflict. Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) boarded his flagship along with his illegitimate son Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim), ready to patrol the seas and fight for his queen, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy). Meanwhile, Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) sailed across the Narrow Sea and met with agents of the Triarchy, old enemies of Rhaenya's husband Daemon Targaryen. Tyland managed to convince a pirate fleet captained by Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn) to sail for Rhaenyra's rival King Aegon II Targaryen.

That's a lot of names, but the important point is that Corlys Velaryon's fleet and Sharako Lohar's fleet are now on a collision course. They will clash in the Battle of the Gullet.

But it goes further than that. In Fire & Blood, the Triarchy fleet also sacks the island of Driftmark, the seat of House Velaryon. That's what I think we may be looking at in these new images, which show Triarchy and Velaryon soldiers milling about on a beach:

This production is going down on the island of Llanddwyn in Wales. In another image, we see soldiers lying dead on the beach, so you know these two groups are going to mix it up:

As for what named characters are around, we can see Abubakar Salim (Alyn of Hull) in the image below. We've also heard that Steve Toussaint (Corlys Velaryon) is present. That makes sense; the two set sail together at the end of season 2, so they should still be together when battle is joined at the beginning of season 2. Below that, we have an image of a Velaryon soldier and a Triarchy pirate. You can smell the bad blood in the air:

It's slightly more surprising to see Bethany Antonia on set. Anthona plays Baela Targaryen, Corlys' granddaughter. She rides the dragon Moondancer. In Fire & Blood, Baela doesn't participate in the Battle of the Gullet, but I can see them tweaking things for the show. I'm not sure if she'll ride Moondancer into the fray, just show up with Corlys and Alyn afterwards to survey some of the damage done to Driftmark, or something else. She's here, though:

The cast and crew have crowed a lot about how the Battle of the Gullet may be one of the most ambitious and complicated battles ever filmed for TV, so it makes sense that the shoot would take a long time and involve a lot of setups. Expect that battle to go down in the first episode.

But other things do happen in season 3. Redanian Intelligence has images of what it thinks is another House of the Dragon set going up in Surrey, England. It looks like it could be a barn or a small keep or something:

We have a while to wait before we get more details. Look for the third season of House of the Dragon to premiere sometime next year on HBO and HBO Max.

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