Who is Alys Rivers: the mysterious Witch Queen of Harrenhal is the Melisandre of 'House of the Dragon'.

In Burning Mill, this week's episode of House of the Dragon, there are deaths, clandestine journeys, secret encounters in the Sept, conquest of strategic places, and the visit of ghosts from the past.  

Written by David Hancock (The Crown) and directed by Geeta Vasant Patel, this chapter made a controversial decision among fans: to narrate the battle of the Blackwoods and the Brackens with an ellipsis in favor of the spectacular scene with Alicent and Rhaenyra that doesn't exist in the book. A decision that we applaud from here, because there will be enough battles already and it had no dramatic weight to see a bunch of characters die that the viewer didn't know.

But in this hour of television full of great moments both in King's Landing and in Dragonstone, some of the best sequences were those of the Harrenhal Castle, a place with a lot of history and marked by a supposed curse from its origin, which time has not been able to refute because throughout the centuries it has ended several Houses of Westeros until extinguishing them.

As the series usually does, each new setting and the new characters who inhabit them are introduced into the story from the point of view of someone we already know and in this case, Daemon was the viewer's avatar.

'House of the Dragon'

Clad in his war armor and ready to claim his place by exercising all the violence necessary, the king consort of Dragonstone entered with impetus into the main hall of the castle to meet Lord Simon Strong and his meager court, ready to bend his knee before Rhaenyra Targaryen and prepared to sit down to dinner quietly.

At night, Daemon, a skeptical man by nature, who unlike his brother Viserys never believed in dragon dreamers, succumbed to the power of the supernatural history of the castle and the curse trapped in its walls.

Daemon Targaryen in 2x03

He lived an experience for which he has no rational explanation, in which his feeling of guilt manifested with hallucinations of adolescent Rhaenyra and the corpse of the child who was slaughtered because of him, to finally find himself in front of a heart tree, not knowing how he got there, and where the mysterious woman he had seen in the hall gives him an ominous omen about his future.

Who is Alys Rivers

Her complete story is not entirely clear in Fire and Blood. What all chroniclers of the time do agree on is that she mastered dark arts. According to Munkun, she "flirted with potions and spells. Septon Eustace defines her as "a witch of the woods." And Mushroom, for his part, says she is "an evil sorceress who bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her beauty". 

It is also known by her surname that she was a bastard. Although her real father is not known, much less her mother. According to Munkun and Eustace, she would be the daughter of Lyonel Strong, the father of Larys and Harwin, but Mushroom insists that she was much older than them, and that she not only breastfed them, but also their father.

Alys Rivers

The legend also says that all her children were born dead, but that in her breasts she held so much milk, that she had bodily nursed countless newborns at Harrenhal. 

Although the real extent of her powers and her true age are unknown, Gale Rankin, the actress who plays the character in the series confirmed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that "Alys can basically predict the future. She is someone who has all this power, who potentially has been alive for 400 years".

We won't go into details, as they are spoilers from the book and the series, but Alys Rivers' role as the embodiment of the bewitched nature of Harrenhal will be important when the war begins and the dragons turn their eyes to the Riverlands. 

Theories about Melisandre and Alys Rivers

Due to the similarities between both characters, for a long time fans of A Song of Ice and Fire have explored theories that not only connect them but have asserted that they are the same person. 

Melisandre and Arya Stark. HBO

However, due to Melisandre's different origin, and in Game of Thrones this connection was not suggested, this version has been ruled out. This does not mean that House of the Dragon cannot confirm this theory if George R.R. Martin considers it. It is worth noting that he is the co-creator of the prequel and collaborates with Ryan Condal. 

Other theories suggest the possibility that Melisandre is the daughter of Alys Rivers, who could finally have conceived with a Targaryen during the Dance of the Dragons. 

*This article has been automatically translated using artificial intelligence