HBO just unveiled a brand new trailer for House of the Dragon Season 3 that’s full of bloody battles, dramatic dialogue, and one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that teases the show might have taken George R.R. Martin‘s now-deleted “Beware the Butterflies” blog post to heart after all.

**Potential spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 3 ahead**

In the nearly two years since House of the Dragon Season 2 ended on the anti-climatic precipice of a major battle, fans have lobbied various criticisms at the hit series for veering too far away from George R.R. Martin’s source material. (I, for one, want to know what happened to Nettles!) However, none of these critiques caused such a brouhaha amongst the fandom quite like Martin’s own thoughts about showrunner Ryan Condal‘s decisions to cut a certain infant prince from the series.

House of the Dragon viewers will remember all too well the horror of Season 2’s “Blood and Cheese” incident. After Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) killed Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’Arcy) son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) in Season 1, Daemon (Matt Smith) decides that the best move is to take a “son for a son.” He hires two Goldcloaks in the city to sneak into the Red Keep and murder Aegon’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) son and heir Jaehaerys right in front of his mother, Helaena (Phia Saban). Book readers know that a character was missing from this scene: Maelor Targaryen.

When DECIDER spoke to Ryan Condal all the way back in June 2024, he explained that he had to cut Maelor because of how the television production needed to change certain details out of necessity.

“The first season, in the book, like that story would take place over more than 30 years. And it’s just if we tried to do that, we would have to recast every character in the story and it would have been even more difficult to produce and dramatize than what we had,” Condal said. “So it just means that, you know, Helaena and Aegon’s kids and Rhaenyra and Daemon’s kids are just younger in this than they would have been in the original story.”

“So it just means that Maelor didn’t exist in this time.”

When George R.R. Martin took to his “Not a Blog” to vent his frustrations with the HBO show in September 2024, he specifically complained about the effect that excising the younger prince would have later in the storyline. He also spoiled that he had read Condal’s outline for House of the Dragon Season 3 and that without the drama of little Maelor’s tragic death, Helaena’s subsequent death by suicide doesn’t make sense.

Martin wrote: “Ryan’s outline for season 3, Helaena still kills herself… for no particular reason. There is no fresh horror, no triggering event to overwhelm the fragile young queen.”

Well, if you watched the latest House of the Dragon Season 3 trailer carefully, you might notice a strange cut about one minute and twenty-six seconds in that appears to be Helaena screaming in the midst of labor. I mean, she could be screaming for any other reason, but her prone position and sweaty brow suggest she might be giving birth.

Could Helaena be giving birth to baby Maelor in this scene? If so, that means Condal might have read Martin’s notes and found a way to introduce the child (and his horrific death) after all.

Of course, this is all wild speculation based on a carefully edited piece of promotional material, so maybe Maelor is totally cut from the series, after all!

Besides this tiny juicy little shot, the House of the Dragon Season 3 trailer definitely confirms that we will be getting many, many bloody battles when the show returns on June 21, 2026. The trailer opens with Daemon boasting to Rhaenyra about their newfound position of power, thanks to the new dragonriders they’ve assembled.

“You will have an empire unassailable, Rhaenyra,” Daemon says. “And our children will rule it forever and a day.”

We also see Alicent (Olivia Cooke) seemingly regretting her bold decision to broker a peace with Rhaenyra, noting not only that the city is no longer safe, but that Rhaenyra “will do things that your heart will have recoiled from before you came to the throne.”

The trailer even introduces a new power player to the game. Ormund Hightower (James Norton) lays out his moral justifications for the civil war in clear terms: “The Targaryens are a savage race. We act with holy purpose to restore a rightful king.”

House of the Dragon Season 3 premieres on June 21 on HBO and HBO Max.