Michael Hein has been covering entertainment, fandom news, and trending topics since 2016 on outlets including **Rogues Portal, PopCulture.com, **and ComicBook.com. He has provided live coverage of red carpet premieres, conventions, and up-fronts, and has interviewed major stars including **Charles Dance, Patrick Stewart, **and Chloe Sevigny. An avid fiction reader and writer, Michael has been diving deep into all the biggest book-to-screen adaptations of the last decade, from ***Game of Thrones **to *Foundation.
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Some of the oldest, most beloved, and most plausible Game of Thrones fan theories revolve around secret identities — Jon Snow is secretly a Targaryen prince, for example. Several secret identities are revealed throughout the series, and there are dozens more proposed and debated in online forums to this day. Now, that grand fandom tradition has spilled over to House of the Dragon, where a surprisingly compelling theory ties Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) to the main series. Alys is clearly more than she claims to be, but more and more fans are opening up to the idea that she may not even be human. Specifically, some believe she may be Leaf — a Child of the Forest who helps guide Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) to the throne.
*House of the Dragon *started off around 200 years before Game of Thrones, and after a few time-skips, it’s now depicting a war that took place about 170 years before Bran Stark fell from a tower window. There have been some half-hearted theories about characters with unnaturally long lives who might appear in this prequel, but so far the producers seem more interested in connecting the two shows through garbled prophecies and visions. However, that could change by the end as the mystery of Alys Rivers grows and demands explanation. However, if the witch of Harrenhal is truly Leaf wearing a glamor, it would set off a chain reaction of other theories about A Song of Ice and Fire.
House of the Dragon is adapted from George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, which is not a novel but a “fictional history book.” It’s written from the perspective of an in-world maester, who is an unreliable narrator at the best of times. The book typically offers at least two or three explanations for every action its characters take, and the truth is obscured in the fog of history. On top of that, the maesters are notoriously skeptical of all magic, which means the book downplays the influence of magic at every turn. This is even true for Targaryen dragon-riders — who have demonstrable magic for all to see — so it’s even more true for those like Alys Rivers who worship the old gods and use more discrete powers.
The adaptation had every opportunity to downplay Alys’ abilities as well, taking the simplest explanations offered by the maesters. Instead, the show has only bolstered Alys’ influence, if anything. Not only has she ensorceled Daemon (Matt Smith) and other men, she has communed with animals, assassinated Lord Grover Tully, and dispensed important prophecies she already seemed to know. In Fire & Blood, some of Alys’ greatest alleged magical acts are still ahead, and by now most fans agree that House of the Dragon will take the more esoteric explanation whenever possible.
It’s obviously fun and preferable for a fantasy TV series to have more magic in it, not less, yet as Alys’ power continues to build, fans are more curious than ever about her identity. In Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, we are repeatedly told that “old powers are waking,” indicating that the magic of the old gods such as Alys uses has been weak and scarce south of the Wall for quite some time. For this witch of Harrenhal to be using these powers so much, many feel she must be more than a bastard daughter of House Strong. The show seems intent on stringing out the mystery of Alys’ identity as well, implying that the answer will be a big payoff.
Naturally, fans have compared Alys to* Game of Thrones’ *Melisandre (Carice van Houten) — another mysterious witch with an unnaturally long lifespan and an interest in manipulating Westerosi politics. Some have even proposed that Alys is Melisandre in disguise, but there’s not much evidence to support that theory. However, Melisandre is not the only character who can live for hundreds of years — and in the books she’s not the only one who can use a magical “glamor” to change her appearance, either.
Leaf is the only Child of the Forest character with dialogue in *Game of Thrones *and A Song of Ice and Fire. She meets Bran and his friends in Season 4 and helps hold back the wights as they all scramble into the cave where Bran will learn to become a Greenseer. However, the book version of this character tells us quite a bit more about herself. In a conversation with Bran, she explains that she was “born in the time of the dragon” — presumably meaning the time when House Targaryen ruled Westeros. She continues: “For two hundred years I walked the world of men to watch and listen and learn.”
It would not be easy for a Child of the Forest to go unnoticed among humans — Leaf is described as humanoid, but child-sized, with only three fingers and a thumb on each hand, and black claws instead of fingernails. Her skin is dappled brown, her ears are larger than a human’s, and her eyes are large, green and gold colored, with slitted pupils like a cat. For Leaf to “walk the world of men,” she would need some kind of disguise — probably a magical one, like the enchanted ruby necklace that made Melisandre appear young and strong.
There is plenty of precedence for this in the book besides Melisandre’s ruby. For one thing, Melisandre is able to cast glamors on other people in the book. We also see Brynden Rivers — a.k.a. Bloodraven — use a glamor on himself in one of the Dunk & Egg novellas. I won’t give the details for fear of spoiling a future season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but keep in mind that Bloodraven goes on to become the “Three-Eyed Crow,” Bran’s mentor in that cave. He and Leaf are co-conspirators on behalf of the old gods, so it’s reasonable to assume that if he can use glamors, so can she.
Their shared mission is also evidence for this theory that Leaf is Alys Rivers. In A Dance with Dragons, Leaf helps Bloodraven with Bran’s training. She is the one to prepare and administer the Weirwood seed paste that activates Bran’s powers, and she tells Meera Reed (Ellie Kendrick) that she speaks the common tongue “for the Bran boy.” We know Bloodraven has been orchestrating events to lead Bran north to his cave, and if Leaf is working towards the same goal, there’s no telling how long she’s been at it or how far she has gone.
If Alys turns out to be Leaf in disguise, it would solve a lot of mysteries left over from Game of Thrones. In fact, some critics would inevitably call it an attempt by HBO to rewrite the disappointing ending to the main series, adding more depth and magic to the final war against the White Walkers that many fans felt was glossed over. It would be sinister to find out that Leaf had knowingly instigated battles between dragons just to steer history on the correct path to bring Bran north at the right time, and finally kill the Others.
Sadly, this would also lead to more divergences between the books and TV shows. While the book version of Leaf said that she was born within the last 300 years, the TV version of the character was shown in a flashback helping to create the Night King himself thousands of years earlier. Even if Leaf’s “time of the dragon” meant that she was born while the Valyrian Freehold ruled Essos, that would be thousands of years too late to aid in the original creation of the White Walkers. This isn’t a point of continuity that HBO is likely to alter, either — the network shot a pilot for another Game of Thrones prequel series called Bloodmoon, which would have been about the original Long Night. Leaf would have appeared in that show, played by Doyin Ajiboye, but sadly it did not get a series order.
Your answers point to the great house whose words, values, and way of surviving in Westeros match your own. Bend the knee — or don’t. That’s very much up to you.
Winter is Coming — and you have always known it. You prepare not out of fear but out of duty, because the people who depend on you deserve someone who takes the long view.
You understand the game — its rules, its exceptions, and exactly when the rules become the exception. You play it without illusions and without apology.
You carry a sense of destiny that is difficult to explain and impossible to ignore — the feeling that you are not simply participating in the world but meant to reshape it.
You are a force — direct, powerful, and difficult to ignore when you enter a room or a conflict. You do not negotiate with challenges. You meet them.
You understand that power does not always announce itself — that sometimes it arrives with flowers, good wine, and a smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.
Still, Alys’ age already seems to be more in line with HBO’s timeline than that of the books. In a 2024 interview with Vulture, Rankin herself revealed that Alys is no ordinary mortal woman. She let slip that, as far as she understands it, Alys is about 400 years old. That would make her older than the completion of Harrenhal itself, as the castle was finished on the day Aegon the Conqueror first landed in Westeros.
House of the Dragon clearly has big plans for the magic of the old gods, and is willing to go where Game of Thrones did not. We’ve already had two sightings of the “Green Men,” along with more evocative dreams and visions caused by proximity to Weirwood trees. Alys is at the heart of all this action, and one way or another, we should expect more revelations about her background before the series ends. House of the Dragon Season 3 continues on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
