Maelor Targaryen

Aegon and Helaena's youngest — the son Helaena was told to choose, too young to understand the choosing. The show's telling leaves him out.

The fuller tale

Aegon and Helaena's youngest son exists in the record primarily because of a single, unbearable moment: the son his mother is forced to name, under duress, when Blood and Cheese demand she choose which of her children dies. Too young to understand what has just been decided about him, Maelor survives that night only because his brother is taken in his place — a mercy with no comfort attached to it.

The show's telling leaves him out of the story entirely, folding his narrative purpose into Jaehaerys and Jaehaera alone; Fire & Blood keeps him, and gives him a second, crueler chapter still to come once the war's later chaos reaches for him directly.

The page and the screen

This is one of the sharpest divergences between the two tellings: the show simply does not include Maelor as a character, giving Helaena and Aegon only the twins. Fire & Blood keeps him as a third child whose existence and eventual fate add one more layer of horror to the war's treatment of royal children — a divergence significant enough that book readers and show viewers are, in a real sense, tracking two different families.

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The books: Torn apart by a mob at Bitterbridge (F&B, ch. 6)

Smuggled toward Oldtown for safety, Aegon's youngest was recognized at Bitterbridge, and the crowd's greed for the queen's reward became a riot that tore the child apart. Both crowns blamed the other; Bitterbridge burned for it either way.

The show has no Maelor to give a fate to. In Fire & Blood, the boy is sent away from King's Landing toward the presumed safety of Oldtown as the capital grows too dangerous, but he is recognized during the journey at Bitterbridge, where a mob drawn by the promise of Rhaenyra's reward for green princes descends on the party escorting him. The child is torn apart in the resulting riot before anyone can intervene — a death the book notes both sides tried to blame on the other, while Bitterbridge itself burned regardless of whose fault it actually was.