Plaza of Purification

The Plaza of Purification is a broad, open square in Meereen, paved with many-colored bricks and dominated by a great bronze harpy, the emblem of the city's old slaving nobility. It is the most prominent public space in the city, situated near the base of the Great Pyramid, and it is here that Daenerys Targaryen first made her most terrible display of power after the fall of Meereen.

The Blood Price of Conquest

When Daenerys's host approached Yunkai, the Great Masters of that city nailed one hundred sixty-three slave children to mileposts along the road, each with one arm outstretched to point the way. After Meereen fell, Daenerys retaliated by nailing a like number of Great Masters to posts in the Plaza of Purification. Swarms of flies attended their slow dying, and the stench lingered long in the plaza. The act was intended as a brutal lesson, but it also cemented the enmity of the Meereenese nobility. The plaza, renamed in a gesture of cleansing, became a monument to the blood price of liberation. Daenerys herself later reflects that she fears she did not go far enough, as the Meereenese continue to resist her rule at every turn, and the memory of those dying men poisons the air between conqueror and conquered.

The Dragon's Shadow

Months later, the plaza is the setting for a second, more intimate crisis. During a court session, a shabbily dressed man with a windburnt face approaches Daenerys, carrying a sad cloth sack. When he spills its contents on the marble floor, the queen sees broken and blackened bones, the longer ones cracked open for their marrow. The man claims the black dragon, Drogon, descended from the sky and killed a child. Daenerys shivers and realizes the bones are not those of a sheep but of a child. This moment, in the very square where she once executed slavers, forces her to confront the fact that her own dragons—the instruments of her power—have become a threat to the innocent. The plaza, a site of her most decisive act of justice, now bears witness to the first sign that her rule is built on a foundation of ash and unintended consequences. The sculptor who later proposes to replace the head of the great bronze harpy with a cast of Daenerys's own image is denied, as if the plaza itself resists being remade into a monument to her alone.