Meereen

Meereen is the largest of the three great Slaver's Bay cities, a sprawling metropolis of many-colored brick pyramids and stepped temples that Daenerys Targaryen conquered and then struggled to rule. Under her reign it became a crucible of clashing cultures—freedmen and former masters, Dothraki horselords and Ghiscari nobles, sellswords and Unsullied—where the ideal of abolition collided with the entrenched realities of slavery, siege, and insurgency. The city's fate, caught between the dragon queen's transformative ambitions and the relentless pressure of Yunkai, Volantis, and the Sons of the Harpy, makes it the central stage on which the moral and political dilemmas of the entire eastern narrative are played out.

Conquest and the Tokar of Rule

Daenerys took Meereen by storm, smashing its gates with siege engines built from the timbers of her own ships and impaling one hundred sixty-three Great Masters in the Plaza of Purification as retribution for the slave children nailed to mileposts on the road from Yunkai. Yet once the city fell, she found that conquest was far simpler than governance. Her advisors—the Green Grace Galazza Galare, the seneschal Reznak mo Reznak, and the sellsword captain Brown Ben Plumm—persuaded her that to rule Meereen she must don its native garment, the tokar, a clumsy, shapeless sheet wound around the hips and shoulders that required mincing steps and exquisite balance. "Man wants to be the king o' the rabbits, he best wear a pair o' floppy ears," Plumm told her, and so Daenerys submitted to the tokar, the crown of the three-headed dragon, and the endless ritual of court. The city's stepped pyramids—Zhak, Hazkar, Ghazeen, Merreq, Loraq, Pahl—remained standing, their noble families still wealthy and resentful, and the queen soon discovered that freeing slaves did not automatically create a free society. The Great Masters hired their former chattels back at wages so meager that most could scarce afford to eat, while the old, the young, and the infirm were cast into the streets.

The Shadow War and the Sons of the Harpy

Almost from the moment of conquest, Meereen was plagued by a nightly insurgency. The Sons of the Harpy, masked assassins drawn from the old slaving families, murdered freedmen in the dark and left their mark—a harpy drawn in blood on the bricks beside each corpse. The killings escalated from unarmed freedmen to Daenerys's own soldiers: Stalwart Shield, an Unsullied who had gone to a brothel seeking companionship, was set upon by six or more attackers, his cheeks slashed open and the genitals of a goat forced down his throat. The queen responded by offering a thousand honors for information, creating a new city watch called the Brazen Beasts—freedmen and shavepate Meereenese who wore hoods and brass masks to protect their identities—and demanding a blood tax of a hundred pieces of gold from every pyramid for each freedman slain. Yet the killings continued, and the Shavepate Skahaz mo Kandaq urged ever more brutal reprisals: take one man from each of the great families and kill him for every murder, then two, then more. Daenerys refused, insisting that she was no butcher queen, but the pressure never relented.

The Siege and the Pale Mare

Beyond Meereen's walls of many-colored brick, enemies gathered. The Yunkai'i, whom Daenerys had spared after defeating their army in the field, returned to slaving and raised levies, hired sellswords—the Windblown, the Long Lances, the Company of the Cat—and made alliances with New Ghis, Tolos, and Mantarys. Qartheen galleys blockaded the bay, strangling trade. And from the fallen city of Astapor came a tide of refugees, starving and sick, carrying with them the bloody flux that the Meereenese called the pale mare. Daenerys dared not open her gates to them, lest the plague consume the city, so she set up a camp outside the walls and sent what food she could spare, knowing that most of them would die. The Astapori stumbled after her as she rode among them, calling her "Mother," and she could only watch as they shat out their lives in stinking streams of brown and red. The pale mare spread inside the city as well, killing freedmen and sellswords and Brazen Beasts alike, though the Unsullied remained untouched.

The Marriage and the Pit

To buy peace, Daenerys married Hizdahr zo Loraq, a wealthy Meereenese nobleman of ancient lineage, accepting the Ghiscari rituals of foot-washing and the white tokar fringed with baby pearls. As part of the bargain she agreed to reopen the fighting pits, the blood-soaked arenas where slaves had once died for the amusement of the mob. On the day of the reopening at Daznak's Pit, the queen sat in the royal box as Barsena Blackhair faced a boar and was disemboweled on the scarlet sands. Then Drogon descended from the sky, black wings blotting out the sun, and the pit erupted in chaos. The dragon killed and burned, and Daenerys, seizing a whip, climbed onto his back and flew away over the Skahazadhan, leaving Meereen without its queen.

Aftermath and the Hand's Gambit

In Daenerys's absence, Hizdahr's rule crumbled. The Yunkish envoys presented the severed head of Admiral Groleo, demanding the destruction of the dragons. Ser Barristan Selmy, acting as the queen's Hand, arrested Hizdahr on suspicion of poisoning the honeyed locusts meant for Daenerys, killed the pit fighter Khrazz in single combat, and prepared for war. The dragons Viserion and Rhaegal, freed from their chains by the Dornish prince Quentyn Martell's disastrous attempt to tame them, flew free over the city, burning the pyramid of Hazkar and making lairs in the pyramids of Uhlez and Yherizan. The Sons of the Harpy resumed their murders, killing twenty-nine in a single night. Ser Barristan convened a council of freedmen captains, Unsullied commanders, and pit fighters, resolved to break the peace and attack the Yunkish besiegers, lighting a beacon atop the Great Pyramid as the signal for the assault. Meereen, the city of bricks and blood, stood on the edge of a final, desperate battle, its queen vanished, its dragons wild, and its fate uncertain.