Meereen

The city stands at the northernmost point of the eastern shore of Slaver's Bay, where the Skahazadhan meets the sea and separates it from the other cities of the Red Waste. Its streets mix broad cobbled avenues with narrow, twisting alleys threading between temples, granaries, brothels and bathhouses; the sea there runs the color of pewter, and the river loops into bends before it loses itself in the bay.

A wall of multicolored brick rings Meereen, bristling with towers at every corner and bronze gates topped with harpy heads whose open mouths can pour boiling oil on anyone attacking below. Four gates pierce that wall: the North Gate, facing the river; the East or Khyzai Gate, toward the pass of the same name; the Yellow Gate, on the road to Yunkai; and the West Gate, the one an army would eventually breach. The city's water comes not from the Skahazadhan, which serves as its sewer, but from wells cut into the rock.

Above the rooftops rises the Great Pyramid, more than two hundred meters tall, and near it the Temple of the Graces under its gilded dome. Brick rings of the fighting pits, among them the vast Pit of Daznak, dot the rest of the city. Over all of it flies a harpy that, nowhere else in the old Ghiscari lands, is shown with empty claws.

Those born in Meereen have copper skin and the coarse red-and-black hair of the old Ghiscari, and speak High Valyrian with a heavy accent. The Great Masters, the caste that rules the city, wrap themselves in the tokar, a garment that must be held with one hand and whose trim marks the wearer's rank; their hairstyles are shaped into wings, horns and other extravagant forms.

The city's wealth rests on selling people. Slaves are trained to fight in the pits, to stand guard, to clean, or to serve in brothels, and highborn children under ten are among the most sought after for that last purpose. Eunuchs in Meereen lose only part of what Astapor's are cut in full.

Meereen's own people say the city was not always like this: the cedars that once grew along the coast fell to the axes of the Old Empire or burned in dragonfire when Ghis fought Valyria, and the bared earth baked under the sun. Without its trees, and with too little copper left to matter, Meereen was left, so the story goes, with little to sell but slaves.

Long before Daenerys ever came near its gates, Meereen already carried a reputation as a plague city: when Khal Drogo takes captives on his road toward Westeros, it is Jorah Mormont who advises him to sell them there before any other market, precisely because a recent plague has left the city marked.

Years later Daenerys herself stands before those walls. Learning her army is coming, the Great Masters lay waste to the countryside before shutting themselves behind the wall, and the city is besieged. The city does not fall through the West Gate or any frontal assault, but through its sewers: Daenerys's men slip in through them and open the city from within.

With Astapor thrown into chaos so soon after its own conquest, Daenerys chooses not to march on toward another throne or another city. She stays in Meereen to learn how to rule, and that lesson turns out to take far longer than she expected.

Ruler of the city now, Daenerys first proclaims herself Queen of Meereen and later takes Hizdahr zo Loraq as her husband, who then reigns beside her. She bans slavery within the walls, though in the hills beyond the custom does not fully disappear. Ships from Westeros and the Free Cities, once frequent in port for the fighting pits and slave markets, grow scarce.

Not everyone accepts the new order. A group calling itself the Sons of the Harpy begins killing men in the queen's service by night, among them freedmen and Unsullied, with no one caught. At Daenerys's request, the Lhazareen reopen trade with the city and become her only allies, but ships from Qarth close off the river route.

Beyond the walls, Yunkai raises an army and lays siege to Meereen: so begins the battle that will decide whether the queen keeps the city she chose to stay in.