The peace Daenerys Targaryen sought to keep in Meereen proved a brittle thing. The freeing of the slave cities had made her enemies of every slaver from Astapor to Volantis, and in time the men of Yunkai returned at the head of a great coalition, drawing to them the sellsword companies, levies from New Ghis, and the promise of the Volantene fleet, resolved to pen the queen within her walls and starve or storm her out. They ringed the city with a siege camp, and with the besiegers came a crueller foe than any host, a bloody flux the freedmen called the pale mare, which slipped inside the walls and began to thin the defenders and the citizens alike.
The siege broke into open battle after Daenerys, driven at last to desperate measures, went down into the fighting pit of Daznak to reopen the games as the price of a fragile truce with the Meereenese nobility. There her lost dragon Drogon returned out of the sky amid the carnage, and the queen mounted his back and was carried away over the walls and out of the city entirely, leaving Meereen leaderless with the enemy at its gates. Command fell upon her Hand and lord protector, Ser Barristan Selmy, who determined that the city's best hope lay not in waiting behind its walls while the pale mare did the besiegers' work for them, but in leading the Unsullied, the sellswords, and the freedmen out to give battle in the open. As the Yunkish host was assailed, a second storm was gathering upon the water, for the Iron Fleet of Victarion Greyjoy was beating toward Slaver's Bay bearing a horn its master believed could bind dragons, even as the great warships of Volantis stood out for Meereen to crush the dragon queen for good and all. Because so many banners converged upon the city at once, of Yunkai and Ghis and Volantis, of dragon and kraken, some chroniclers name the engagement the Battle of Fire.
The full course and outcome of the Battle of Meereen remain untold, for the events at the city's walls carry past the close of the published histories and into pages not yet set down. What is known is that the second siege ended in fire and open war rather than a quiet surrender, and that the fate of Meereen, of Ser Barristan's sortie, and of the fleets closing upon the bay was left hanging in the balance.