The greatest and eldest of the slaver cities was Meereen, whose Great Masters ruled from a vast pyramid crowned by a bronze harpy and whose walls of many-coloured brick were reckoned proof against any host. As Daenerys marched upon it the Masters sought to break her spirit before ever she reached the gates: they nailed a slave child to a signpost along every league of the road from Yunkai, a hundred and sixty-three in all, each with an arm outstretched to point the way to the city. The queen ordered that they be taken down and buried, and swore that the men who had done the deed would answer for it.
Meereen's strength lay in its walls, and Daenerys had no engines to breach them, so the city fell not to storm but to the very slaves it was built upon. Her freedman captain Grey Worm and the champion Strong Belwas led a chosen band through the sewers that emptied into the river, while agents worked within to raise the bondsmen against their owners. When the fighting spilled into the streets the slaves rose in their tens of thousands, and the harpy that had crowned Meereen for centuries was hauled down as those of Astapor and Yunkai had been before it. The Great Masters who had lined the road with crucified children were dragged from their pyramids, and Daenerys had a hundred and sixty-three of them nailed up in turn upon the plaza, a life for a life, that the city might learn her justice was neither soft nor forgetful.
With Meereen taken, Daenerys made a choice that would shape the rest of her war. Rather than press on for Westeros and leave the freed cities to sink back into bondage behind her, she took the great pyramid for her seat and set herself to rule what she had won, to see whether a queen could hold a peace as well as she could break a city. It was a decision the maesters mark as the turning of her campaign, for in halting to govern Meereen she traded the swift road to the Iron Throne for the harder labour of keeping the chains from being forged anew.