Aegon Targaryen's descent upon Westeros met its stiffest test not in the north, where Torrhen Stark chose the wiser path, but in the south, where two crowns still believed steel and numbers could answer dragons. Mern IX Gardener of Highgarden and Loren I Lannister of Casterly Rock set aside old rivalries between Reach and Rock to combine their strength, marching a host reckoned in the tens of thousands to meet the invader before he could reach the heart of either kingdom.
They found him first. Whether by misfortune or design, the combined army came upon Aegon's smaller force in the open — precisely where three dragons wished them to be. Balerion, Vhagar, and Meraxes fell upon the packed ranks together, and what followed was less a battle than a burning. Men caught fire in their armor; horses screamed and bolted through their own lines; the grass itself blackened for a mile in every direction, giving the field the name it has carried ever since.
By the time the flames guttered, Mern IX Gardener lay dead among the ashes of his household guard, and the Gardener line that had ruled the Reach since the Age of Heroes was all but ended. Loren I Lannister survived — some say he fled before the worst of the burning, a charge his descendants have spent three centuries living down — and lived to kneel before Aegon and keep his rock, if not his crown. No single battle did more to convince the Seven Kingdoms that resistance was a shorter road to the grave than submission.