Dawn over Carcassonne brought no sun, but rather a diffused, milky, and golden light that seemed to emanate from the stone itself. St. Mark's Cathedral, disembowelled by the fury of the Demon Prince, was no longer a building. It had become a sculpture of faith. The missing roof allowed the sky to become the vault; the broken columns looked like the fingers of giants stretched out in prayer; the dust still dancing in the air sparkled like diamond dust, transforming the rubble into relics.
There was no need for decorations. The destruction was the decoration. The pews had been removed. The central nave was a long tongue of bare, cleared stone, flanked by two human walls. To the right, the Royal Army: the Dukes in their parade armour, cloaks of red, blue, and green velvet, their steel polished to a mirror sheen that reflected the morning light. Their faces were rigid, curious, judgmental. To the left, the Survivors: Tancred's men, militiamen with soiled bandages, the women of Carcassonne in tattered clothes but with proud eyes. They had no gold, but they held the memory of the fire.
And in the high shadows, perched upon the ruins of the triforium galleries like living gargoyles, were the Wood Elves. Silent. Motionless. Witnesses to a drama they found both ironic and tragic.
The silver trumpets of the royal messengers rang out—a sound so pure it made one's teeth vibrate. "Make way for Sir Gilles, the Hammer of Mousillon, the Shield of Carcassonne, the Champion of the Lady!"
Geneviève entered through the great west portal, whose oak doors had been unhinged and replaced by the void. She did not ride Duraz. The dwarven horse waited outside, a faithful guardian of her escape route. She walked alone. The sound of her heavy footsteps echoed in the absolute silence of the cathedral. Clang. Clang. Clang. Every step was a challenge. Every step was a confession.
Her black Gromril armour, repaired in haste during the night by Master Lambert, still bore the scars of battle. No amount of polishing could hide the dents where the demon's claws had tried to pry it open. The cloak she wore was simple, dark grey, without any heraldic crest save for the small symbol of the Three Nails engraved upon her breastplate.
As she passed, something occurred that made the nobles mutter and the commoners weep. The light streaming from the collapsed roof seemed to bend toward her. It did not hit her; it caressed her. The blue aura of the Grail, usually visible only to the most attentive eyes, pulsed rhythmically today around her metallic figure, creating a halo that defied all rational explanation.
The Duke of Parravon, who had bet on her ugliness, turned pale and took a step back. That was no cheap hedge-magic. That was the Presence.
At the far end of the nave, where the high altar once stood and where now lay only a blackened block of stone surrounded by fresh flowers brought by children, the King waited. Louen Leoncoeur was magnificent. He wore a full plate, the Crown of Bretonnia shimmering upon his open helm. His personal aura—that of a veteran Grail Knight—was a golden sun that answered Geneviève's blue light. Beside him, Duke Tancred looked like a worried father watching his child go to war.
Geneviève arrived at the foot of the altar steps. The distance between her and the King was three meters. She stopped. The sound of metal ceased. The entire world seemed to hold its breath. Slowly, with the solemnity of a funeral rite, Geneviève sank onto a single knee. She bowed her head, offering her nape to the monarch.
"Raise your head, Knight," Louen commanded. His voice did not need to be raised; it filled the sacred space with natural authority. Geneviève obeyed. The deformed mask of the helm looked up toward the noble, bearded face of the King.
Louen descended a step. "I have heard many stories of you, Sir Gilles," the King began, speaking not only to her, but to the crowd. "They say you come from nothing. They say you have no land, no father, no name. My Dukes..." he cast a sharp glance toward the right side of the nave, "...whisper that a man without a past can have no future among the Peers of the Realm."
Louen paused, letting his words weigh upon the consciences of those present. "But I look upon this cathedral. I look upon the stones that withstood hell. I look upon my subjects who are alive because of you. And I say that your past does not interest me. I am interested in your heart."
The King drew his sword, the legendary Blade of Couronne (a twin to the one Tancred had shattered), and rested it gently upon Geneviève's armoured shoulder. "In the name of the Lady of the Lake, I recognise your valour. In the name of Bretonnia, I thank you. You carried the weight of iron when others fled. You brought the light when the sun had gone out."
Geneviève was trembling. Not with fear, but with a violent surge of emotion. The King was speaking to the warrior, to the ideal. But he was speaking to a lie. If you only knew, she thought desperately. If you knew you were blessing a peasant girl who stole destiny.
Louen sheathed his sword. His face softened. In his eyes, Geneviève saw a burning curiosity, but also a profound, brotherly respect. He felt the bond of the Grail between them. He knew that Louen knew she had drunk. But the King wanted to see. He wanted to see the eyes of one who had shared the Chalice.
"Protocol dictates that a Baron receive the Kiss of Brotherhood with an uncovered face," Louen said, his voice dropping, becoming intimate. "And it dictates that the King know the face of his champions."
Louen reached out his hands. They were large, strong hands, gloved in silver mail. They moved toward the sides of Geneviève's helm. Geneviève felt the heat of the King's hands through the cold metal. She could pull back. She could stand and run. Duraz was outside. She could vanish and become a faceless legend forever. But her legs were locked by duty.
Time slowed to a standstill. She saw the dust suspended in the rays of light. She felt Tristan's racing heartbeat somewhere in the crowd. She felt Tancred's bated breath. She felt the cynical gaze of the Duke of Parravon, waiting to see a monster.
King Louen's fingers gripped the edges of the deformed helm. There was resistance. The metal was bent. "Forgive me if I hurt you," the King whispered kindly. He applied pressure. The metal shrieked. Screechh.
The helm began to lift. The light of day hit her chin. Then her mouth. Then her nose.
The final layer of protection was about to fall. The truth was about to explode within the cathedral.
The sound of metal shrieking against metal was the last audible thing within St. Mark's Cathedral for a span of time that felt infinite. King Louen Leoncoeur had to exert his considerable strength. The Gromril helm, deformed by the Demon Prince's titanic grip in the crypts, did not wish to surrender its guest. It had become a second skin, an iron prison protecting the most dangerous secret in the realm.
Geneviève remained motionless, the muscles of her neck taut as the King pulled upward. She felt the lower rim of the helm scrape painfully against her jaw and nose—a final, brutal kiss from her fictitious identity. Then, with a final creak that sounded like the breaking of an ancient seal, the helm came free.
Louen lifted it away. And the world changed.
It was not like removing a lid from a pot; it was like opening the door to a furnace where a star burned. At the exact moment Geneviève's face was exposed to the open air, a sensory shockwave washed over the nave. It was not a concussive explosion, but a sudden and violent expansion of Light and Heat.
King Louen, standing less than half a meter from her, stumbled back a step, instinctively throwing an armoured arm before his eyes. He felt an intense heat, akin to the midday sun in the deserts of Araby, radiating directly from the skin of the person kneeling before him. It was not a heat that scorched the flesh, but a heat that melted the spirit—a sacred warmth that penetrated through the plates of his golden armour and made his own Grail-blessed blood vibrate.
The light emanating from Geneviève's face was not a reflection of the sun entering through the ruined roof. It was a luminescence of its own, internal, rising from her skin like gold vapour. It was so intense that for the first few seconds, no one could distinguish her features. They saw only a halo, a human silhouette made of white and blue fire pulsing to the rhythm of a heart that had pumped the ambrosia of the Goddess.
Slowly, as the eyes of the crowd adjusted to that supernatural splendour, the details began to emerge from the light.
The first thing they saw was the hair. Freed from the constriction of the helm and the leather coif that had been torn away during the removal, a heavy mass of hair fell onto the knight's armoured shoulders. This was not the short, practical hair of a male soldier. It was long, thick—a wild cascade reaching down to the middle of her back. And its colour was not the gold of nobles or the brown of peasants. It was Ash Blonde. The colour of embers fading at dawn—a cold blonde, almossilvery-greyay, streaked with darker strands from the dirt and sweat of weeks of war. That hair, which should have been dull and filthy, instead shone with its own light, like threads of platinum and smoke woven together.
Then, they saw the face. The face of Sir Gilles was not that of a man scarred by battle or leprosy, as the Duke of Parravon had wagered. It was the face of a woman. Young, perhaps twenty, but with eyes that spoke of a thousand years. She was filthy. Armoury grease, stone dust, and dried blood smeared her cheeks and forehead in dark streaks. But the dirt did not hide her nature; on the contrary, it seemed only to emphasise the light pushing from beneath the skin, making the grime appear almost transparent, like shadows on a lit lantern.
Her features were not the delicate ones of a court lady of Couronne. They were strong, defined. A square jaw, high cheekbones, and a straight nose that had been broken at least once in the past. It was an architectural beauty, sculpted by toil and determination, not by powder and silk.
And then there were the eyes. Geneviève raised her gaze to the King. Her eyes were no longer grey. The irises were two pools of liquid, swirling blue light—the same shade as the water of the Sacred Lake where the Lady appears to her chosen. To look into her eyes was to look directly into the mystery of the Bretonnian Faith. There was no humanity in that gaze at that moment; there was only the pure and terrifying power of the Grail.
The silence in the cathedral broke, not with shouts, but with a collective intake of breath—a choked sob from a thousand throats.
In the left nave, among the commoners and the simple soldiers, the effect was immediate and devastating. The "Iron Saint" was not a man. And the light emanating from her... to their simple minds, tried by the horror of demons and desperate for salvation, there was only one explanation. "The Lady..." whispered an old woman of Carcassonne, letting her cane fall. "It is She... she has come to walk among us..."
One after another, like stalks of wheat bent by the wind, the common folk fell to their knees. Not the formal bow owed to a noble, but the total prostration owed to the divine. They pressed their foreheads to the cold stone, weeping openly, unable to sustain the sight of that radiant, ash-haired figure who radiated the warmth of paradise. To them, Sir Gilles was no longer a person. She was the avatar of the Goddess herself, descended to earth to save them.
In the right nave, among the nobles, paralysed chaos reigned. The Duke of Parravon gasped, clutching the arm of the Count of Gisoreux as if he were drowning. Their entire worldview—the patriarchal order, the laws of chivalry that excluded women, the certainty of their superiority—was shattering in the face of the undeniable evidence of the miracle. A woman. A peasant (her physiognomy did not lie about her origins). And yet, the Lady had chosen her. The Lady had filled her with more power than any male Duke present. It was a theological abomination and an absolute miracle all at once.
Only Tristan, the young squire, remained standing among the kneeling crowd. He watched the ash-blonde figure with tears streaking his dirty face. He did not see the Goddess. He saw the person who had saved him in hell, and his mind struggled desperately to reconcile the image of the iron giant with this luminous woman.
King Louen Leoncoeur dropped the deformed helm. The metallic clang was the only sound that was not a sob or a whispered prayer. The King, the most powerful knight in the realm, the man who had drunk from the Grail decades prior, looked at the woman kneeling before him. He, better than anyone, knew what he was seeing. It was not the Lady in person, no. But it was someone who had been touched by the Lady so deeply that she had become a vessel of her will.
The heat emanating from Geneviève's face warmed his chest through his armour. The light of her blue eyes met his, and in that silent exchange, Louen saw the truth. He saw the suffering, the necessary lie, the total sacrifice.
The King trembled. Not with fear, but with an overwhelming emotion that was a mix of boundless admiration and political terror. He had promised to make Sir Gilles a Baron. But what do you do when your hero reveals themselves to be someone whom the law does not evenrecognisee as capable of wielding a sword?
Geneviève, feeling the crushing weight of thousands of gazes and the intensity of the heat she was generating without meaning to, opened her mouth to speak. Her voice, when it emerged, was no longer the metallic and hoarse growl of Sir Gilles. It was her natural voice, the one she had not used for months. A woman's voice—deep, roughened by disuse and the smoke of battle, but undeniably feminine.
"My name..." she said, and her voice rang through the silent cathedral with the strength of a tolling bell, "...is Geneviève. And I am but a servant of the Grail."
The declaration hung in the air, charged with ozone and sanctity—a challenge thrown at the feet of a kingdom that was not ready for her.