The return to Carcassonne was no triumphal march; it was a siege of adoration. As soon as the news that the "Source was cleansed" reached the valley—carried by the very river that had turned from black to crystalline—the entire population, nobles and commoners alike, poured out from the makeshift walls.
Geneviève rode Duraz at the head of the small group. She was exhausted, her hands still bandaged and her armour scarred by the acid from Gulgaz's belly. She wanted only to sleep. She wanted a hot bath and silence. Instead, she found a wall of sound. "THE SAINT! THE ASH SAINT!" "TOUCH HER CLOAK!" "MY DAUGHTER IS SICK, LOOK UPON HER!"
The crowd pressed in. Desperate hands reached out to grab Duraz's stirrups. The dwarven horse, nervous, kicked and bared his teeth, but the human tide was unstoppable. Geneviève felt herself suffocating. The helm, which she had put back on to hide her fatigue, suddenly felt as thin as paper. She felt their expectations weighed more than any demon. They didn't want her; they wanted the miracle. They wanted her to solve their hunger, their poverty, their fear.
"Back!" Gaston thundered, shoving away a fat merchant trying to rip a piece of Geneviève's caparison for a relic. "Give her air, you vultures! She is flesh and blood, not a statue!"
Tristan rode beside Geneviève, pale. The boy looked at the crowd with different eyes now. He had seen hell in the Heart of the Source; these people screaming with joy suddenly seemed childish to him, unaware. "They don't understand, do they?" Tristan murmured. "They think it's over forever."
"Hope is a powerful drug, Tristan," Geneviève replied, her voice metallic and weary. "And I have become the dealer."
That evening, in the royal pavilion, King Louen Leoncoeur received her. There was no pomp. The King was dining on black bread and cheese, studying troubling dispatches arriving from the Empire. When Geneviève entered, she removed her helm. The light in her eyes was dimmed, controlled, but her skin still radiated that supernatural warmth that made the parchments on the table curl.
"You have saved the south of my realm, Geneviève," Louen said, personally pouring her wine. "The Dukes are already bickering over who shall have the honour of hosting you. Parravon wants to give you a castle. Tancred wants to build a cathedral in your name."
Geneviève took the chalice but did not drink. She looked at the reflection in the red wine. "It would be a prison, Majesty. You know it better than I."
Louen smiled—a sad, knowing smile. "The Throne is the most luxurious prison in the world. And the Grail... the Grail is a golden chain. It binds us to duty."
"I cannot stay here," Geneviève said, raising her gaze. Her blue eyes fixed upon the King's. "If I stay, I will become an idol. The people will stop defending themselves because they will wait for the 'Saint' to arrive. And the nobles... the nobles will use my name for their border disputes. 'The Saint is with me,' they will say."
Louen nodded slowly. "And what do you wish to do, Maiden?"
"The evil did not end at Crow's Peak. I felt... things. While I was in the mind of the Matriarca.Threads are leading elsewhere. East. Toward the Empire. Toward Kislev. There is a web, Louen. Be'lakor is weaving something vast." Geneviève set down the chalice. "I want permission to disappear. Officially, Geneviève of the Light will retire in prayer to a secret monastery. In reality... I will return to the road. Without a name. Without banners."
The King rose and went to a chest. He extracted an object: a heavy steel ring, without gemstones, engraved inside with the King's personal seal: the lion's head. "This is the Ring of the Royal Messenger. Few know its significance. It will give you safe passage and credit among the noble houses truly loyal to me, without revealing who you are to the rabble. Use it sparingly."
He handed it to her. Geneviève slipped it onto her pinky finger, the only one where it fit over her leather gloves.
"And what of the light?" the King asked. "You are a beacon in the night, Geneviève. How do you plan to hide it?"
"I will learn to close the shutters," she replied, touching her chest. "The Kensai learns to control the Ki. I will learn to stifle the Grail. I will make it seem like nothing more than... charisma."
Leaving the royal tent, she found Gaston and Tristan waiting for her by a dying campfire. They knew. They saw it in the way she walked, in the way she had already packed Duraz's saddlebags.
Tristan jumped up. "I'm coming with you."
"No," Geneviève said, sweet but firm.
"But I've fought! I killed the Knights of Rust! I am no longer a child!"
"It is true. You are a warrior now," Geneviève placed a hand on his shoulder. "And that is why you must stay. Carcassonne needs men like you to rebuild. Tancred needs a spiritual heir who knows what true horror is and never wants to see it again."
Tristan lowered his head, tears streaking his soot-stained cheeks. "Without you... Everything will turn grey again."
"You are the light now, Tristan. Do not let it go out."
She turned toward Gaston. The old sergeant chewed a blade of grass, leaning on his axe. "I suppose it's useless to argue with a mule, let alone a saint," Gaston muttered.
"Look after him, Gaston. And look after that knee."
Gaston spat into the fire. "Go on, girl. Before I get sentimental and ask you to marry me." He winked his good eye at her. But Geneviève saw the deep sadness in that single eye. He had found a commander worth dying for, and now he was losing her.
Geneviève monta Duraz. She did not wear the ceremonial white cloak. She had stolen—or "requisitioned"—a rough wool cloak, dark grey and stained with mud, from a distracted quartermaster. She had covered the crest on her breastplate with a layer of black wax mixed with ash. Vespers' Light was wrapped in oiled linen bandages.
She looked one last time at the illuminated camp, the banners fluttering, the cathedral in the distance. It was the world she had saved. And it was the world to which she no longer belonged. She gave Duraz a nudge with her heels.
"Let's go, my friend. East. Where no one knows our name."
The dwarven horse snorted, happy to leave that place which smelled of perfume and politics, and set off toward the darkness of the mountain passes. Geneviève of the Light was gone. Now, there was only a knight errant in the mist.
Two weeks had passed since she had left Carcassonne. Winter was arriving early in the Grey Mountains. The wind sliced across her face like an icy razor, and the rain was a miserable constant, turning the roads into rivers of clingy, viscous mud.
Geneviève rode along the Axe-Bite Pass, the primary trade route connecting the realm of Bretonnia with the Empire. It was a no-man 's-landd. Too far from the Bretonnian Dukes to be patrolled, too wild for the Elector Counts of the Empire. It was the kingdom of bandits, smugglers, and things that crawled out of abandoned mines.
Geneviève had learned her first lesson in going incognito: the stench. To hide the divine nature of hearmouror and her skin, she had stopped cleansing herself magically. She let the mud crust over and flake off on its own. She slept in the stables with Duraz to soak in the smell horsesrse and straw. It worked. When she encountered ottravellerslers, they did not see a Goddess. They saw a filthy, hulking, and likely dangerous mercenary to be avoided.
The sun was setting behind a jagged peak when she spotted the lights of a fortified coaching inn: "The Broken Tooth." A cluster of rotting wood and stone, surrounded by a palisade of sharpened logs. Geneviève was hungry—a human, painful hunger that the Grail no longer completely suppressed now that she was not in active combat.
She tied Duraz in the common stable, paying the stableboy with a blackened Bretonnian silver coin. "No tricks with the pony," she growled in her hoarse voice, holding her helm under her arm but keeping the visor snapped shut over her face even though she wasn't wearing it. "He eats meat if you bother him." The stableboy, a hunchback with three teeth, looked at Duraz's fangs and nodded frantically.
Geneviève entered the common room. The air was thick with peat smoke, the smell of sour beer, and stale sweat. There were about twenty patrons: nervous Imperial merchants, a group of Tilean mercenaries playing dice, and a few locals with gallows-faces.
Geneviève sat in a dark corner, her back to the wall. "Ale. And stew. Whatever is inside it," she ordered the innkeeper, a large man whose apron looked like a geographical map of grease stains.
As she ate—barely lifting the visor of the helm she held to her head so as not to show her face—she listened. The voices of the tavern were the newspaper of the world.
"...I say Emperor Karl Franz is weak," said an Imperial merchant, spitting on the floor. "Taxes go up, and the roads are full of beasts. I lost two wagons near Helmgart."
"Beasts?" a Tilean mercenary asked, throwing the dice. "Goblins?"
"Worse. Mutants," the merchant replied, lowering his voice. "There's a new band coming down from the hills. They don't want gold. They want... pieces."
"Pieces?"
"Eyes. Tongues. Livers. They call them 'The Surgeons.' They say their leader is a former leech-doctor from Altdorf who went mad."
Geneviève froze, spoon mid-air. The itch. She felt it beneath her skin, right there at the base of her neck. A subtle vibration, like the buzzing of a fly. Corruption was not far. It was here. In the room? No. But close.
The door of the inn burst open. Four men entered. They were large, dressed in tattered furs and studded leather armour. But there was something wrong with them. The way they moved—in jerks. And the smell. They smelled of formaldehyde and old blood.
They approached the merchants' table. "Toll," said the leader, a bald man with a bandage covering half his face and his nose—or rather, the absence of a nose.
"I... I already paid at the pass!" the merchant stammered.
"Flesh toll," the bandit laughed. He drew a knife. Not a combat dagger. A rusted but razor-sharp scalpel.
No one in the inn moved. The Tilean mercenaries looked elsewhere, feigning interest in their dice. The innkeeper began to scrub a flagon with fury. Fear is the true sovereign of the Old World.
Geneviève sighed. Her stew was barely acceptable, and she wanted to finish it. She stood up. The stool scraped across the wooden floor with a grating sound. SCREEECH.
The four bandits turned. They saw a figure in black, mud-armour armour, with a deformed helmgrey a grey cloak. "Sit back down, tin-man," the bandit leader snarled. "Or we'll open you up to see if you have a heart or a gear inside."
Geneviève advanced slowly. She had to be careful. If she used the Light, the entire inn would fall to its knees or flee screaming, "Witch!" The news would spread. She had to resolve this... the old way.
"Leave him be," Geneviève said, her voice low and controlled. The bandit laughed and lunged at her, aiming for her throat with the scalpel.
Geneviève did not draw her sword. She took a lateral step—minimal, economical. She seized the bandit's wrist. She squeezed. The sharp sound of bonepowdering echoed through the room. CRACK. The bandit screamed, dropping the scalpel. Geneviève delivered a headbutt—the metal of her helm against the man's forehead. The bandit collapsed like a sack of potatoes, unconscious.
The other three roared and charged. One had a spiked mace. He struck Geneviève on the shoulder. She didn't budge an inch; the armour absorbed the blow. She responded with an armoured punch to the man's stomach. The strike was so powerfulthat it lifted the man off the ground, knocking the wind out of him for a week. To the third, she snapped his knee with a low kick. The fourth ran out the door, screaming into the night.
Geneviève dusted off her cloak. She looked at the merchant, who was still trembling. "Next time, pay for better guards," she said curtly.
She returned to her table, sat down, and resumed eating her stew, which was now cold. The inn remained in deathly silence. Everyone watched her—not with religious adoration, but with that fearful respect reserved for wolves that enter the sheepfold. She had kept her secret. No one had seen the blue light. They had seen only the brutal, efficient violence of a veteran. It was exactly what she wanted.
But as she finished her ale, she felt that itch again. The bandit who escaped wasn't running aimlessly. He was running toward a master. These were no simple brigands. They were scouts. Geneviève realised her rest was over before it had begun. She paid the innkeeper, stood up, and walked out into the rain. She didn't go to sleep. She went to follow the tracks in the mud.
The hunt had begun again.
The rain upon the Grey Mountains did not wash away sins; it only drove them deeper into the earth. Geneviève followed the tracks of the escaped bandit not with sight, which was useless in that black deluge, but with hearing and instinct. The sound of heavy boots slipping on wet rock, the ragged breath of a terrified man running for his life.
She had left Duraz behind, safe in a thicket of pines. A warhorse, however faithful, made too much noise. Geneviève moved on foot, her grey cloak heavy with water, clinging to her shoulders. Every step was calculated. Despite the thirty kilos of dwarven armour upon her, she managed to walk through the undergrowth with a barely perceptible rustle—the fruit of years of physical discipline, not magic.
The smugglers' path led down toward an old abandoned watermill, built astride a rushing torrent. The wheel, half-rotted, still turned with a rhythmic and screeching moan that drowned out all other sound: Creee-splash. Creee-splash. A sickly, yellowish light filtered through the shuttered windows.
Geneviève approached from downwind. The scent wafting from the mill made her nose wrinkle beneath her helm. It wasn't just blood. It was vinegar, strong alcohol, and scorched flesh. The smell of a slaughterhouse run by someone who fancied himself an artist. She climbed a pile of sodden logs to peer through a gap in the roof.
Inside, the grinding room had been transformed into a grotesque operatingtheatrer. Rough wooden tables were arranged in a circle. Upon them lay bodies. Some were travellers, others local peasants. Moving around the tables were hooded figures—the "Surgeons." They were not frenzied cultists screaming praises to the Dark Gods. They were methodical. Silent. They worked with saws and retractors, removing healthy limbs to... replace them.
At thecentrer of the room, a tall, skeletal man dressed in a black leather apron slick with blood was examining the bandit who had fled the inn. "You failed, Gunter," the man said. His voice was cultured, precise, with an accent of the Empire—perhaps from Nuln or Altdorf. "And you brought a guest."
The bandit, panting, looked around in terror. "N-no, Master Vane. It was just... just a mercenary. Big. In black armour. I gave him the slip."
Master Vane stroked the bandit's cheek with a rubber-gloved hand. "No one gives a predator the slip, Gunter. One only draws them into the den." Vane looked up toward the roof, precisely where Geneviève was positioned. "Is that not so, Knight?"
Genevièverealisedd she had been discovered. There was no magic at play, only the acute paranoia of those who live in the shadows. She wasted no time in descending. She smashed through the rotted beams of the roof. She fell into the centre of the hall, landing with a heavy impact that made the surgical tools on the tables rattle. Wooden debris rained down around her. She rose slowly—a figure of dark metal and a soaked cloak. She did not draw the sacred sword Vespers' Light. That blade shone too brightly; it was too recognisable. Instead, she drew a common bastard sword, a piece of rough steel she had scavenged from a corpse days earlier for precisely such occasions.
"Public disorder, kidnapping, and unauthorised medical practice," Geneviève said, her voice filtered by her lowered visor. "The penalty is death."
Master Vane smiled. He was not afraid. "A Road Warden? How picturesque. Kill him. I need a sturdy spine for Project Three."
The Surgeons abandoned their patients. There were eight of them. They brandished cleavers, bone saws, and meat hooks. Geneviève moved. She used no divine powers. She used physics and cold rage. The first surgeon lunged at her with a handheld circular saw. Geneviève parried the blow with her armoured forearm—sparks flew—and responded with a front kick to the sternum. The man flew back, knocking over a table full of glass jars.
Another tried to circle her to slice the tendons of her legs. Geneviève felt the shift in the air. She spun on her heel, reaping with the bastard sword. The blade, not as balanced as her magical weapon, was heavy and brutal. It struck the aggressor's neck with a wet, final thud.
But they were fast, and drugged with stimulants that rendered them insensible to pain. One managed to cling to her back, trying to drive a dagger into the joints of herarmourr beneath the armpit. Geneviève grunted. The tip of the knife scratched her skin. She threw herselbackwardsrd with all her weight, crushing the man against a stone column. She felt the attacker's ribs give way.
"Stop him!" yelled Vane, who observed the scene with clinical interest, taking notes in a ledger. "Note: subject with strength and endurance superior to the human average. Possible beneficial mutation or elite training."
Vane pulled a lever on the wall. A grate opened in the floor. From the darkness emerged a gurgling snarl. A creature climbed up, scrambling with four arms. It was no demon. It was a Flesh Construct. Vane had stitched together parts of orcs, men, and beasts. The creature had the muscle mass of a bull and the head of a man sewn onto an orc's body, with surgical blades grafted in place of fingers.
"My masterpiece," Vane whispered. "Tear him apart."
The monster charged. Geneviève parried the first strike, but the creature's strength was immense. She was hurled across the room, smashing through a wooden wall and landing outside in the driving rain, in the mud of the riverbank. Harmourmor saved her bones, but the impact stole her breath. The bastard sword flew from her hand, lost in the dark water.
The monster emerged from the hole in the wall, towering over her. It raised its blades to finish her. Geneviève was on the ground, unarmed, in the mud. She could call the lightning. She could invoke the aura that burns corrupted flesh. A single thought would suffice. No, she commanded herself. If I use the Light here, Vane will flee to tell the tale. Or worse, he will die without telling me who he works for.
She fumbled in the mud. Her hand closed around a large river stone. As the monster brought down its blades, Geneviève rolled laterally. The blades thudded into the ground where her head had been a second before. Geneviève sprang to her feet. She did not attack the monster. She attacked the structure. She saw the monster was connected to the mill by a thick leather tube, pumping a fluorescent green fluid into its back. The power source.
Geneviève lunged for the tube. She seized it witharmouredd hands and pulled. The monster tried to grab her. Geneviève planted her feet in the mud. She screamed with the effort, the muscles in her back burning. STRAAAAAAP. The tube snapped. Green fluid sprayed everywhere, mixing with the rain.
The monster froze, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. It staggered, emitted a choked sound, and collapsed forward, inert, pinning Geneviève beneath its stinking mass.
Geneviève shoved the thing's corpse aside with effort, panting. She was covered in mud, blood, and chemical fluids. She re-entered the mill, staggering. The remaining surgeons had fled upon seeing their creature fall. Only Vane remained. He was trying to stuff his papers into a bag, trembling. His arrogance had vanished.
Geneviève seized him by the throat and lifted him off the ground, slamming him against the wall. Vane gasped, his feet kicking the air. "Who... who are you?" the doctor wheezed.
Geneviève lifted the visor of her helm. No divine light. Only the grey, weary eyes of a woman who had seen too much horror for one lifetime. "I am the end of your career," Geneviève said.
She tightened her grip, just enough to terrify, not to kill. "Where do you take the pieces, Vane? Who buys this flesh?"
"Marienburg..." the doctor whimpered. "A merchant ship... 'The Lady of the Sea'. They pay in gold... they say it's for... for the new armies."
"What armies?"
"I don't know! I swear! I only know they seek... they seek champions. Strong bodies. Like yours."
Geneviève let him drop. Vane fell to his knees, massaging his throat. "Please... I am a man of science..."
Geneviève picked up a torch from a bracket. She looked at the bodies on the tables. The atrocities. "Science seeks truth, Vane. You seek only pain."
She threw the torch onto a pile of barrels filled with alcohol and oil. The flames flared instantly, roaring toward the dry roof. "Leave," she told the doctor. "Run. And pray that the fire is faster than the cold that awaits you."
Vane did not need to be told twice. He fled into the night. Geneviève stood watching the mill burn for a moment, the rain sizzling against the fire, unable to extinguish it. Marienburg. The richest and most corrupt city in the world. That was where the trail led.
She returned to the woods where Duraz awaited her. She leaned against the horse's warm flank, feeling the tremors of exhaustion in her legs. She had not used the Grail. She had won as a man. But as she wiped the blood from her hands with a handful of wet grass, she wondered how much longer she could continue to fight monsters without becoming one of them.