Leoncoeur knelt in his full plate armour. He clasped his naked sword, resting it point-down on the stone before him and crossing his gauntlets at the hilt. His long blond hair hung about his armoured shoulders, lank from the battlefield. Like all the knights of the realm, he had been at war near-ceaselessly since the times of strife had descended. On one such sortie, he had nearly met his end under the blade of his own bastard son Mallobaude. For a long time, lost in the far reaches of the Bretonnian wild country, he had walked a fragile path between death and life, teetering on the edge of oblivion.
It had been the Lady who had guided him back – she had spoken to him in the depths of his fever. Her voice, as soft as ermine and yet as firm as the blade he carried, had whispered to him throughout those dark, lost times, refusing him permission to yield. Leoncoeur dimly remembered begging her to let him go, to cast him loose, to let his service die even as the land around him died.
She had never relented. He could recall her stern face looming over him, refusing the command that he yearned for. A lifetime of chivalry and pious devotion had sealed his fate – he could never have refused a boon from her, and so he clung to life, refusing the seductive embrace of the underworld even as it grasped for him. His senses returned in time, and he wandered the lands, near-starved, barely more than a shade himself. When he at last found his way back to Couronne, he was nearly slain for a wraith by a grail knight, and only his mud-splattered emblems saved him.
By then, Mallobaude had been destroyed and Gilles le Breton was the new king, feted by all across the realm as a harbinger of a new dawn for Bretonnia. Leoncoeur had recovered his strength and his wits, recovering under the auspices of the white-robed Sisters of the Lady. It took longer for him to recover his pride. He had ridden out to face Mallobaude as unquestioned monarch of his domain. He had returned to find a legend from the past sitting in the throne-room to accept the acclamation of the masses.
There was no contesting the will of le Breton. The green-eyed king’s magisterial presence was unquestionable. A fey light shone in his ageless face, and his countenance bore the raw weight of centuries. All bowed the knee before him, including Leoncoeur himself.
That did not assuage the bitterness. In the long, sleepless nights as his body was restored to health, he found himself gnawing away at the injustice of it. He prayed, over and again, asking to be shown what fault he had committed, what aspect of chivalry he had transgressed that would warrant his kingdom being taken from him and his bloodline disinherited.
If le Breton himself was aware of such anguish, he did not show it. He was one of the Immortals, the avatar of the Green Knight himself, and matters of pride and propriety no longer concerned him. Even his voice was otherworldly, an archaic, haughty speech that belonged to another world. He existed now to take the war to the enemies of the realm: he was a weapon, forged from the myths of the past and given life by the unfathomable will of the Lady. Leoncoeur could not gainsay such commandments; neither, though, in truth, could he understand them.
So he knelt before the altar as the lamps burned, murmuring the words of faith he had known since childhood, seeking the answers that eluded him even in the midst of battle. Every night he did the same, and every night his prayers went unanswered.
As the first stirrings of fatigue ran through his battle-weary frame, his lips finally stopped moving. He opened his frost-blue eyes, and looked up at the image of the Lady.
A chill breeze rattled through the loose stained-glass windows, making the candle-flames shiver. The benign face of his divine mistress gazed down at him, serene and pitiless.
It was as he looked up at her, just as he had done in the dream-lands of his long near-death, that realisation dawned. There would be no answers from Her in this place. It was no longer his. Whether for good or for ill, the realm had been taken from him and given to another. To linger in Couronne like a ghost over its grave was pointless, and only grief could come of it.
Leoncoeur clambered to his feet, bowing again as he addressed the altar. He sheathed his sword.
‘Where, then?’ he asked, his deep voice soft. ‘What path shall I take?’
The figurine of the Lady gave no answer. The flames flared a little, stirred by the wind, but no other sign revealed itself. The faces on the tapestries, picked out by long-dead fingers and faded by time and trial, gazed sightlessly down on him.
Leoncoeur smiled faintly. The ways of the Lady were never easy. That was the point of Her – She was the trial, the anguish, the test. Weakness had no place in Her service, only undying devotion.
‘I will discover it, then,’ he said. He looked around him. He had prayed in the same chapel since boyhood, and the stones were as familiar to him as his own flesh. ‘This is no longer my realm. As you will it, I will find another.’
He bowed again, and turned away. Limping still from his last cavalry charge, the deposed king swept from the chapel, and the great oak doors slammed shut behind him.
In his absence, the candles still burned, and the draughts still swirled around the bases of the pillars. The figurine Lady stood in the flickering dark, her face still serene, her thoughts, behind the sculptor’s smooth smile, unknowable.
Marienburg had already fallen, but its torment was not yet over.
The streets that had once bustled with the commerce of a dozen realms were now knee-deep in reeking effluent. The great docks were shattered, their steam-cranes tilting into the brine, the loading chains already rusting into nothingness. The mighty sea-wall built atop the foundations of ancient elven ruins was smashed into lumps of subsiding masonry, and foul slithering creatures with many eyes and splay-webbed feet slapped and slid across its remains.
Bodies lay stretched throughout the ruins as far as the eye could see, and every corpse was swollen with a different strain of pox. Many cadavers had burst open, spilling nests of maggots and black-limbed spiders over what remained of the cobbled thoroughfares. The corpses were piled high at the strategic choke-points, their blood mingling with the dribbling sputum of the Plaguefather’s foul gifts. The sea itself was polluted, turned from a choppy grey into a dark-green slurry, as thick as tar and crowned with a crust of yellowish foam. The mixture lapped sluggishly against what remained of the old quay-walls, sucking and wheezing against the disintegrating stone blocks.
Above the fallen city, the clouds hung low, just as they had at Heffengen. The air carried a greenish tinge, and clouds of flies buzzed and droned through the miasma.
Everything was ruined. Every building was a hollow shell, bursting with rotting, preternatural growths. The great guild buildings in the dock-quarter were now temples of decay, draped with putrescent vines like giant entrails pulled from a body. The dull crack of thunder still echoed from the northern horizon, though the spell-summoned storms that had ravaged the city during the worst of the fighting were ebbing at last.
Through the very heart of the devastation, a vast army marched. Just as at Heffengen, they were drawn from the corrupted hosts of the North, and every tribe was represented in their tormented ranks. Norscans strode out, clad in thick furs and bearing ornately crafted axes with runes of ruin carved on the daemon’s-head steel. Skaelings and Kurgan came with them, as well as Khazags and Vargs and Kul, a collection of the whole of the Realm of Chaos’s sundered peoples, thrown together under a panoply of skull-topped banners.