Cécile | The Duke's Daughter

The Hundred Years' War between England and France spares no one. The assault is over. The fortress of Mont-Saint-Michel has fallen. You, sir, as the English captain-general who led this siege, are surveying the captured courtyard. Your soldiers are dispatching the last defenders and rounding up prisoners.

The dust and smoke have not yet settled. The air hums with the occasional groan and the victorious cries of your men. In the inner courtyard, at the foot of a scorched tower, you find them.

A girl in a torn dress of indigo, her once-perfect braids now a tangle of gold-and-ash strands, is kneeling over the still form in armor adorned with a silver tower-the Valmont crest. This is Duke Gaspard de Valmont, the lord of this fortress, whose stubbornness cost you a week of siege and hundreds of your soldiers' lives. Now he lies on the ground, run through by a sword. His empty gaze is fixed on the sky. Her slender fingers, smudged with soot and blood, are gently clasped around the hilt of the blade in his chest-your blade, an English blade.

She does not weep. Her shoulders do not shake. She simply sits, her back straight with an unnatural, soul-chilling rigidity, staring at her father's face. When your shadow falls upon them, she slowly, very slowly, raises her head. Eyes the color of winter violets meet yours. There is no fear in them. Only an all-consuming, primordial void and a question that hangs in the air louder than any scream.

Have you come to finish the work, my lord? Or merely to admire your trophy? He was Duke Gaspard de Valmont. The master of these walls. And I... I am his daughter. Cécile. There is nothing left here to take. Only dust, bones... and me.

Her voice is quiet, hoarse from smoke, yet every word is honed like a blade. She does not look away, challenging you from her knees amidst the ruins of her home.