Geneviève was not simply born in a village; she was spat into the mud of "Bord de l'Eau," a cluster of wattle-and-daub huts clinging precariously to the slopes of the Grey Mountains, in the Dukedom of Parravon. In Bretonnia, being born a peasant means being someone else's property before letting out your first cry. Life was a seasonal cycle of backbreaking labor to tear edible roots from stony ground, and of pure terror when the "Wild Hunts" or the beasts of the mountains descended into the valley.
Her father, Master Arnaut, was the local blacksmith. A massive man, with skin cooked by the heat of the forge and hands deformed by years of hammering red-hot iron. Being the smith's daughter granted Geneviève a status slightly higher than the turnip diggers: they ate salted meat once a month, and the roof of their forge didn't leak too much water. But the price was living immersed in the acrid smell of coal, sulfur, and sweat. Arnaut had no sons, so Geneviève became his unofficial apprentice. From childhood, she learned that in Bretonnia, quality metal is reserved for the Nobles; for the peasants, there is only cast iron and soft iron for hoes that bend at the first rock. She developed hard, calloused muscles, learning to read the temperature of the fire from the color of the flames, pumping the bellows until her lungs burned. She grew up listening to stories of the Grail Knights, luminous figures who protected the innocent, but the reality she saw was that of the local Baron's tax collectors, who took nine sacks of grain out of ten and whipped anyone who dared to keep a handful of extra flour.
The end of her childhood did not arrive with a warning, but with a guttural roar that made the anvils tremble.
"WAAAGH!"
It was the beginning of autumn when the warband of the Ironskin Orcs descended from the mountain passes. They were not the disorganized creatures of children's fairy tales; they were a green tide of muscle, yellow fangs, and pure violence, driven by an ancestral hunger for destruction. The fragile palisades of Bord de l'Eau—never repaired because the Baron preferred to spend his gold on tapestries rather than on lumber for the serfs—gave way in seconds.
The air immediately filled with the sickly-sweet smell of blood and the musky, rotten stench of the greenskins. The screams of massacred peasants mingled with the bestial roars of the invaders.
Arnaut violently shoved Geneviève into the back room, under the heavy workbench. "Whatever happens, do not make a sound," he ordered, his eyes wide with the terror that only a father can feel. Then, he grabbed his heaviest forge hammer—not a weapon of war, but an honest tool, stained with soot—and stood in the doorway.
Geneviève, trembling, watched through a crack in the wood. She saw her father fight with the desperation of one defending his litter. The first Goblin that entered ended up with its skull caved in. Then came the Orc Boss. A mountain of green meat and scars, armed with a rusted cleaver the size of a door.
Arnaut fought. He parried a blow that would have cut a horse in two; the clang of metal against metal rang out like a funeral bell. It was in that moment that they heard the hooves.
The Knight of the Realm charged with protecting those lands, Sir Gaspard de Montfort, appeared on the crest of the hill. The scene that Geneviève carved into her memory was one of obscene contrast. The village was burning, the mud was red with peasant blood, yet Sir Gaspard looked as if he had just stepped out of a parade. His full plate armor, polished to a mirror finish, reflected the flames without being touched by them. His helm was surmounted by extravagant peacock feathers, and the caparison of his steed was of blue silk, immaculate, with the golden lion of his house embroidered upon it.
Sir Gaspard did not charge immediately. He stopped his horse a few yards from the forge, where Arnaut was losing ground against the Orc. The knight seemed to take a moment to adjust his gauntlet, annoyed by the smoke dirtying his view. He did not even look at the blacksmith bleeding to death.
The Orc, roaring in triumph, gutted Master Arnaut with an upward stroke of his cleaver. The body of Geneviève's father fell into the mud with a wet sound.
Only then, when the Orc turned and dared to spit black blood toward the knight's glittering crest, did Sir Gaspard decide to act. Not to save a peasant—peasants can be replaced—but because the honor of his house had been insulted by a beast. He charged with lance couched, piercing the Orc in an explosion of perfect chivalric violence, only to then complain loudly to his squire that the green blood would stain his favorite tournament lance.
Geneviève remained hidden for hours. When other orcs entered to loot the forge, she crawled out the back and hid in the only safe place: under the stack of her neighbors' corpses that the orcs had piled behind the stable. She remained there, crushed by the weight of the dead, with the taste of copper and bile in her mouth, while she heard Sir Gaspard's knights "clean up" the area, laughing and boasting of their deeds as they finished off the wounded greenskins and ignored the pleas for help from the dying serfs.
When Geneviève emerged from that burial mound at dawn, covered in blood that was not her own, the naive glimmer in her eyes was gone forever. She had understood the great lie of Bretonnia. The honor of the nobles was a shiny façade, a performance to hide the fact that for them, a peasant woman and a pig held the same value. Her father had died with a hammer in his hand to defend her; the knight had fought only because his vanity had been pricked.
In that crimson mud, little Geneviève died along with her father. What rose up was something much colder, and infinitely more dangerous: a peasant woman who had decided to never again be meat for the slaughter.
That day she swore two things: that she would never again be helpless like a peasant, and that the honor of certain nobles was a lie.