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PROLOGUE
Paris
In the shadows of revolution, we can just see the cobblestone which witnessed a battleground for revolutionaries and royalist, between the dream of liberté and the brutality of the guillotine. The streets were damp with snow, slippery and feels like—condemned to be not-free from the frozen sense of weary urgency where the blood of kings mingled with the cries of the fallen, there lay a prison that had long become the womb of Paris' darkest fears: the Conciergerie.
The once-glorious streets of Paris had become grimy and dangerous. You could hear the echo of cheering for executions, nothing but cold merciless streets, vomiting revolution in the every dip of the stone. The woman, in her early 20s being hurried to the prison gate, wearing royal attire, suddenly scared by the horse cart, which dragging the overload corpses of the condemned, just exiting the prison gate. Covered her nose not in disgust but in the stagnant smell for the carts. In that time people were unknown to the pleasant smell so she would not know the pleasant odor either. She was tall, face gleamed with radiant color of her cheeks, her body was desirable—like Greek statues. She suddenly covers her ears for the cheered-up roar exuding from the Place de la Révolution, the very heart of the city's death toll—where they hang the condemned. Hundred paces away from the Prison gate, one merciless merchat were shouting in his gaunt-hunger face to his wife—"s'il vous plaît, stop selling all the wine—save for tonight, just tonight, oui?." The shelves of Parisian boutiques once filled with imported luxuries now held the last scraps of bread and stale vegetables. She turned to her husband and says—"you think I can save the wine for tonight alone? You must know, the revolution is thirsty…" She didn't heard the full, she hastened to the gate already.
The outer walls of the prison were all covered with the posters or banners: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—seemingly images of deposed nobles were smeared as warnings to all who would oppose the revolution. Here, within its chill, stone-surfaced interior, the fates wove strange and perilous webs, affecting the paths of those who would resist tyranny in their own time. Of these souls, none had ever dared to anticipate the sinister twist their lives would follow, not even the man now sitting at the edge of his fate—Lucien Duret, the man in his 60s.
A poet of ink and of ideals, Lucien had spoken when silence was the intelligent thing to say, written words in other hearts that were inflamed, from salons to blood-soaked streets. The tyranny he defied was old as well as new, with the face of repression and the mask of revolution. And now, waiting for death, those very same words seemed to echo from the cold, iron confines of his cell. The guillotine, that omnipresent god of retribution, had already slit the throats of so many. Lucien knew it would soon do the same to him.
But fate, being truth, is never so neatly bound. For in the darkness of night, when the icy silence of prison had been stifling him, the turning of the key in the lock broke his mind. A visitor—a so unexpected, so inconceivably out of place one—stood in the darkness of his cell. A woman born of woman, her face a map of inner power, her eyes piercing as if she too had drunk the bitter gall of revolution. She was Éléonore de Vigny, and while she came to him in the guise of an overture, Lucien was aware that her offer would be neither simple, nor simple to accept.
"Freedom," she told him, with an assurance that sounded louder than any promise of freedom.
A word so often tarnished in these days, it rang with a strange, unfamiliar resonance. She had a plan, a secret, a truth buried in the annals of history—something Lucien could not ignore. And all she asked in return was his mind, the one thing he had left to offer, the one thing he had built his life upon.
Her offer seemed madness—marriage to a condemned man.
But beneath the layers of nonsense, something stirred in Lucien. That thread of truth that had always driven him, the never-ending search for solutions to questions with no easy solution, began to pull him into her words.
With one hypothesis, Éléonore de Vigny reordered his fate.
And as the cell door closed behind them, Lucien was aware that perhaps, just perhaps, this strange woman, this unlikely friend, would give him something not even death could Strip away: the chance to excavate the most dangerous secret of all.
One that could alter everything.
Hereafter, that incident changed Paris' fate alone.
