When a tide of the dead rolled across the fair fields of Bretonnia and hemmed in its royal city, the kingdom faced its darkest hour in The Siege of Couronne. Couronne is a city of deep sanctity, and to see its walls ringed by grinning skeletons and shrouded wraiths struck at the very heart of the realm's faith.
The defenders of Bretonnia manned the walls with peasant bowmen and dismounted knights, while beyond them a silent host pressed ever closer. The besiegers, legions of the Vampire Counts, needed neither food nor sleep nor rest, and each night they hurled their tireless dead against the ramparts while their necromancers raised the city's own fallen defenders to turn against their kin. The garrison dwindled; the walls cracked; and within the city the folk prayed to the Lady of the Lake for a deliverance that seemed ever further away.
Deliverance came, as it always does in Bretonnian song, upon the backs of horses. From across the kingdom the knights had ridden hard for the royal city, and at the moment of the walls' greatest peril they crashed into the rear of the undead host in a single glittering avalanche of lance and barding. The dead, caught between the walls and the charge, were ground to splinters, and the dark will binding them faltered beneath the fury of the realm's assembled chivalry.
The Siege of Couronne ended in a victory the troubadours would sing of for centuries — the holy city saved, the dead cast down, and the Lady's favour proven once more. Yet the fields around Couronne remained sown with bones, a reminder of how nearly the grave had swallowed the kingdom's heart.
The chronicle continues
