February 1807.
Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Dawn.
The first light of morning crept over Paris like a thief, revealing a city that no longer knew its own face.
The streets, once so proud, were clawed with barricades and blackened ruins.
The wind carried not songs or sermons, but the low, shuddering groan of a city dying in slow, uneven gasps.
Inside a soot-darkened forge at the edge of the Faubourg, Étienne Roux worked by the faint glow of a dying fire.
His hands — scarred, massive, trembling only when unseen — moved mechanically over the battered remains of an iron gate.
Hammer.
Strike.
Bend.
Shape.
Not into tools for farmers.
Not into hinges or horseshoes.
Into weapons.
Pikes.
Hooks.
Makeshift spears forged from the splintered bones of a collapsing world.
Each strike rang out against the cracked stones of the forge like a slow, heavy heartbeat.
Étienne's brow dripped sweat despite the cold.
He barely noticed.
In the corner, a battered tricolor flag — once hidden for years under floorboards — now hung limply, streaked with ash and old blood.
Étienne looked at it once, briefly.
Not with reverence.
With weariness.
He had seen too many flags.
Too many promises.
Too many graves.
A sharp knock at the door broke the rhythm.
He wiped his hands on a filthy rag and opened it cautiously.
Outside stood a boy, no older than twelve, breathless and pale.
A messenger.
Another one.
The boy shoved a crumpled scrap of parchment into Étienne's hand before bolting back into the mist.
Étienne unfolded it slowly.
A simple message, scrawled in broken handwriting:
> "Barriers fall on Rue de Charenton.
Help needed.
Bring iron."
No seal.
No name.
But he knew who had sent it.
Knew what was being asked.
With a grunt, he moved back into the forge, gathering the finished weapons into a rough canvas sling.
His joints ached.
His shoulders protested.
It did not matter.
By the door, he paused — one hand resting on the threshold — and looked back once more at the place that had been his world.
The blackened anvil.
The shattered bellows.
The cracked hammer his father had used.
It would all be gone by nightfall.
One way or another.
Étienne Roux slung the weapons across his back, tightened the worn leather strap, and stepped into the freezing, smoke-choked morning.
He did not pray.
Paris had no gods left to hear him.
Only steel.
And fire.
And hunger.
And somewhere, across the crumbling city,
a different heartbeat answered his own —
small, quick, terrified:
Margot Lefèvre,
threading a stolen needle through rough linen,
preparing for the wounds she could not yet imagine.
---
Étienne Roux reached Rue de Charenton just before noon.
The street — once lined with modest bakeries, bookshops, and cafés — had become a battlefield.
Smoke twisted upward in ribbons from overturned carts and shattered lamp posts.
Windows were bricked with crates and sacks of flour; doorways barricaded with timber and iron pulled from construction yards.
At the intersection near the old chapel, a barricade six men high had formed — a jagged wall of furniture, stones, barrels, corpses.
And atop it, standing like a phantom of revolution past, was a child no older than ten, waving a flagpole fashioned from a broomstick and a torn bloodied tablecloth.
Étienne pushed forward, the weight of iron on his back heavier with each step.
He was greeted not with cheers, but silence — tense, hollow-eyed silence.
No one here had the strength left to praise.
They only had enough to survive.
> "Weapons," he rasped, unshouldering the sling and laying it at the feet of a barricade captain — a former carriage driver turned revolutionary leader, his coat stained with powder and rain.
The captain nodded once.
> "You're Roux."
Étienne said nothing.
He simply picked up a spear he had forged hours before and took his place in the line, between a boy holding a rusted cavalry saber and a woman with a pickaxe.
No orders were given.
No formations drawn.
Only breath.
Only stillness.
Only waiting.
And then — the thunder of hooves.
From the far end of the boulevard, cavalry emerged like black smoke — a remnant of the city's loyal forces, grim and desperate, their sabers gleaming even in the grey light.
There was no time to think.
A shout.
A drumbeat.
And then the street exploded into noise —
bullets, war cries, metal against flesh.
Étienne braced as a rider charged the barricade, his saber flashing.
The spear left his hands before he knew it —
a perfect throw, clean and brutal.
The soldier tumbled backward, crashing into the cobblestones in a spray of blood and mud.
Another rider leapt over the barrier — and was caught mid-air by a thrusting pike.
The boy next to Étienne screamed — a terrible, high sound — as a bullet tore through his shoulder.
Étienne grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back, teeth clenched, breath ragged.
There was no time to mourn.
No time to count the dead.
Just strike.
Survive.
Strike again.
And then — in the middle of it all — a flash of motion.
From the alley on the flank, a figure darted through the chaos — small, fast, determined.
Margot.
Blood on her apron.
Ash in her hair.
She knelt beside the boy Étienne had dragged down and, without a word, pressed a linen wad to the wound and tied it off in seconds.
Their eyes met — and in that second, neither could speak.
Not because there was too much to say.
But because the moment could not bear it.
Étienne stood again and turned back toward the barricade.
Margot followed, kneeling beside another man who had fallen, already unwrapping her satchel.
And the street screamed again.
And Paris bled again.
And between the smoke and the dying and the silence between cannon shots,
two strangers fought side by side —
not for glory,
not for victory,
but simply
to endure.
---
By twilight, Rue de Charenton had become a grave.
The cavalry had withdrawn — not defeated, but stalled.
Their bodies littered the boulevard, tangled with those of the defenders.
The barricade still stood, though cracked and soaked through with blood.
Étienne sat slumped against a scorched wall, his hammer leaning beside him, one arm cradling a torn shoulder that bled through his shirt in slow, stubborn pulses.
Around him, the survivors moved like ghosts — bandaging, stacking, digging.
Some cried.
Some prayed.
Most said nothing.
Margot knelt beside the boy she had saved earlier, now lying silent under a blanket that barely rose and fell.
She had not moved in an hour.
Her hands were red and stiff, caked in blood and grime. Her face was smeared with ash. Her eyes were open but fixed on nothing.
Étienne watched her, and for the first time that day, not as a stranger.
He saw not a girl, but a piece of Paris itself —
thin, scarred, trembling —
still breathing.
He stood with effort, his boots crunching over shattered glass, and crossed to her side.
She didn't look up.
> "You still alive?" he asked, his voice dry, ragged.
Margot blinked once.
> "For now," she whispered.
"You?"
> "Until I'm not," Étienne said simply.
A beat passed.
The wind curled down the alley, carrying the distant sound of church bells — or cannon, it was hard to tell anymore.
> "He's burning," Margot murmured, glancing toward the horizon, where orange light pulsed against the clouds.
"The Emperor."
Étienne followed her gaze.
> "No," he said.
"The city is. The Emperor just forgot to notice."
She smiled faintly.
The first smile of the day — tired, sad, but real.
> "Do you think it matters?" she asked.
"Which of them burns?"
Étienne shook his head.
> "No. But I think it matters who's left when the fire dies out."
They sat in silence a while longer, two specks of warmth in a city gone cold.
Above them, from a shattered upper window, a makeshift banner had been tied to a broken beam — it fluttered weakly in the evening breeze.
A child's handwriting, uneven but proud:
> "We are the ashes that will not vanish."
Margot closed her eyes.
Étienne looked toward the sky.
And beneath the crumbling bones of a world collapsing,
two souls endured —
not because they believed in victory,
but because they had already lost too much
not to keep going.
---
That night, the stars never showed.
Smoke clung to the rooftops like a second sky, a black veil stretched across the heavens.
The moon was a pale blur behind it, useless and silent, like the old gods Paris no longer prayed to.
Étienne lay in the corner of a cellar beneath a bombed-out bakery, wrapped in a wool coat that wasn't his. His shoulder throbbed. His fingers stung. His legs felt like stone.
But he was warm. And breathing.
Across the room, Margot sat on a flour sack, her back against the wall, her knees drawn to her chest. She hadn't slept.
Not really.
Only blinked longer than usual, then opened her eyes again when the silence shifted.
In the flicker of a dying lantern between them, shadows danced on the cracked stone walls — ghosts of furniture, of people, of memories neither of them dared name.
> "He was my brother," she said suddenly.
Her voice startled him. It was the first time she'd spoken in hours.
Étienne turned his head, slowly.
> "The boy," she added. "The one with the musket wound. Earlier today. He was my brother."
Étienne sat up slightly, pain rippling through his shoulder.
He didn't speak. Just watched her.
Margot's eyes were empty. But not dry.
> "I didn't even recognize him at first," she said. "His hair was longer. And he'd gotten taller. I hadn't seen him in months. He'd run off to the border, they said. I thought he was gone. But there he was. Dying under my hands."
Her voice didn't crack.
It was too numb for that.
> "He died an hour ago. While you were fixing the barricade."
Étienne didn't offer words of comfort.
There weren't any.
Instead, he reached for his flask, half-filled with water and a bitter taste of vinegar, and held it out to her.
She took it, drank, wiped her mouth, and handed it back without looking at him.
A long silence passed.
Then:
> "Why do you fight?" she asked, her voice soft, almost curious.
"You're not like them. The ones with slogans. The boys playing heroes. You don't believe, do you?"
Étienne looked into the dark.
> "No," he said. "I don't believe in any of it. Not anymore."
A beat.
> "Then why?"
He hesitated.
> "Because it's worse not to fight," he said finally.
"Because I can't watch another century of kings and ministers gamble with the bones of children.
Because if I swing a hammer, maybe the next boy doesn't have to pick up a musket."
Margot nodded once, slowly.
Then leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.
> "I'm tired of bleeding," she murmured.
"But I think I'm more afraid of stopping."
He understood that. Too well.
Outside, the city groaned.
Somewhere, another building collapsed.
Somewhere else, another fire was born.
Paris was still burning.
But here, in this pocket of darkness, two embers remained.
Not flames.
Not yet.
But embers.
And in the end,
that's what rebuilds the world.