Prologue
Fifteen years ago, the war changed everything. When Guinevere’s father enlisted, he did not expect it to be as tragic as it was. It came to the farm, only a few months after his wife went into labor with her second child, a little boy. Guinevere, even though she was just two years old at the time, knew something was terribly wrong. However, what she didn’t know was that her father, a musketeer by nature, was part of the troops trotting up the hill. As soon as the battle unfolded, her mother, who knew of her father’s whereabouts, asked him to take her son to a safe shelter in the nearby village while she took Gwen to another. She promised that as soon as the battle ended, they would reunite their children. However, this never happened. Gwen’s father took both a bullet and arrow to the chest, and as he lied dying on the ground, his eyes landed on a basket in which the soldiers stripped it of its rations. Grabbing hold of it, he gently set his crying, infant son in it and gave the basket a small push. It floated down the relatively calm river, away from the battle and hopefully to safety.
Gwen’s father watched it, and with his dying breath, his last words were,
“He is the Illusion.” Then, that was it.
When Elisabeth, Gwen’s mother, found his corpse after the battle, she fell to her knees and sobbed, fearing that it was her fault she failed to protect her husband and son. The guilt traveled with her as Gwen grew older and more mature. She promised, that as a mother, she would do everything in her willpower to protect her only living child; her only family. Plague and famine, only twenty years prior, wiped out hers and her husband’s other family members, leaving them the only family left. The future rested in Gwen’s hands, but Elisabeth had one little problem. Guinevere was the daughter of a musketeer. No doubt about it, after what happened when the Thirty Years War hit their farm, she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. After witnessing so much devastation, plague, and famine in her early years, she vowed to protect the people, and the only way to do that was to become a musketeer herself. Unfortunately, for being a young female living in the seventeenth century, there were plenty of speed humps in her way that she had to overcome. To most men, they saw her as a mere damsel in distress, but Guinevere was much more than that. She was a fighter, a thinker, a rider, and the other half of the Illusion. She was a musketeer.
All rights reserved: Please do not plagiarize this story. I don’t want to have to turn on my bad side. Just FYI.
