Duchess Gisele Marie de Vauex
Les Lions noirs ne faibliront jamais.
General. Fearless. Accomplished. The Last.
. Essentials .
- Age: Twenty seven
- Height: 5'7"
- Weight: 132
- Build: Toned
- Skin Tone: Sunkissed
- Hair Color: Brunette
- Eye Color: Brown
- Martial Status: Unmarried, uncourted, no offspring
. Extensive .
- Spoken languages: French (mother tongue), English (fluent), German (fluent), Russian (proficient), Italian (proficient)
- Notable Skills: Horsemanship, archery, swordsmanship, cartography, business, politics.
- Favored Weapon/s: Arming sword, misericorde, long bow.
- Mount/s: Recken; 18hh black stallion of unknown breeding, draft cross type [active]. Philippe; 16.2hh gray stallion of her family's own Boulonnais bloodlines [semi-retired].
. The Black Lions .
- Status: Private military regiments under command of the de Vauex family and the King.
- Size: 4,400 and growing.
- Origins: Mixed; both genders and multiple countries serving within the ranks.
Born into a lineage of great soldiers and highly educated nobility, Gisele was the fifth child of seven to be born from the union of Richard and Eleanor de Vauex, their first daughter. Unlike her younger sister, it was quickly apparent that, like her brothers and father before her, the girl would not focus on the softer arts of nobility and their politics. Instead, the little hellcat defied every order to remain outside of the lands that housed the barracks to the private army her family had amassed through generations of marching for the glory of the King and their own conquests. Instead, she seemed to bond tightest with the aging Master of Arms and despite numerous attempts to interest her in other aspects of life, Richard soon came to realize that Gisele was no soft girl. She was to become a warrior, like her brothers and her forefathers.
Stubborn though she was, it proved as valuable a trait as it was frustrating for her family - too proud to not master a skill, Gisele would train with her sword until her hands bled and would ride until her thighs were raw to become so comfortable with skills taught to her through multiple cultures within the Black Lions. Court proved another matter entirely, her pride and prowess making her seem almost a bit brash to potential suitors, and even when a brave man might have challenged for her hand, he failed.
By the first time Gisele marched at a mere sixteen, she had lost two of her brothers to a hellish skirmish where their own ego had proven their downfall. The rage manifested from the loss of family had driven the girl to prove she could be just as bloodthirsty as a berserker, avenging her fallen siblings and bringing them home for burial.
That had truly been the beginning of the end, hadn't it?
With Michael and Justin dead, her father had seemed to lose some of his own confidence in battle. Though the man had gone gray in his temples, his broad shoulders had deceived many from knowing just how hard it had been to put two of his children to rest. Called to war again and again, the other three boys had fallen one by one. Alexandre, Corbin, Roland… all given proper rights, their ashes put in the family tombs. Soon, Richard was left marching only with his daughter and the losses had changed the general - his own tactics became reckless, a source of fights with Gisele - and a worry for his wife.
It was while the Black Lions had been facing a horde of tribal warriors when Gisele was nineteen that her life had changed for the worse yet again.
One wrong move had taken the general from them, an axe to the neck meaning sure death. For the young warrior, it had been a haze of leaping from her horse and cleaving a man apart before she had held her dying father in her arms. That night, she had keened high and wept among the carnage, unable to bring herself to let him go until the Master of Arms had come to collect his body.
The next day, Gisele had killed them all. There had been no mercy, every warrior under her command soaked in their blood. While most had celebrated, the young woman had felt like her world was falling apart behind the privacy of her tent flaps. Bringing her father home for proper funeral rites had been a solemn affair for some, but the singing of war tunes within the ranks had nearly brought her to tears.
It was only at the pyre that Gisele had wept once more, her head turned towards the sky with the drumbeats and voices of the men and women whom had once followed her late father's command around her. Sending his spirit to the next world had been a soul-crushing night for her, one that had changed her.
A fortnight later, her mother suffered from a heart attack as well, as if she had been too lost without her husband. She, like Richard, was given to the skies and the tombs.
With her younger sister Amelia as the last of her family, Gisele had married the bright girl to a man she fancied to find herself alone by the age of twenty. Hardening herself into the general she would become, it had not come without sacrifice and vice. Even still, before she was thirty, no one could laugh at an army and control of multiple ports, towns, and trading routes.
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