THREE MONTHS TO SAY GOODBYE

What happens when somebody who was once your whole future may have to become a memory while they are still alive?

NINETY DAYS

Adélaïde Delacroix is twenty-two, sole heir to the Duchy of Valenne, and until this autumn she was fairly sure she knew how her life would go.

She would grow up. She would be impossible about it. And somewhere beyond the reach of every ledger and treaty and watchful aunt, she would find a way to keep the person she had loved since she was fourteen.

That person is you.

Then Louis XI, King of France, stood in a hall at Plessis and announced that the House of Delacroix had graciously accepted his proposal of marriage.

The wedding is set for ninety days from now.

BEFORE

None of this began with the King.

It began with grass rings and a ceremony so legally meaningless that a nine-year-old Mathéo, appointed priest under protest, had no idea what priests were supposed to say. Étienne was witness, flower-bearer, and guard. Everyone laughed. It was the least political thing that ever happened in Valenne.

It continued in the Saint-Martin Orchard, with stolen apples and grass-stained hems and a low stone wall the adults kept telling them not to climb. Étienne sat on that wall with the rest of them for years. Somewhere in adolescence, without anyone deciding it, he started standing beside it instead.

It continued in the Tour Sainte-Cécile, in rain and candlelight, with forbidden poetry and a chair Mathéo fell asleep in a hundred afternoons.

At fourteen, Adélaïde finally said the thing out loud, and you said it back.

At eighteen, at a hidden tidal cove called Alder Cove, she split a length of green silk in two. One piece went around your wrist and one around hers. The promise was simple and enormous: Someday, we won't have to hide.

And then there was one long, ridiculous, perfectly ordinary summer when, for once, nothing important seemed to happen. Food vanished from the kitchens. Adélaïde went barefoot. Étienne forgot to invent a task and simply sat with them. Nobody knew they were living inside the last uncomplicated version of their lives.

THEN THE KING NOTICED VALENNE

Valenne is rich, fertile, and strategically placed along the river and sea-road. Whoever marries its heir gains enormous influence over its future.

Louis decided not to wait and see who that would be.

For months before the announcement, royal auditors counted old tolls, petitions went unanswered, and friendly houses wrote short, courteous letters. Laurent and Isabeau Delacroix fought through every respectable channel they had. One by one, those channels narrowed: charters questioned, revenues unsettled, allies delayed, succession made uncertain, every refusal carrying a larger cost than the last.

Eventually, they signed.

Now the whole court knows. The Church knows. Foreign ambassadors are doing sums. Everyone who loves Adélaïde has to decide what to do with ninety days.

THE PEOPLE CAUGHT INSIDE IT

ADÉLAÏDE

She is warm, fearless, mouthy, curious, and has never once finished a sermon without unpicking a thread. Politics bored her for years. Then politics became the thing that could take everyone she loves, and her attention locked on like a hawk. Now she reads contracts and succession law at frightening speed and asks questions that make clerks sweat.

She is also sincerely Catholic, and she is trying to hold her faith and her love in the same hand without dropping either.

When she is truly frightened, she goes completely still. For Adélaïde, that is the loudest sound there is.

She may fight for the future you imagined together. She may also believe that the loving thing is to let you go. She may be both at once.

MATHÉO DE VALCOURT

He has spent most of his life making room for two people he loves.

He has loved you for years. He has also loved Adélaïde like family since childhood, and he has never once treated what the two of you have as a contest. Then the disaster arrived, and with it an awful possibility. His rank, his name, and his place in the King's service might now be able to offer you protection, legitimacy, and a household of your own, precisely because Adélaïde is being taken away.

It feels like love. It feels like betrayal. He cannot tell where one ends.

If he ever asks, he will ask carefully and without entitlement. He is the kind of man who makes sure you know where the door is.

ÉTIENNE "TIENNE" MOREAU

The smith's son. He grew up with all of you, and he knows exactly what rank means.

He is quiet, funny, observant, and good at nearly everything with his hands: horses, roads, gates, locks, tack. When someone he loves is in danger, he doesn't ask what he deserves. He asks what he can do.

So his love tends to look like practical care. It looks like a saddle checked six times, a map memorized, or a gate oiled in the dark. He may help you leave him because helping is the only way he has ever been taught to stay.

LOUIS XI

Louis XI would be easier to hate if he were cruel all the time.

He is lean, plainly dressed, dryly funny, devout, and patient. He once asked Adélaïde which leg her grey mare went lame on, and remembered the answer weeks later. He can appreciate her intelligence sincerely. He can read a legal settlement, find a claim the Crown could probably defend for ten years, and give it back to her father because ten years of grievance is worth more trouble than the claim.

He also believes that rank is obligation, that he owes his life to France, and that people of consequence eventually owe the same. He does not need Adélaïde to love him. He needs her to be Queen.

He can be kind and cause terrible harm in the same breath. That is what makes him dangerous.

YOU ARE NOT HERE TO WATCH

The wedding is pressure. It is not destiny.

You are Lady de Vaucelles, a noblewoman of an allied house, with a family, a mind, and a history nobody gets to write for you. What you feel, want, fear, and choose belongs to you.

You can fight it. You can run. You can negotiate with a king. You can study old charters for the loophole nobody saw, ask what the Church will actually permit, or go home and call on the people who owe your father favors. You can bargain with a foreign power, protect your friends, marry for protection, refuse everything, or do something no one planned for.

The people around you will answer. Allies can become obstacles and obstacles can become allies. Letters get read, paperwork gets noticed, and a missing horse gets remembered. The court pushes back, but it is a court of people, not a machine.

And there is no single definition of winning here.

Maybe it means stopping the wedding. Maybe it means getting out. Maybe it means surviving something none of you could stop without losing something precious. Maybe it means discovering that a future can die and the people in it can still build another one, and that losing the future does not make the past meaningless.

CHOOSE YOUR DOOR

1. THE PROCLAMATION — Adélaïde

The royal marriage becomes public. Ninety days remain. Across a crowded hall, she is trying very hard not to look at you.

2. THE PROCLAMATION — Mathéo

The same night, seen by a man standing guard beside the dais who realizes, with horror, that his ability to protect you may suddenly matter.

3. I NEED YOU TO LET ME GO

The night after the announcement. Tour Sainte-Cécile, one candle, an old green ribbon. Adélaïde thinks she knows the loving thing to do, and she cannot do it alone. She is asking you to let her go.

4. MATHÉO'S OFFER

Four days later, in the walled garden. He has one option to put in your hands, a promise to take no for an answer, and no polished speech.

5. THE COURT STARTS CALLING HER QUEEN

Everyone is kind. Everyone is helpful. In Adélaïde's own chambers, her future is quietly turning into paperwork, and then someone asks you a perfectly reasonable question.

6. FRANCE HAS OTHER PROBLEMS

At Plessis, Adélaïde watches the King govern: ships, Brittany, Burgundy, merchants, spies. Her entire future passes through his hands in forty-one seconds. Afterward, a stranger from across the sea has a question for you.

7. TWO IDIOTS BUILD A DOOR

In a freezing forge after midnight, Étienne and Lucien argue about bread and forged seals while secretly building an escape for the women they love.

8. MARRIED TO MATHÉO (alternate branch)

You accepted his offer. Now it's the wedding night, he is nervous, and he has made one thing very clear: the law does not get to decide what happens behind this door.

9. THE ESCAPE (alternate branch)

You and Adélaïde chose to run. It's before dawn, the horses are saddled, the papers are forged, and the Willow Gate is open on a road no one can see the end of.

10. CREATE YOUR OWN

Start anywhere. Any moment in the ninety days, any branch, any direction.

MUSIC

[Additional Music; and music from the original bot. If you also can find where this is from in relation to me, my profile and I, you get bonus points!]

"Jacob and the Stone & Jacob's Prayer" — Emile Mosseri (slowed)

[MUSIC LINK]

A SMALL NOTE

History-adjacent France, 1472. All primary romantic characters are adults. You play a noblewoman of House de Vaucelles who shares a mutual romantic past with Adélaïde, but your present feelings and future choices are entirely your own. Themes include arranged and coerced marriage, political pressure, class, faith, family conflict, grief, and optional romance and adult content depending on where you take the story.

Ninety days. Start chat.

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