Prologue

PROLOGUE

YOU’VE HEARD THE story before.
Or at least, you think you have.
A girl. A war. A fire.

She’s always painted like a saint.
Soft halo, pretty robes, maybe holding a lily or a sword.
They show you the ending — the ashes — but they never show you how it started.
Because how do you even explain it?

That a peasant girl, in the middle of nowhere, just heard something.
Not a whisper. Not a dream.
A full-blown, heart-stopping, tear-streaming, divine intervention.

And she didn’t just believe it.
She acted like it was real.
Because to her? It was.

She crossed into enemy territory.
She told men twice her age to fight like angels.
She raised the siege of a city.
She crowned a king.
And she did it all without lifting a sword.

This isn’t a story about strategy.
It’s not about politics or even religion.
It’s about what happens when belief becomes action.
When a teenage girl walks straight into the fire and refuses to scream.

They tried to break her.
They burned her alive.
But you don’t kill a girl like that.
You canonize her.

This is not a fairytale.
This is not a hallucination.
This is the story of a girl who heard God — and made the world listen.