The heavy iron gates had groaned a welcome, but Faust did not follow the servants toward the warm, lantern-lit entrance of the mansion.
Instead, he veered to the right, his boots crunching on the gravel path until the manicured lawn gave way to the ancient, sprawling roots of a Great Apple Tree.
Under the dappled shade of its gnarled branches, five graves stood in a silent semi-circle. They were well-tended, the stone clean of moss, but they felt like anchors pulling at his soul.
Faust sank to his knees in the damp grass, the "big dignity" he carried before the world finally fracturing.
"I'm finally home," he whispered, his voice cracking.
He reached into his leather travel bag. First, he pulled out a bottle of heavy Spanish wine—a vintage he knew his foster father would have savored.
With a steady hand, he uncorked it and poured the dark, fragrant liquid directly into the earth before the first headstone. "To the man who taught me how to live," he murmured.
For his mother, he produced a small pot of vibrant purple paint he had acquired from a merchant in the New England colonies. He remembered her fingers always stained with pigments, her easel set up in this very garden. He placed the pot on the marble ledge. "The color of the sunsets over the Atlantic," he told the stone. "You would have loved to paint them."
He stood for a moment before his elder brother's grave, placing a small, intricate bronze statuette—a Roman relic from Constantinople—beside the headstone. "For your collection," he said softly. Then, turning to the grave of young Wilhelm Faust simply took off his hat and held it to his chest in a silent, agonizing salute of respect.
Finally, he knelt before the center grave. The name Elena was carved deep into the stone, sharing the same surname as his own. There were fresh flowers here, likely placed by the servants, but Faust reached beneath his shirt to grab the silver necklace. He popped the latch, staring at her miniature portrait.
He stayed there for a long time, the shadows of the apple tree lengthening.
He spoke to them in a low, rhythmic murmur, catching them up on the chaos of the last year. He told them of the muddy streets of the New World, his patients, new residence, the salt spray of the Isabella, and the terrifying that had erupted from a boy's shoulder in a Dutch theater. He spoke of Lola—the woman who was a storm—and the Francisco family who had vanished into the mist.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, the stoic mask of the Professor finally shattered. Tears tracked through the dust on his face, falling onto the grave of the woman he had married, treated, and eventually buried.
"I wish you were here with me," he sobbed, his forehead resting against the cold marble. "Why do I have to stay? Why is this body so... so stupid?" He struck his own thigh in a fit of quiet rage—at the regeneration, the multiple heartbeats, the immortality that felt like a biological insult to the family that had rotted away.
The snap of a twig behind him made his pulse spike.
Faust wiped his eyes with his sleeve and stood, his internal "engines" instantly cooling his grief into a sharp, defensive alertness.
Standing a few yards away was a man and a woman, both in their late forties. They were dressed in the high-quality, somber wools of the German upper class. Tucked against the woman's skirts was a young boy, perhaps eleven years old, his small hand clutching the fabric of her dress as he stared at the "stranger" with wide, curious eyes.
The man stepped forward, removing his cap. He looked at Faust—a man who appeared twenty years his junior yet possessed the eyes of an ancient—and bowed his head with profound, ancestral gravity.
"We did not mean to intrude upon your prayers, Patriarch," the man said, his voice echoing the deep respect of the servants.
The woman curtsied, her gaze flickering to the graves and then back to Faust's youthful face with a mixture of reverence and a touch of well-hidden fear. "The house has felt empty without you, Herzog. We have taught the lad of your return every day since the last solstice."
Faust looked at the child, then at the couple—descendants, the living fruit of a family tree his brothers had planted but could never truly be a part of. He straightened his coat, the weight of the "Herzog" returning to his shoulders.