The castle hall was quiet.
Candlelight trembled along the long table, painting the walls with slow-moving shadows. Outside the tall windows the night had thickened, and clouds gathered over the town like a dark tide rolling in from the south.
Oskar sat alone.
His skull-faced helmet rested upon the table before him. The massive sword leaned beside it, its weight so great that the wood beneath it creaked softly. Plates of meat and bread lay scattered before him, and the carcass of the roasted pig had already begun to lose its shape under the relentless work of his knife.
He cut another thick slice.
Raised it.
Ate.
The motion was slow and deliberate, yet the amount of food disappearing into him would have shamed three ordinary men.
But Oskar did not eat out of indulgence.
He ate because his body demanded it.
Inside him something burned.
The moment the meat slid down his throat he felt it vanish, as though thrown into a furnace. Heat spread through his chest and stomach instantly, consumed and transformed by the monstrous engine that was his body.
Beneath the black plates of armor his muscles shifted.
They pressed against the steel like restrained beasts, cords of living iron swelling and tightening beneath the dark metal. The armor had been forged for a giant, yet even it seemed barely enough to contain him. His shoulders rolled beneath the plates with the slow strength of something far larger than a man. Veins pulsed along his forearms and neck, thick as braided cords, carrying blood that seemed almost too hot for the flesh that held it.
His heart beat.
Once.
Twice.
Each pulse struck his chest like a hammer inside a cathedral.
And deep within that heart, beyond flesh and bone, something answered.
The core.
He could feel it now as clearly as he felt the beat of his own blood.
A sphere of light buried inside him.
Red.
Violent, living red.
It pulsed with the rhythm of his heart, sending waves of energy through his veins like a second circulation. That red strength flooded his muscles, making them tighten and harden as though iron had been poured into them. It made his limbs feel heavy with power, coiled with a force that begged to be unleashed.
Beneath that red glow lay another layer.
Gold.
Not bright like flame, but dense and steady like molten metal beneath the earth. It flowed outward through his bones, seeping into ribs, spine, and limbs. Wherever it passed, the skeleton beneath his flesh seemed to strengthen and thicken, reinforcing the living frame that carried his weight.
And deeper still—at the smallest, quietest center of it all—was the white.
Soft.
Cold.
Like falling snow.
Fragments of pale light drifted outward from that center and settled wherever the body had been wounded or strained. Old scars faded. Pain dulled. Even the lingering ache left by the Sarajevo bullets seemed to dissolve beneath that silent snowfall of energy.
Red for strength.
Gold for structure.
White for healing.
Oskar did not understand it.
But he felt it.
The longer he sat there, the clearer the sensation became. The body he wore—this enormous mass of muscle and bone—felt almost like armor of its own, a shell built around something deeper. The true core of what he was lay not in the flesh, but in that burning sphere of power within his chest.
He closed his eyes briefly.
The red light pulsed.
And with it came another presence.
Shadowmane.
Even from here he could feel the stallion.
The horse stood in the castle stables somewhere beyond the walls, feeding quietly in the darkness. Yet in Oskar's mind the animal appeared not as a black shape of hide and hair, but as something else entirely—an outline of muscle, bone, and living power, glowing faintly with the same crimson pulse that beat within his own veins.
Shadowmane had grown.
He had always been large, but over the years the horse had become something more—bigger, stronger, harder than any normal beast should have been. Ever since Oskar had begun riding him, the change had been impossible to ignore.
Now he understood why.
The same fire that burned in his own heart had seeped into the animal.
It had made the horse something else.
Not merely a mount.
A weapon.
And as Oskar felt the stallion's presence in the darkness, he sensed that Shadowmane felt him in return—a faint awareness passing between them like an echo.
A bond.
Strange.
Unnatural.
But undeniable.
Oskar opened his eyes.
Lightning flashed beyond the windows, turning the castle hall white for the briefest instant.
Thunder followed.
Then the rain began.
It struck the tall glass panes in long slanting lines, the storm rolling over Soldau at last. Outside, the town vanished into darkness and water.
Oskar looked down at the table.
At the skull-shaped helmet.
At the enormous sword resting against the wood.
For a long moment he said nothing.
But somewhere deep inside him, beneath the burning red heart and the golden bones and the quiet white healing, he felt the coming storm.
And he knew.
It was almost time for him to move.
But as Oskar sat within the castle hall, something was stirring far beyond Soldau.
South of the town, where the fields stretched into darkness and rain fell across the open land, the first shadows of the Russian advance were already moving.
On the northern side of those fields lay the German defenses: barbed wire belts, circular trench bastions hidden within patches of trees, and dugouts carved into the earth. The soldiers inside them slept lightly beneath canvas covers or within the shallow shelters cut into the trench walls.
Across the field, in the black line of trees to the south, horses waited.
Their riders stood beside them.
Cossacks.
Some leaned against trunks with rifles in hand. Others crouched low, watching the open ground between them and the German line. Their long coats were dark with rain. Caps pulled low over thick mustaches and beards. Sabres and knives hung ready at their belts.
Behind them, deeper in the woods, more riders waited in silence.
Their mission was simple.
Find the Germans.
Find their weak points.
And if fortune allowed it—strike, disrupt, and spread confusion before the main army arrived.
Across the southern front similar patrols were moving that same night. Cossacks from the Don, from the Kuban, from the lands of the Dnipro and the endless steppe. Some had been ordered forward by officers. Others had come by rivalry alone, eager to be the first to spill German blood.
Most patrols stopped when the enemy line was located.
But not all of them.
At one point of the line, three younger scouts eager to prove themselves slipped forward from the tree line.
They moved low through the rain, carrying short logs and branches. The field between them and the German trenches stretched nearly two hundred meters of dark soil and flattened grass.
Lightning flickered faintly above the clouds.
In those brief flashes the men saw strange markers scattered across the ground ahead.
Long sticks.
Wooden stakes hammered into the earth.
Each one carried a board with a crude skull painted across it.
The scouts paused only a moment.
None of them understood the warning.
Then they moved again.
Step by careful step they crossed the field.
The rain whispered around them.
The German trenches lay silent.
Reaching the wire, the first Cossacks moved fast.
They laid the logs across the barbed coils and stepped onto them one after another, boots slipping on wet bark and rain-slick wire. The obstacle shuddered beneath their weight, but it held long enough.
The first man dropped into the trench.
Then the second.
Then the third.
It was not a broad trench—only a narrow fighting ditch, tight enough that one man could move properly while the others were forced to follow almost single-file, shoulders scraping mud and timber as they pushed in behind him.
A German sentry turned at the sound.
He had only enough time to grunt, "What the—"
Then the first Cossack hit him.
The two of them slammed together in the trench so hard their shoulders struck both walls at once. Mud and rainwater splashed. The Cossack drove his knife down with all his strength—
—and the blade hit the German's chest plate with a metallic crack, skidding off uselessly. The knife bounced wild and plunged straight down into the Cossack's own thigh.
He screamed.
The German roared back in pain and fury, half pinned beneath him, and dragged out his pistol at point-blank range. The two men writhed in the cramped trench, boots slipping, elbows smashing into the walls, neither able to get clean leverage in the narrow space.
Behind the wounded Cossack, his two comrades tried to force themselves forward—but there was no room. Only a tangle of bodies, steel, mud, and panic.
The wounded Cossack, maddened by pain, struck again. This time the knife went under the collar.
It punched into the German's neck.
Blood burst hot and black in the rain.
But the German did not stop.
Teeth bared, choking, drowning in his own blood, he jammed the pistol upward into the Cossack's ribs and fired.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The flashes lit the trench in white bursts. The shots were deafening in that narrow ditch. The Cossack jerked with each hit, then sagged forward, dead weight collapsing atop the man he had killed.
For one stunned heartbeat, the two Cossacks behind him only stared.
Their comrade lay sprawled across the German sentry like butchered meat, the two bodies tangled together in the mud at the bottom of the trench. Blood ran along the narrow ditch, mixing with rainwater and soaking into the churned earth.
Neither man moved.
For a moment the world seemed to hold its breath.
But the night beyond the trench was not still.
Out in the field, other shadows were already moving toward the wire.
Boots slipped through wet grass. Men crouched low as they crossed the dark ground, rifles held close, their eyes fixed on the trench line ahead.
Then one of them stumbled.
His foot caught something buried in the soil.
There was a sharp metallic snap.
A dull pop sounded from beneath the earth.
One of the advancing Cossacks looked down just in time to see a small black shape burst up from the ground at his feet.
"What the hell—?"
It exploded in his face.
The blast tore him apart without killing him outright. A storm of steel fragments ripped through cheeks, eyes, throat, and chest. His legs vanished from under him as his knees and shins were shredded into wet ruin. He hit the ground screaming, hands clawing at a face that was no longer a face.
"Blyat! Blyat! Mother of God—!"
Another man lunged to drag him back.
He never reached him.
Another wire snapped.
Another mine sprang up.
Another burst of steel tore through the rain.
The second man spun as fragments ripped through his stomach and arm, opening him like torn cloth. He fell on top of the first, both of them shrieking in different pitches, one high and choking, the other raw and animal.
From the tree line more Cossacks shouted in alarm.
"Back! Back!" "Help them!" "Move, move!"
Some surged forward to pull the wounded clear.
Others froze.
Then farther down the line another patrol stumbled into the same trap.
Pop.
Flash.
Screams.
Then another.
And another.
The darkness broke apart into bursts of mud, blood, and flying steel as the scattered minefield came alive. Men dropped everywhere—some with legs torn open, some clutching ruined faces, some simply howling and rolling in the field as shrapnel turned flesh into meat.
Panic spread faster than the explosions.
The Cossacks no longer knew where safety ended and death began.
And then the German line woke.
"Alarm! Alarm!" "Enemy! Enemy at the wire!"
Voices rose from the trenches all at once.
Men exploded from dugouts and rain-dark shelters, half awake and already angry. Boots hit firing steps. Rifle bolts snapped. Machine gun teams threw themselves down behind their weapons.
In the trench where the sentry had died, a German infantryman burst up from a recess in the wall with his M1 carbine already in hand. He took one look at the two Cossacks trapped behind the dead bodies and shouted:
"Enemy in the trench! Alarm!"
The Cossacks lunged at him.
He fired instantly.
The M1 bucked in his hands—bam, bam, bam, bam, bam—so fast it sounded almost like one tearing burst.
The first shot hit one Cossack in the upper chest and threw him backward into the trench wall.
The second took the other in the mouth.
The next three slammed into both of them before either body had fully fallen.
They collapsed in the mud in a heap of limbs and blood.
The German soldier stared at them only long enough to see the dead sentry pinned beneath the first infiltrator's corpse, throat opened to the spine.
His face twisted.
"Man down!" he roared. "Medic! Medic!"
Then his rage swallowed whatever came after.
"Kill them all! Fire! Fire!"
And the trench obeyed.
Red flares screamed into the sky.
Their light turned the clouds crimson and painted the rain in blood-colored streaks.
"Field! Field! One hundred fifty meters!" "Left side! Movement!" "Fire!"
Machine guns opened up.
The first bursts tore across the open ground low and flat, kicking up mud, smashing into bodies, stitching through men who were bent over dragging the wounded. One Cossack trying to haul a comrade by the collar jerked three times and folded over him. Another lost half his jaw and dropped without a sound.
The riflemen joined in a heartbeat later.
Cracks rolled along the trench line in ragged sequence. Muzzle flashes stabbed the dark. Men shouted ranges, directions, corrections.
The field became murder.
Still, from the southern tree line the Cossacks fired back.
Muzzle flashes flared among trunks and bushes. Bullets hissed and snapped over the trench. One German cried out as a round smashed into his shoulder plate hard enough to spin him sideways. Another took a hit in the helmet; the bullet glanced off with a vicious clang, leaving him dazed and bleeding from the scalp.
"Tree line! Three hundred fifty meters!" a sergeant bellowed. "All squads—fire, fire!"
The German line shifted as one.
Rifles hammered the woods.
Machine guns raked the undergrowth.
Then the grenadiers stepped up.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Rifle grenades leapt out into the darkness and burst among the trees. Branches shattered. Bark flew. Men screamed as steel fragments punched through trunks, cloaks, hands, and faces. One blast blew a Cossack backward out from behind a tree, chest opened and one arm hanging by strips.
Then the mortars woke.
A dull, hollow thump rolled through the trench line.
Another.
Another.
Small bombs rose invisibly into the night and came down in the forest edge with brutal concussions that sent mud, roots, and torn bodies into the air.
The whole right flank seemed to come alive at once.
Rain hammered down.
Lightning flashed.
Rifles cracked.
Machine guns roared.
Grenades burst.
Mortars slammed into the dark.
And everywhere along the line the same thing was happening—small patrols colliding with German steel, first blood running into trench water, the night itself tearing open with the first true violence of the campaign.
Across the trenches, backpack radios crackled awake.
Signals raced down the line.
Within minutes the whole front was stirring.
But despite the Cossacks' fury and their unwillingness to yield, the clash did not last long.
No more than ten minutes after the first mine burst in the field, the fight was already dying.
The Russian scouts had expected darkness, confusion, perhaps even a half-sleeping enemy line they could cut apart before alarm truly spread. Instead they had found wire, mines, machine guns, mortars, and an enemy that woke fast and killed faster. Under the sudden ferocity of German fire, even their courage could not hold them there.
So they broke.
Not in panic at first, but in grim necessity.
Men dropped low and crawled back through the wet fields while bullets hissed above them. Others dragged wounded comrades by collars, belts, and wrists, hauling them inch by inch toward the safety of the tree line. Some ran bent double through the rain. Some simply vanished into the forest without a word. Mortar rounds burst along the edge of the woods, showering branches, bark, and wet soil down over them, while grenade-launcher blasts cracked through the darkness and snapped limbs from the trees overhead.
Still the Russians kept pulling back.
And the Germans did not pursue.
From trench to trench the order went down the line:
"Cease fire!"
One by one the machine guns fell silent.
Rifles lowered.
The grenade launchers stopped thumping.
Only the rain remained, and beneath it the faint groans of the wounded left in the dark between the lines.
The first blood had been drawn.
And yet it was nothing.
No more than the first spark.
The real battle still waited ahead.
Soon after, the rain began to weaken.
The storm did not wholly pass, but its violence broke. The hammering downpour faded into a thinner, colder trickle, and the clouds slowly began to tear apart overhead. The fields, however, had already been transformed. Soil had turned black and slick. The low ground was churned into mud. Every boot, every wheel, every hoof would now have to fight the land itself.
Then came the first gray light of dawn.
Across the trench lines of I Corps, men were already awake and moving.
Machine guns were uncovered, polished and prepared. Ammunition crates were hauled into firing pits. Mortar crews checked their tubes, fuzes, and shells one last time. Signalmen bent over their radios and cables. Officers moved down the trenches, speaking little, their men already knowing what was coming.
Far to the south, beyond the forests and the wet fields, the Russian army had already stirred awake.
Infantrymen had risen from the ground where they had slept in cloaks, under wagons, beside horses, or simply in the open. Officers shouted them awake. Bugles sounded. Orders spread down the line. Great marching columns moved along the roads, and when close to the town they began to break apart. Battalion by battalion, company by company, the Russians spread out toward their assigned sectors.
Across the southern front, stretching nearly a hundred kilometers, more than two hundred thousand Russian soldiers were moving into position.
And in the Soldau sector, on the German right flank, nearly sixty thousand infantry were already assembling for the assault.
Behind the dark line of trees, rifles were lifted.
Bayonets slid into place with cold metallic clicks.
The attack was forming.
Officers moved among the ranks.
Men checked rifles, ammunition pouches, grenades, and the straps of their packs.
Field guns were dragged into firing positions as close to the line as the roads and ground would allow. Some Russian batteries remained farther back for indirect fire. Others, because the terrain offered little room and the woods limited movement, were pushed aggressively forward into clearings, hedgerows, and forest edges where they could fire more directly at the German lines.
It was not elegant.
It was not subtle.
But it was the Russian way.
Then, as the pale morning light spread over the soaked land, the guns spoke.
The first Russian artillery salvo roared out across the southern front.
Shells shrieked over the fields and smashed into the earth before the German trenches. Mud, timber, wire, and black soil leapt into the air. The bombardment was not overwhelming—not yet. These were mostly light field guns, and their ammunition was limited. The fire came in concentrated blows against chosen strongpoints, trenches, and key sectors where the Russian artillery had found room to deploy and clear lines of fire.
Behind that shelling, the Russian infantry waited.
And watched.
And prepared to come on.
Another shell screamed overhead.
It flew too far.
The projectile passed over the trenches, over the sleeping streets of Soldau, and slammed into the outer wall of the old Teutonic castle.
Stone shuddered.
The explosion rolled through the fortress like thunder through a burial chamber. Dust burst from ancient mortar lines. Splinters of timber scattered through the corridors. Somewhere deeper within the castle a window shattered, the glass ringing against stone.
In the throne hall, Oskar stirred.
The chamber had been silent through the long night.
Only the weak glow of dying candles remained, their small flames trembling in iron holders along the walls. Their light crawled across old red brick and the hanging banners of the Empire, casting long black shadows that stretched across the floor like reaching fingers.
At the far end of the hall stood the throne.
It was an old seat of dark carved wood, once meant for some forgotten Teutonic lord of the borderlands. For most men it would have seemed immense.
For Oskar it was merely large enough.
There he sat.
Not resting in comfort, but waiting.
He had not gone to a bed. He had not laid aside his armor. Through the long hours of darkness he had remained there like a statue carved from black iron.
His armor drank the candlelight.
Broad plates covered his chest and shoulders, their dark surfaces scarred by earlier battles and dull with the weight of rain and dust. Beneath them his enormous frame seemed barely contained, the metal rising and falling with the slow, heavy rhythm of his breathing.
Across his lap rested the skull-faced helmet.
Beside the throne leaned the massive sword, its blade so long that the tip brushed the stone floor.
For hours he had not moved.
He had slept sitting upright, like some ancient warlord awaiting the moment of awakening.
Then the castle shook again.
Another shell burst somewhere in the courtyard below.
Dust drifted down from the beams of the high ceiling.
Outside, faint at first but growing clearer, came the sound of shouting men and running boots as soldiers rushed to their positions along the walls and trenches.
Still Oskar did not move.
For a moment longer he remained as he had been through the night—a dark shape upon the throne, silent and unmoving beneath the banners of the Empire.
Then his eyes opened.
Slowly.
The candlelight caught them for an instant, reflecting in the dark metal of his armor.
Beyond the walls the artillery continued to roar.
He said nothing.
He only listened as the guns spoke across the fields beyond Soldau.
It was the 27th of July.
His twenty-sixth birthday.
And this was how it began.