Shadowmane did not slow after the first trench line.
He tore across the open field alone, black barding flashing under moonlight, leaping shell craters with impossible ease while stones, roots, and broken branches shattered beneath his hooves.
Ahead of him, the second Russian trench line was waking fast.
Men were already dragging themselves into position for the Black Legion assault. Rifles were being loaded. Machine guns were hauled into place. Caps were jammed onto heads, boots half-laced, belts pulled tight. Officers moved along the line shouting through the dark, forcing order into men still half-blinded by the panic and fear the earlier artillery barrage had caused
Scared though they were, they had prepared for the Germans.
Tank ditches had been dug ahead, with barbed wire waiting behind. And further behind that, in the tree line, men crouched in deepened trench bays and firing pits, ready to duck from artillery and rise for the assault.
They were ready for the Black Legion, but they were not ready for the horse.
Shadowmane cleared the outer defenses in a single savage leap and crashed into the trench like a dropped engine. One poor Russian conscript had time only to look up at the dark shape above him before the armored stallion came down on him and crushed him into the mud without a proper scream.
For one heartbeat, the trench froze.
Shadowmane seemed ready to surge onward toward Riga.
But just then, one panicked Russian fired almost point-blank into the black armor over his hindquarters.
The bullet sparked harmlessly off the plate. Shadowmane stopped instantly, and slowly, his armored head turned.
His ears flattened.
Then he screamed and charged.
He hit the shooter like a bull, slamming him into the muddy trench wall hard enough to break him apart against it. At the same time, the broken chain hanging from Shadowmane's neck snapped through the darkness and caught another soldier across the face, tearing skin and flesh in a red strip that dropped the man screaming into the mud.
Just like that, that section of the trench dissolved into panic, rifle fire, and the rage of one horse.
Farther down the line, men heard the screams before they saw anything. Then bodies started flying out of the smoke—one crashing into a machine-gun crew, another landing across two crouched riflemen, another tumbling lifeless into the mouth of a dugout.
Some men survived the impact.
Most did not.
By the time the nearest officer understood that the black horse was inside the line, Shadowmane had already smashed through that section and bounded out again, racing north toward the next belt of defenses and the city of Riga beyond.
Behind him, the Black Legion had already reached the first trench line.
The tanks came first.
The Black Legion called them Panzer I, though in shape and purpose they belonged to a later age—squat, turreted, armored machines with cannon and machine guns, closer to the Panzer III of Oskar's old world than anything 1914 had a right to see. Against the Russians in their shallow trenches, they were not vehicles so much as moving forts.
The Russians had one answer.
The Zhilinskiy Grenade.
It was a crude anti-tank charge made by bundling several Model 1912 "Lantern" grenades together, then given the name of General Zhilinskiy in the usual way senior men claimed the ideas of desperate subordinates. In theory, it could damage tracks, crack armor, or cripple a tank.
The problem was simple.
A man had to get close enough to use it.
The Black Legion tanks did not allow that.
They halted outside easy throwing distance, headlights glaring through the smoke, and opened fire. Their machine guns swept the trench lip. Their cannons smashed dugouts, firing pits, and any knot of Russians trying to rally. Any man who rose with a Zhilinskiy bundle in his hands was cut down before he had taken three steps. More than once, a Russian fell backward into the trench with the charge still live, and his own weapon tore him and the men around him apart.
Rifle fire answered in panic.
Bullets struck German armor and did nothing.
Then the armored trucks rolled up behind the tanks.
They were ugly, hard-edged machines bristling with machine guns and carrying men in their bellies. Rear doors slammed open, and Black Legion infantry spilled out in squads with their faces covered, dressed in dark uniforms, wearing modern helmets and light body armor, weapons at the ready, moving low and fast under the protection of tank and truck fire.
Grenades went first into dugouts, blind corners, and any hole where a rifle barrel still moved.
Then came the carbines and machine guns.
Short bursts. Controlled fire. Clean, efficient killing. Bayonets flashed only when the work had to be finished up close, driving down into wounded enemies before they could reach for rifles, pistols, or grenades.
There was no mercy and no wasted motion.
It was a clearing action, nothing more.
Once the trench was taken, the assault troops mounted up almost as quickly as they had disembarked.
Doors slammed shut.
Engines growled.
The tanks pushed toward the next line first.
The armored trucks followed.
Behind them came the motorcycles—two-wheeled machines and sidecar teams, fast, dirty, and efficient. Their riders dropped into the captured trench, checked dugouts, shot any survivors trying to hide, gathered German wounded, marked usable gaps, and held the line just long enough for the heavier infantry columns behind them to arrive. Once the main infantry reached the trench and took over its defense, the motorcycle troops moved on again, racing after the armored spearhead to clean out the next broken position.
That was how the Black Legion advanced. Simple, mechanical, ruthless, moving line after line, pushing onward.
While the southern defenses were broken apart in stages, Riga's western coast was hammered from the sea.
Around the coastal batteries, Russian guns flashed from cracked emplacements and half-ruined concrete pits, firing desperately into the dark Gulf of Riga. Prince Heinrich's fleet answered from fog and distance with heavier voices. One battery vanished beneath a naval salvo. Then another. Searchlights died one by one. Concrete split. Gun shields folded. Men dragged wounded away from smashed gun pits, only to be thrown flat again by the next impact.
The port suffered as well.
Not deliberately. Not always. But war did not care for intention once shells began falling. A warehouse exploded in flame. A quay vanished under dust and spray. Near the waterfront, shells meant for gun positions struck a row of apartment buildings instead. The upper floors folded inward in a roar of brick, timber, plaster, furniture, and men who had chosen or been ordered to remain too close to the guns.
North of the city, German landing craft kept vomiting marines onto the shore. The first waves drove inland quickly, cutting roads, seizing junctions, and moving toward the rail access points that connected Riga to the north. Their orders were simple: close the city's northern throat, block reinforcements, and be ready to press inward once the defenders weakened.
Riga was being tightened from every side.
From the south came tanks, armored trucks, and infantry.
From the west came the fleet.
From the north came marines.
At the center stood Oskar and the Third Company, holding the castle and the bridge.
Yet the fight around Riga Castle was already becoming worse than Oskar had wanted. He had intended to take the castle and bridge intact. Riga was too valuable to burn. It was a port, a bridgehead, a rail hub, and a future supply artery. Such things were worth more alive than destroyed.
But the Russians fought harder than expected.
Less than twenty minutes after the attack began, the castle district had become a killing ground. The Eternal Guard held barricades, rooftops, stairwells, windows, and bridge approaches with professional discipline, but the Russian Guardsmen kept coming. When they could not break the German positions head-on, some officer—madman or genius, perhaps both—ordered his men to make their own roads through the city with grenades, artillery shell's, or simply with hammers and axes.
Walls were blasted open. Shopfronts were smashed through. Apartments and adjoining buildings were torn into new passages. If the streets were covered, the Russians came through plaster and brick. If the doors were watched, they came through kitchens, sitting rooms, storage rooms, and stairwells.
It worked.
Partly.
The fighting became close, vicious, and confused. Russians burst through interior walls into rooms the Eternal Guard had thought secure. Germans answered with grenades down hallways, carbines through doorframes, and machine-gun fire through floors and thin partitions. Men fought in kitchens, shops, attics, bedrooms, corridors, and apartments where ordinary furniture stood untouched until bullets and bodies smashed it apart.
With the fighting came fire.
Riga's buildings were full of wood, cloth, wallpaper, dust, curtains, beams, paper, furniture, and all the dry little things flame loved. A grenade in a hallway, a lamp overturned, a burst through a wall, a curtain catching fire, and suddenly one room became a floor, and one floor became a building breathing smoke from broken windows.
Oskar moved wherever the line threatened to crack.
He came through walls, dropped through floors, smashed into Russian groups from above and behind, crushed men beneath armor, and threw others aside like broken dolls. Sometimes the sight of him alone was enough. Men saw the skull helm, the blood, the red cape, the impossible size of him, and ran.
But more Russians kept coming without knowing what waited ahead.
So he struck again.
And again.
By then he was covered in dust, soot, blood, and fragments of men. Not because he enjoyed it. Not because he wanted ruin. But because the battle had become a machine that fed men into him, and every time they came, he had to break them before they broke his plan.
Eventually, through the thunder of the city, he felt the southern attack drawing closer.
The armored fist was coming.
So Oskar moved to meet it.
He crossed rooftops, dropped into alleys, cut through a half-formed Russian counterattack near a warehouse, and reached the stone bridge beside Riga Castle just as the eastern sky began to pale faintly with the promise of dawn. Sunrise was still some minutes away, but the night had already begun losing its absolute hold.
He ran onto the bridge, intending to cross south and help break the defensive lines himself.
Then he stopped.
On the far side of the bridge, covered in mud, blood, splinters, and smoke, stood Shadowmane.
The great black stallion stood among the dead and shattered stones like the animal of some war-god. His barding was dented. His nostrils flared. Broken chain still dragged from his neck. Blood streaked his armored chest. Something that might once have been a man's sleeve hung from one jagged edge of his harness.
For a moment, horse and master stared at one another across the bridge.
Oskar's skull helm tilted slightly.
"What," he said, his voice carrying oddly through the ruined quiet between bursts of gunfire, "are you doing here?"
Shadowmane snorted.
It was not an ordinary horse sound. It was like accusation, saying, "How dare you leave me behind."
Oskar understood it well enough.
For one absurd heartbeat, amid artillery, burning buildings, dead men, and the collapse of a city, Oskar nearly laughed.
Then he slid his great sword into the scabbard beneath his red cape and started forward.
Shadowmane came to meet him.
They met at the center of the stone bridge beneath moonlight, smoke, and the fading red glow over Riga Castle. Oskar threw both armored arms around the stallion's neck. Shadowmane pressed into him hard enough that a lesser man would have been knocked flat. The horse huffed hot breath against the skull helm and stamped once, making clear that he remained deeply offended.
Oskar released him and laughed.
"I know you are angry," he said, patting the armored neck. "But I am still not dropping you out of an aircraft. Not yet. A parachuting horse is a bit much, even for me."
Shadowmane huffed and turned his head away as if insulted by the lack of ambition.
Oskar laughed again. "Fine. Perhaps next time. But if you get hurt, do not blame me when I am forced to put you into retirement early."
At that, Shadowmane's ears came forward.
He seemed to brighten instantly.
Oskar shook his head and struck one fond hand against the armored faceplate.
"Mad beast."
Then the two of them turned south.
But Oskar did not mount, instead he ran beside Shadowmane, armored boots striking stone in rhythm with the stallion's iron-shod hooves. Master and horse moved together across the bridge with terrible joy, like a boy and his dog racing through a meadow to pick flowers, if the boy were a black-armored warlord, the dog weighed nearly a ton, and the flowers were Russian soldiers waiting to be torn out by the roots.
On the rooftops, Eternal Guard sniper teams watched in stunned silence.
From one of the castle towers, Captain Carter lowered his binoculars slightly.
For once, even he did not know what to say.
So he only smiled faintly, shook his head, and returned to commanding the fight at the center of the city.
Riga looked ready to fall within the day.
But the Russians had not yet accepted that.
At City Hall, the new General of the Russian 1st army, Aleksandr Ivanovich Litvinov watched the city burn from behind dark glass.
He was not dressed for a battle. Not properly. Less than half an hour ago he had been asleep, and the haste showed. His grey hair was flattened on one side. His mustache, usually brushed to a stiff imperial neatness, had lost its shape. His tunic was buttoned unevenly over a nightshirt, his collar sat too high against his neck, and his boots had been pulled on without care. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, trying to force himself into the posture of an old Russian commander, but the performance did not fully hold.
His right foot betrayed him.
It tapped against the floorboards again and again in small, sharp motions, quick as a nervous telegraph key.
Outside, Riga was no longer the city he had gone to sleep in. Fire pulsed over the castle district. Gunfire flickered in the streets. Somewhere south of the river, the Black Legion was rolling forward like a mechanical tide. He had prepared defenses to the best of his abilities, and tried to make Riga into an unbreakable fortress with the few resources that had been gifted to him.
Now, despite all that preparation it seemed that it had not been enough. For how could it have been, he realised that now.
Before this night, he had heard the stories from Warsaw, about Black Legion soldiers falling into the city. Command posts cut apart before anyone understood the attack had begun. The Iron Prince appearing where he should not be, slaughtering officers and generals like a butcher dropped into the heart of the army.
Litvinov had dismissed much of it as panic, excuses, and battlefield madness.
He did not dismiss it now.
He had woken under the red flare and seen the truth with his own eyes.
The Germans did have airborne troops. The Iron Prince was in the city.
And Riga just might fall in less than a day, much like Warsaw had.
Behind him, the door opened hard.
A staff officer stumbled in, breathing fast, mud and soot on his coat, sweat running down his temples despite the cold. He looked like a man who had crossed half the city at a run and had arrived only to discover that the room he reached was no safer than the streets behind him.
"General," the officer said, voice tight, "the situation is severe. The Black Legion has broken through the first southern line. Riga Castle is still in German hands, and every attempt to retake it has failed. The Iron Prince and his elite guard hold the bridge district. German marines are landing to the north. Their fleet is smashing the coastal batteries. We are being pressed on every side."
He swallowed.
"Sir… what are your orders?"
Litvinov did not turn at once.
He watched another flash bloom south of the river, bright and brief against the dark.
"So," he said quietly, "the Black Legion truly dared to attack us after all. And with such force."
The officer hesitated. The general was speaking partly to him, partly to the window, partly to his own wounded pride.
Then Litvinov answered.
"The men will do what they have already been ordered to do. They will hold the city as long as they can. At any cost."
The officer's face tightened.
He had expected that answer.
Expectation did not make it easier to hear.
"And you, General?"
Litvinov turned then.
The officer stiffened.
"I mean no offense, sir," he said carefully, "but City Hall may no longer be safe. If the Iron Prince is moving through Riga, he may come for headquarters. Many of the staff fear this will become another Warsaw. Maybe, we should relocate?"
For a long moment Litvinov only looked at him.
There it was.
The fear no one wanted to say too loudly. This battle if lost would not merely be a defeat, but a decapitation. The First Army's command butchered in its own headquarters, the way men said the Second Army's command had been butchered before. If that happened here, Riga would not merely fall. The First Army would shatter into rumor, panic, and take many more months to be remade if ever.
Litvinov could not allow that, and he also could not allow it to be called a flight, but merely a tactical retreat.
"Do not worry," he said at last. "That is precisely why I have a motorcar."
The officer blinked. "General?"
"My Muscle Motors A-Class is waiting outside," Litvinov said. "Prepare it for departure. Before first light, headquarters must relocate. City Hall is too exposed, and if command is cut off here, the defense will collapse faster. I will not give the Iron Prince the satisfaction of decapitating the First Army's commander in his bedchamber."
The officer's mouth tightened.
Both men understood how that would look if the soldiers were told to hold, while the general left.
But the officer did not argue. Russian hierarchy had crushed better instincts out of stronger men than him.
"Yes, General."
"Pack the operational maps, signal logs, codebooks, and current dispositions. Anything that cannot be carried is to be burned."
"Yes, General."
Litvinov turned back toward the window, watching flames crawl higher over the city.
"And once we are clear, burn the city behind us. If Riga must fall, let the Germans inherit smoke, ash, and useless walls."
The officer looked up sharply.
"Sir… the city?"
Litvinov's foot kept tapping.
"The city is already burning," he said. "We will simply make certain it burns usefully."
The officer went pale, but his pencil moved.
"Yes, General."
"And send word to Northwestern Front Headquarters. To General Yakov Grigoryevich Zhilinsky. Tell him the Germans have attacked Riga in full force. The Iron Prince and his men hold the castle district. Naval forces are bombarding the coast. Marines are landing north of the city. Armored forces have broken through from the south."
The officer wrote as quickly as he could.
Litvinov's voice hardened.
"Tell him also that I believe we have drawn the main weight of the Black Legion onto Riga, just as predicted. Their attack is too coordinated, too violent, too strong to be anything less. If that is true, then the rest of their line must be exposed."
The officer glanced up.
Litvinov was wrong, though he had no way to know it. The force striking Riga was only part of Oskar's army: XVII Corps, Rommel's armored division, Heinrich's fleet, the marines, and Third Company at the bridge. Elsewhere, other Black Legion corps, reserves, police units, and occupation formations still held the long front, stretched thin but not broken, tired but not helpless.
Litvinov saw only the blow landing on his city.
To him, such force had to mean weakness somewhere else.
"And tell him honestly," Litvinov continued, "that Riga may fall within the day. Two, if God is generous. If Northwestern Front intends to counterattack, now may be the moment. Not here of course, but elsewhere. Against the line they must have weakened to make this assault possible."
For a moment, neither man spoke.
Then Litvinov snapped, "Go, carry out my orders, and remember to prepare the car. I want to be gone before the Germans decide to make a newspaper headline of me."
The officer saluted.
"Yes, General."
He left at once.
The door closed behind him.
General Litvinov remained at the window, hands clasped behind his back, tunic uneven, belly forward, mustache bent out of shape, posture still fighting to remain imperial.
Outside, Riga burned and his foot kept tapping.