The last thing he remembered was the hiss of tires on wet asphalt and the blinding glare of headlights where they shouldn't be. A spectacular failure of risk assessment, his final, fleeting thought had been with a detached, academic irony. Then came the wrenching shriek of metal, a constellation of shattered glass, and the cold, abrupt silence that followed. It was the messy, unpredictable chaos of the real world he had always sought to model and control from the safety of a screen.
Then, chaos gave way to pain.
It was not the sharp, clinical pain of a catastrophic injury he might have expected, but a dull, throbbing ache that seemed to emanate from the very bone of his skull. A thick, sweet smell of woodsmoke and something acridly herbal clogged his nostrils. Beneath him, the surface was not the cold pavement of a city street, but something soft, yet coarse. Wool, he registered. Scratchy and unpleasantly warm.
He forced his eyes open.
The world swam into focus through a blurry haze. Heavy, dark beams crossed a low, plastered ceiling. Motes of dust danced in a single shaft of weak afternoon light filtering through a leaded glass window. The air was thick and still. A man with a graying beard and wire-rimmed spectacles was leaning over him, dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth that smelled of vinegar and lavender.
"Ah, he awakens. Thank God." The man's voice was a low rumble, speaking a language he had never studied but understood with perfect, startling clarity. It was Danish. "Careful now, my lord. You took a nasty fall. The stallion was spooked by the sound of the drilling."
My lord?
The confusion was a physical thing, a wave of nausea that rolled through him. He tried to sit up, but a spike of agony shot through his head, and the man gently pushed him back down.
"Easy, Baron Eskildsen. You've a severe concussion. Another inch to the left and…" The man, presumably a doctor, trailed off, shaking his head grimly. "Your constitution is strong. A true Eskildsen."
The name landed in his mind like a stone dropped into a deep well. Baron Christian Eskildsen.
And as the name settled, the memories came with it.
It was not a gentle recollection. It was an avalanche, a violent, disorienting flood of a life he had never lived, crashing against the bedrock of his own twenty-nine years from the 21st century.
He saw, felt, and knew it all in a dizzying, sickening rush:
A stern-faced man with a magnificent mustache and cold, assessing eyes—Father. Count Eskildsen.The damp, salty air of the Kattegat, whipping across the fields of the family estate—Eskildsgård.The weight of a hunting rifle, cold and solid in his hands. The thrill of a successful hunt.French verbs drilled into his head by a severe-looking tutor. Galloping a black stallion named Odin along a muddy track. The face of a pretty dairymaid, blushing as he passed.The rough camaraderie of other young nobles. The deep, ingrained sense of duty, honor, and a station to which he was born.
It was the complete, lived experience of an eighteen-year-old Danish aristocrat, and it was now his. The memories were faded, like a photograph left in the sun, lacking the sharp emotional core of his own life, yet they were undeniably there. He knew this room. It was his bedchamber in the family's Copenhagen residence. He knew the doctor's name was Madsen.
His own identity, his own memories of a world of skyscrapers, smartphones, and global information networks, remained solid. It was the core of him, the true self now imprisoned in this… vessel. This boy.
"Where… where is my father?" Christian asked, the Danish words feeling foreign and yet perfectly natural on his tongue. His voice was higher than he was used to, lacking its familiar timbre.
Dr. Madsen sighed, his expression turning grave. "The Count is still with the army at Dybbøl, my lord. We pray for his safety and for all our soldiers. This war…" He wrung his hands, a gesture of profound anxiety. "Prussia does not sleep."
Dybbøl. Prussia. War.
The words sliced through his confusion with the terrible clarity of a historian's insight. He pushed himself up on his elbows, ignoring the renewed protest from his skull. His eyes scanned the room, desperate for confirmation. On a small writing desk near the window lay a newspaper, the Berlingske Tidende. He couldn't make out the fine print, but the large, blocky text of the date was unmistakable.
18. February 1864.
February 18th, 1864.
The Second Schleswig War.
The single most catastrophic military conflict of 19th-century Danish history. The war that would see Denmark utterly humbled, its southern provinces of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg ripped away by the combined might of Prussia and Austria. It was the war that ended any pretense of Denmark being a significant European power. It was the beginning of the end.
Christian swung his legs over the side of the bed. The room tilted violently, but he planted his feet on the cold, wide-planked floor.
"My lord, you must rest!" Dr. Madsen exclaimed, rushing forward.
Christian ignored him, stumbling towards a washstand in the corner. Above it hung a small, polished silver mirror. He gripped the edge of the stand, his knuckles white, and forced himself to look.
The face that stared back was not his.
It was the face of a boy. Barely a man, with high cheekbones, a strong jaw still softened by youth, and a mess of dark blond hair. His eyes, a startlingly clear blue, were wide with a terror that was not entirely his own. It was the face of Baron Christian Eskildsen. An eighteen-year-old noble, destined to live through his nation's greatest humiliation, to inherit a title in a broken country, and to fade into history as a footnote.
The historian in him saw the grand, tragic sweep of events. The strategist saw the variables, the levers of power, the catastrophic mistakes. He knew how this war ended. He knew about the failed diplomacy, the outdated tactics, the political infighting in Copenhagen that doomed the men freezing in the trenches at Dybbøl. He knew this was the event that would cement Otto von Bismarck's power and pave the way for a unified German Empire that would twice plunge the world into fire.
A cold calm washed over him, extinguishing the boy's panic. The throbbing in his head subsided, replaced by the low hum of furious calculation. He was here. Now. In this body, in this time. He was a Danish Baron, son of a Count, in the precise moment his nation was about to be brought to its knees.
He had been given a front-row seat to a disaster.
Or perhaps, he had been given something else entirely.
Christian looked at the pale, frightened boy in the mirror, but his own thoughts were clear, sharp, and utterly ruthless. This wasn't an end. It wasn't a punishment or a bizarre afterlife.
This was ground zero. And he was standing at the epicenter.