As the year of 1913 began, time once again began to feel slower, somehow, as if the days had finally stopped chasing Oskar and had begun to walk beside him.
Life had once again settled into a simple routine, untroubled by any great crisis. Birthdays were celebrated in warm rooms with familiar voices. Letters were answered before they could pile into accusing stacks. Inspections of the country were still made—rail lines, factories, barracks, ministries—but without urgency. They felt less like burdens and more like the steady rhythm of his life as Crown Prince, a responsibility that no longer tasted like emergency.
Even the scars of the assassination attempt so long ago, had nearly faded entirely. And with that fading of past scars, Oskar found himself drifting back into the role the people of Germany loved most: the People's Prince.
Not a prince above them, sealed behind gates and ceremony, but one who moved amongst them as if he were one of them.
Of course, it was impossible for him to truly disappear. Oskar was a giant of a man—two hundred and eight centimetres of unmistakable presence—and handsome enough that even when his children buried him in sand at the beach, only his face left exposed, a single smile was sometimes enough to make women nearby faint. He did not need to strive for dignity or cultivate authority; it clung to him naturally. He had no need for disguises or careful postures. Wherever he went, he was recognized at a glance.
Still, he tried to walk casually amongst the masses—and, soon the masses learned to let him walk.
At first, reminders were given politely. Calm words. A raised hand. A request for space. Most listened. One did not. An over-enthusiastic reporter pressed too close, camera thrust forward like a weapon, chasing a reaction that was never going to come.
Oskar stopped.
He did not raise his voice. He did not shout. He simply reached out, his fingers closing around the camera as if it were made of thin tin rather than steel and glass. There was a sharp crack—too loud, too final—and the machine collapsed in on itself beneath his grip. Gasps rippled through the crowd.
Then Oskar stepped closer.
He pressed a single finger into the man's chest—not hard, not violently, but with enough effortless pressure to make the reporter stumble back, breath leaving him in a startled gasp. Up close, the difference was undeniable: the sheer size of him, the calm certainty in his posture, the quiet understanding that these hands could crush bone as easily as they had crushed metal.
"Enough," Oskar said.
The word was not loud. It didn't need to be. His voice carried authority the way gravity carried weight.
For a moment, no one moved. Then space opened naturally around him—instinctively, as if the crowd itself had decided where the boundary lay.
After that, the swarming stopped.
People gave him distance the way they gave distance to fire or deep water—not out of fear, but respect. As if this, too, was part of the new Germany: the ability to admire without overwhelming, to approach without violating.
Because Oskar liked being in public.
He simply hated moving through crowds like making his way through chest-deep water.
He didn't enjoy secrecy. He didn't enjoy disguises. He didn't enjoy being shepherded through life by a wall of uniforms. He preferred to be seen—openly, plainly—moving through the same places his people moved.
Through public swimming halls, for example. The Waterworlds—Oskar's creation—were no longer remarkable in themselves, and by 1913 more of them were simply opening across the country each year.
There, he wore nothing more than swimming shorts, unashamed of his body and unashamed of being seen. And thanks to them more and more children learned to swim in clean tiled pools instead of rivers and canals. Adults attended proper swimming classes, not just to bathe but to exercise, to relax, to enjoy the simple luxury of leisure. Workers soaked tired bones after long shifts. Families spent afternoons together under high glass ceilings, light reflecting off water instead of soot-stained stone. It was all ordinary by modern standards—and quietly revolutionary for the early twentieth century.
Waterworld was not just a place to wash. It was a place to live.
Beyond the pools, Oskar had built saunas and steam rooms—warm, enclosed spaces where bodies rested and conversation slowed. It was there, especially in the saunas, that he lingered the longest. Within the thick steam, faces blurred and distinctions softened. Height mattered less. Titles dissolved. A prince could sit naked among his people and simply be another man on the bench.
In those rooms, men spoke more freely than they ever would in offices or halls of state. They spoke of life. Of politics. Of wages, weather, hopes, and quiet frustrations. Of what was changing—and what still needed to change. And Oskar listened, hidden in plain sight, his presence masked by heat and steam, as if the nation itself were speaking to him through the fog.
From there he went to Pump World gyms that smelled of iron and chalk rather than despair. To parks where grass was replacing soot. To train stations and cinemas and amusement halls where laughter felt unforced, not bought with desperation or borrowed from drink, but rising naturally—like a habit returning.
And everywhere he went, he talked.
To miners and clerks, to mothers and pensioners, to young men who looked at him like the future and old men who looked at him like vindication. He listened. He remembered names. He asked questions that weren't rhetorical, questions meant to be answered. And he enjoyed speaking with different people—especially the ones society was trained to ignore.
Bus drivers, for example.
The new Prussian-blue double-decker buses moved through cities like rolling symbols of the era, carrying people freely as if movement itself had become a right rather than a luxury. Oskar often spoke with the drivers, and he liked them—because to him, status meant little. A bus driver could have ideas just as valuable as a general's, and a bus driver knew far more about the buses, the streets, and the moods of local people than any general ever would. To Oskar it mattered, deeply, to speak to people of different backgrounds and grow his knowledge that way—just as he had done in Ukraine, when he had taken time to interview different people and learned more from their plain truths than he ever had from polished speeches.
More and more often, he brought his family with him.
When they came, the Guard came too—but at a respectful distance, and in small numbers. Enough to keep danger away, but not enough to block what mattered. Oskar wanted the people to see them. Not as portraits on coins or names in newspapers, but as a family with muddy shoes and impatience and laughter. He wanted familiarity to do its slow work, to turn the ruling house into something human and close—good people with ordinary wants, ordinary needs. A ruler you could recognize as a man was a ruler you could trust.
So he let them be seen.
The Crown Prince's children laughed like other children, tugged at sleeves, argued over toys, stared in wide-eyed fascination at trains and machines and crowds. His wives spoke kindly. They waved back. They smiled when spoken to. They looked—at least in behavior—like a family any street might hold, if you ignored the uniforms at the edges and the way a crowd kept unconsciously opening around them.
And the affection the people felt for Oskar spread naturally to his household.
But there was an absurd problem—almost a joke the world insisted on playing.
The more Oskar tried to prove they were not some strange, untouchable creatures, the more he accidentally proved the opposite.
Because no matter how gently they behaved, no matter how normal the gestures were, the reality of them was impossible to miss. Oskar, standing at the height of 208 centimetres, did not merely look like a tall man. He looked like the idea of a man made too large, too solid, too certain. His light-blonde hair and icy blue eyes only sharpened that impression, as if even his gaze had been designed to command.
And then there were the wives—three of them—and all of them beautiful in a way that felt unfair, the kind of beauty that made painters want to paint and journalists want to chase headlines. Feminine, curving, radiant, clear-skinned, smiling as if the entire country were something they had personally decided to forgive. And then the children—nearly twenty in total across the three women—each one like a small impossibility: silver hair, violet eyes, faces that looked half-real, half-myth. Not metaphorically. Literally. Hair and eye colors that nobody else had. The sort of looks you expected in stained-glass saints or feverish stories, not in a living royal family walking past a bakery.
It was like watching a family of superstars stroll into an ordinary street and pretend they were ordinary too.
Oskar meant it kindly. He meant it as reassurance.
Yet for many—especially the poorer and less educated—the effect was not "They are like us."
It was, They are not like us at all.
In that era, plenty of people already carried the old instinct: that rulers were somehow more than regular men, touched by God, born different. And here, absurdly, was a ruling family that seemed to confirm the superstition with its own faces and bodies. The friendliness did not erase the distance. It only made the distance feel natural, as if this was simply how the world had always been meant to look: ordinary people below, and above them—walking kindly amongst them—something else.
Something brighter. Larger. Chosen.
There was no mistaking who was in charge of this country. Oskar didn't need to dress up or announce his title; everyone knew who he was, and everyone respected him greatly. And his wives, maybe through his love and affection or who knows what, seemed year by year to grow even more beautiful—so much so that, had any of them stepped onto a stage, Miss Germany would have felt like an inevitable title rather than a contest.
And with that love came something rarer still: trust.
A society that trusted its rulers became a stable, united society with little to no crime. With police patrolling and the economy growing year by year, there began to be villages—even neighborhoods in cities—where doors were left unlocked. Not out of naïveté, but confidence. Crime had, after all, seemingly ended. Whatever little crime remained was mostly between people who chose to solve conflicts with fists rather than words; while petty crime like stealing was nearly nonexistent. Flags appeared in windows without instruction. National pride did not feel imposed—it felt earned.
And the trust between people was immense. If someone dropped a wallet with cash on the sidewalk, after a day that wallet would still have that cash; at most it might have been moved to a bench or brought to a police station to await its owner. If a mother fell sick, she could simply knock on her neighbour's door and have them come and help her, taking care of her home as if it were their own.
And speaking of sickness—Germany was changing there too, faster than anywhere else.
With the invention of antibiotics, Viagra, and other such things, thanks to Oskar and his doctor and partner, Paul Ehrlich, the German medical industry began to take off as a clear leader in the medical field across the world. Germany not only carried futuristic knowledge of first aid, of the human body, germs and bacteria, vaccines, and much more—it had the Oskar Industrial Group's backing, and the German Crown Prince's backing as well, driving it forward until medicine began to feel like another form of national strength.
And Oskar, walking through his country, didn't only feel that trust could replace locks—he felt the shape of something greater forming behind it.
He felt that what he was making might be a true utopia.
Germany's rise was beginning to resemble the golden age of the USA in the middle 20th century, the kind he remembered reading about in his past life—an era where progress felt constant and the future felt close enough to touch.
Germany was becoming a country where people lived well. Where people trusted one another. Where the state did not need to loom, because it did not need to threaten.
A paradise—fragile and human.
---
And as for Oskar's home—there, his life unfolded with a sweetness that still, even now, managed to surprise him.
The eldest children, now seven years old, had begun their schooling. The twin sisters, Lailael and Juniel, moved through their lessons like a matched pair—brilliant, disciplined, already spoken of in glowing terms by instructors who struggled to hide their admiration. Imperiel attended as well, solemn and serious beyond his years, often found beside Karl's son, Durin, as if instinctively learning the value of alliances long before anyone had taught him the word. The younger ones were not far behind, nearly six years old now, their own schooling already looming just ahead.
Mornings were noisy.
Afternoons calmer.
Evenings full.
And nights—
Oskar woke each morning surrounded by warmth. By women who chose him, who knew him, who shared his bed not as ornaments or trophies, but as partners in a life that felt improbably complete. Tanya's fire. Anna's steadiness. Gundelinda's bright devotion. And now Cecilie as well—once distant, once cautious, now undeniably woven into the fabric of the household.
At first, he had resisted her closeness. He had told himself it was necessary. Proper. Sensible.
Then, gradually, he had stopped pretending he could.
Familiarity bred trust. Trust bred intimacy. The four women were now all, unmistakably, pregnant once more. Everything else about their strange, overlapping relationship followed naturally—without drama, without guilt. It simply was. A quiet equilibrium built on affection, routine, and mutual acceptance.
There were other threads in his life, too—more complicated ones.
Bertha Krupp remained both ally and temptation, their bond forged as much in ledgers and factories as in something far less formal. Meetings sometimes ran long. Conversations drifted. Boundaries blurred, then—just as quietly—re-established themselves again. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be. Both understood the line, even when they stepped over it.
And then there were the shadows he could never entirely shake.
Patricia—the British princess—and her constant companion, Elise. Obligations born of old mistakes and quieter compromises. They surfaced rarely, cloaked in false names and discreet arrangements, seeking his presence more out of need than love. Those encounters left him tired rather than fulfilled, heavy rather than light. Still, he told himself no one was being harmed. Life, after all, was being created—and to Oskar, all life, especially life that came from him carried weight and meaning. The children born of those unions bore names and futures that were not his, and he accepted that distance with relief rather than regret.
All things considered, life felt… good.
Too good, perhaps.
He had family. Wealth. Purpose. Beautiful women. Intelligent children. A country growing steady beneath his hands. A people who trusted him. A future that—if it could remain like this—he would gladly accept without asking for more.
And sometimes, standing in a bathhouse watching workers laugh in steam-fogged air, or sitting on a park bench while his children ran in circles around trees, breathless and shrieking with joy, Oskar found himself thinking:
If this is all my life becomes—
if Germany remains at peace,
if my children grow strong and safe,
if I wake each morning loved and needed—
then I will not ask the world for anything else.
History, for once, could wait.
But life was not that simple.
By May of 1913, the Balkan War ground itself to a conclusion—not with reconciliation, but with exhaustion and ash.
The Ottoman Empire was driven back until it clung to Europe by its fingernails. Constantinople remained—its last true foothold west of the Bosporus—while the rest was stripped away. Even Adrianople, the old imperial city whose loss carried the weight of centuries, was gone. The defeat bled the Ottomans in more ways than territory: poverty deepened, refugees flooded the roads, and a wounded bitterness settled across Anatolia like a lingering fever.
But the victors had not escaped unscathed.
The Balkans had "won" in the way starving men won fights over bread—by surviving. Fields were trampled. Villages emptied. Rail lines lay twisted and broken. Markets collapsed. New borders were drawn with confident strokes on maps, while the people beneath them counted coins and calories and buried their dead. Flags changed faster than lives did.
For a few weeks, it looked as though peace might hold.
Not because anyone was satisfied—but because everyone was tired.
Then the old problem returned.
The allies began to argue over the spoils.
Bulgaria, convinced it had bled the most and earned the greatest reward, looked at the peace terms and saw betrayal. Promises made before the war were quietly forgotten afterward. Lands it had expected—especially Macedonia—were now spoken of by others in the language of "necessity" and "security," as if those words carried ownership.
King Ferdinand took it personally.
Anger made him confident.
Confidence made him reckless.
He sharpened his army again, convinced that Serbia and Greece could be forced to yield what they had taken. What Bulgaria failed to see was how alone it had become. Serbia and Greece prepared together. Romania watched from the north like a patient wolf. Montenegro's sympathies drifted away from Sofia.
Bulgaria had won one war.
It was about to begin another—alone.
And thus it was that on the night of 29 June 1913, the Second Balkan War began.
Bulgarian forces struck Serbian positions in central Macedonia and turned against Greece as well—but the attacks were disjointed, poorly coordinated, and slow. Initiative bled away within days. Bulgarian troops hurled themselves forward in costly waves, only to break against prepared defenses that refused to collapse. The harder Bulgaria pushed, the weaker it became.
Then came the real disaster.
On 10 July, Romania attacked from the north—almost unopposed. Romanian troops advanced with chilling ease, cutting deep toward Sofia while Bulgarian forces remained pinned in the south and west. There was nothing left to stop a fresh enemy.
Soon, Romanian aircraft appeared overhead.
They did not drop bombs.
They dropped leaflets.
Paper snow fell across Bulgarian positions—calling for surrender, warning that Bulgaria was isolated, that it had miscalculated, that it should stop before the knife reached the bone.
Officially, Berlin watched from a distance.
The Empire observed the Balkans the way it observed storms over the North Sea—eyes narrowed, hands folded, pretending the wind belonged to someone else.
Unofficially, Prince Oskar had already made his decision.
He had known he would have to move long before the diplomats admitted the truth—long before the armistice grew thin and brittle, long before the maps were redrawn and then quietly sharpened again. The moment Adrianople fell, the moment the Bulgarians failed to take Constantinople, history had revealed its next move to him.
He had seen this pattern before.
An empire humiliated.
Land lost to former subjects.
Christians ruling soil that had once answered to the call to prayer.
He knew what followed.
Revenge did not negotiate.
It purified.
The Ottomans would not simply reclaim territory. They would reclaim dominance. And dominance, when wounded, always bled into churches, villages, and homes. Oskar did not need intelligence reports to know what an Ottoman return would look like. He had read enough history—and lived enough of it—to recognize the shape of coming slaughter.
So while Europe debated and pretended, Oskar prepared.
Letters went out first—quiet ones, written in careful hands, carried by men who did not wear uniforms and did not ask questions. Orders were given to his Eternal Guard in rooms without windows, speeches delivered without rhetoric or ceremony. And one by one, his personal guards vanished from Potsdam—not replaced, but redeployed.
Just as knights once had been.
Not for conquest.
Not for glory.
But for defense of the faithful.
Like the crusaders of old—not the romantic ones of songs, but the grim, disciplined orders who had once marched east to place themselves between steel and civilians—Oskar sent his men ahead of the war. Not under banners, not under crosses, but under secrecy and silence, as mercenaries. If history insisted on repeating itself, then he would at least choose which role he personally played with the pieces that had been given to him.
Trains moved at night.
Routes curved and doubled back.
Crates bore false manifests.
Nothing traveled openly. Everything moved with intent.
Beneath the palace in Potsdam, in his secret underground hideout that did not exist on any architectural plan, the real work took shape.
Maps covered the walls from floor to ceiling—Thrace, Bulgaria, forest belts, rivers, roads both ancient and forgotten. Ink, chalk, pins, and thread turned paper into something uglier than geography: ambush points, fallback routes, buried charges, hidden caches, observation posts. The maps weren't maps anymore.
They were pre-written violence.
There, Oskar played chess against history itself—Karl beside him like a squat little general carved from stone—moving pieces that represented real living people. The board would not forgive mistakes, and these pieces would not get to stand back up again.
Six hundred men.
Three companies.
His Eternal Guard.
Against an Ottoman force so large it was almost comical—over two hundred thousand soldiers at least, an empire's anger marching in boots and dust and prayer.
The numbers were absurd. The kind of mismatch that belonged in old legends, where a handful of knights held a bridge against an ocean. Except legends usually came with miracles.
Oskar had no real miracles to offer.
Only advanced firearms and gear.
Only secrecy.
Only six hundred well-trained bodies.
And even that came with a hard limit: ammunition. No matter how modern their rifles were, six hundred men could not win a war alone. Not against an empire. Not against two hundred thousand boots and banners. Not when every magazine emptied was one less minute of life bought.
So that was never the mission.
They had been sent to arrive before the war truly began—to stand where medieval knights once had stood, not for glory, but for the simple, brutal purpose of being the thing between the weak and the sword. To block roads. Delay columns. Shatter momentum. Shield villages that would otherwise be "cleansed" in the heat of revenge. To force steel to strike steel instead of flesh.
Their task was not conquest.
It was interruption.
Delay.
Protection.
And the gamble did not end with the numbers.
There was no certainty Bulgaria could reinforce them. No guarantee the Bulgarian army—exhausted, fractured, and surrounded by politics—would arrive in time. Oskar's men might hold, and hold, and hold… and then be swallowed the moment the full Ottoman weight finally focused on them.
But Oskar was betting on a pattern.
He knew Bulgaria would make peace with its Balkan enemies first. He knew the moment those borders stopped bleeding, the full Bulgarian army would turn south. And if the Ottomans had not retaken Adrianople by then, reinforcements would arrive like a hammer.
History would be bent—maybe broken—at the hinge of a single city.
If discovered, it would anger the world—but it was only six hundred men. Small enough to deny. Small enough to explain away. Small enough, Oskar told himself, to keep from dragging Europe into the fire.
But if it failed, it would not fail neatly.
It would fail the way border wars always failed: bodies in ditches, villages burning in the background, and great powers looking the other way because looking was inconvenient. And worst of all—worst of all—it would end with his men dying in foreign soil, nameless and far from home, for a move that might be written off as madness.
But if it worked—if it worked—
then tens of thousands of Christian civilians might live who otherwise would not.
And that was enough to make Oskar push the piece forward, even with his hand trembling.
Because sometimes the difference between massacre and survival was a single line on a map… and six hundred men willing to die on it.
Karl stood beside him, short and solid, boots planted on the edge of the table as if it were a battlefield itself. He watched Oskar stare at the marked paper for a long time before finally clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder.
"It's done," Karl said quietly. "The pieces are placed."
Oskar did not answer at first.
He was thinking of churches with broken doors.
Of villages emptied by prayer and fire.
Of history's habit of killing the same people first.
"I hope," he said finally, "that I haven't just broken the world."
Karl snorted, dry and confident. "You already broke it," he said. "Now you're trying to make it better."
And then—at last—the moment arrived.
On the 12th of July, the Ottoman Empire broke its armistice with Bulgaria.
Hundreds of thousands crossed the Çatalca line, marching to reclaim land they had ruled for over four centuries—furious that former subjects, former slaves, had dared to take it from them.
They expected frightened villages.
They expected collapse.
They did not know the land was already defended.
In forests and hedgerows, in ditches and tree lines, men waited—wrapped in three-dimensional camouflage that broke the human form into foliage and shadow. Weapons hidden. Traps set. Positions rehearsed.
Six hundred modern knights, holding their breath.
And history held it with them.