Across Thrace the rains had finally loosened their grip. They did not stop so much as thin—enough for the world to breathe again, and for the red sun to climb out of the horizon like a reopening wound.
Fog rose from the ground in slow sheets. It seeped out of shell-holes, out of trenches, out of the soaked earth itself, carrying the stink of wet ash and rotting flesh. In the mud, men went down on their knees without orders, facing east. Foreheads pressed into filth. Lips moved with prayers that sounded less like hope than habit.
Ash still lay over the fields in a thin gray skin—soft enough to take footprints, thick enough to cling to cloth and skin. Ahmet knelt with his cavalry company, his breath steady, his hands placed right, his mouth forming words he had repeated since childhood. Around him the horses stamped and snorted and shifted their weight, sensing what men tried not to name.
When he lifted his head, the field lifted with him.
Not in life.
In fragments.
The ground ahead was no longer a field. It was a ruin disguised as earth—mud and ash packed over broken bodies, men and horses folded together into shapes that had stopped being human. Some were buried almost completely, but the land could not swallow everything. A rib cage thrust up like a collapsed basket. A skull stared from a crater, mouth open as if still shouting. A boot stuck out from the mud with a leg still inside it, the knee bent at an angle no knee should hold. Here and there, cloth still fluttered—torn scraps of uniforms and banners snapping in the weak wind like ghosts trying to remember their owners.
Closest to him, something reached.
A hand thrust up through the ash, skeletal fingers clawing at the air as if refusing to accept what had happened—defiance frozen into bone.
Ahmet crawled closer, drawn by something he did not want to admit was curiosity.
The bones were clean in places, charred in others. The face beneath the ash had been a man once—jaw locked open, teeth bared, eye sockets empty but accusing. And clinging to the skull was a strip of black cloth, miraculously intact: a bandana marked in white script.
There is no god but Allah.
The words still held, bright against the black like a vow that refused to wash away.
Ahmet removed his cap and set it down in the mud. He reached for the bandana and lifted it gently, as if it might tear and the act would be an insult. Ash fell from it in gray dust. He brushed the skull with careful fingers—not tenderness, not romance—just the strange respect men give to death when they know it will soon come for them too.
He leaned in and kissed the dead man's brow, the way the old stories said the faithful had done, the way the Prophet's companions were said to have honored the fallen. A brief press of lips on ash and bone, and then he pulled away before the taste could settle.
He whispered a prayer.
Then he tied the bandana around his own head, knotting it tight until it pressed into skin, the white words facing forward.
Behind him, the haze shuddered.
Artillery woke.
Not all at once—one gun, then another, then the whole line rolling into life like a beast turning in its sleep. The guns spoke heavy and absolute, their voices spreading across the fields and shaking ash from the air. The ground trembled as if acknowledging the order.
Ahmet rose.
He did not speak.
There was nothing left to say.
He seized his horse by the reins. The animal was already dancing—eyes wide, nostrils flaring at the smell of smoke and fear. Its muscles jumped under its coat. Ahmet tied a strip of white cloth across its eyes, knotting it tight so the world became darkness. The horse snorted, confused, furious—but it did not bolt. It could not see the dead.
That was the point.
Others did the same. Cloth over eyes. Knots pulled tight. Horses trembling in blind patience.
A line of cavalry formed around him—men mounting in silence, rifles slung and bayonets fixed like teeth. Ahmet drew his saber and raised it once.
And rode forward.
At first it was a controlled gallop, hooves striking ash and earth in steady rhythm. Then the pace broke open. More riders joined, the line stretching, tightening, becoming something that looked like purpose. Banners snapped somewhere behind the fog. Hooves thundered, and the ground answered.
From ahead came the first rifle cracks—distant, sharp, growing.
The cavalry answered with a roar that felt torn from the chest.
"Allahu Akbar!"
Men fell. A horse screamed and went down, throwing its rider into the ash. Another stumbled, recovered, kept running, blind cloth flapping against its face. Ahmet leaned forward in the saddle, saber low, teeth bared—not quite a smile, not quite a snarl.
A ditch flashed beneath them—cut to break momentum, to catch the careless. In its dark mouth, sharpened stakes waited for lesser riders and panicked horses, a trap meant to turn a charge into a pile of screaming bodies.
Ahmet's horse cleared it anyway. Legs tucked, body sailing, ash spraying from its hooves as it landed clean on the far side.
Beyond the ditch, more stakes jutted from the ground—an ugly hedge meant for cavalry—but the earlier bombardment had chewed it apart. Splintered gaps yawned where posts had been blasted down, and through those torn openings the riders threaded, slipping past the teeth that should have impaled them.
Then came the sound.
Not a rifle crack. Not artillery.
A thin, rising whistle—like something furious cutting through the air.
Ahmet's stomach tightened on instinct.
The shell landed behind him.
The explosion punched the earth, throwing mud and ash up in a violent bloom. Three riders vanished with their horses in the blast—gone so completely it felt unreal, like the field had simply swallowed them.
Ahmet did not look back.
The trenches emerged through the haze—dark cuts in the earth, shapes moving inside them, rifles rising in panic. A shot grazed Ahmet's neck, hot and sudden, opening skin. He tasted blood and iron and kept riding.
The horse leapt.
Midair, Ahmet leaned down and swung.
His blade took a defender at shoulder and throat, and blood flared bright against gray. The horse landed beyond the trench, and Ahmet was already turning, already shouting without words, driving the momentum forward as more cavalry poured over the line.
The defenders broke.
Those who tried to climb from the trench were ridden down—rifle shots at arm's length, bayonets punching in and out with dull, practiced movements. Some threw their weapons aside and raised their hands, mouths moving in pleas Ahmet did not understand. It made no difference. The charge did not slow. To hesitate was to invite death, and death was already everywhere.
Ahmet cut through a man in a carpenter's apron, then another—too slight, too young—but the blade did not pause to consider such things. In that moment there were no people, only obstacles between him and the next breath.
An explosion tore the air to his right, flinging mud and ash into the haze. Three riders vanished with their horses in a single violent bloom. Ahmet turned his head and saw it then—the source of the killing.
A ruined farmhouse.
Stone and brick, old and thick, its roof collapsed inward, walls broken and clawed by artillery. Smoke and fog poured through its empty windows. From inside came flashes—brief, sharp—and the flat, disciplined rhythm of gunfire. Green shapes moved there with an efficiency that did not belong to frightened men.
Moss Men.
The hatred came fast and clean. These were the ones who had made fields into graves. Who had broken charges and humiliated banners. Not peasants. Not militia. These were the true enemy.
"There," he shouted—not a command so much as a direction fate itself had chosen.
He raised his saber and drove forward, gathering what remained of his men. They followed, screaming, believing the sound might shield them. The ruined house burned brighter with fire as they closed.
Gunfire met them immediately.
Measured. Merciless.
Horses were struck mid-stride and collapsed, pitching riders forward. Men fell from saddles and were trampled. Still Ahmet pushed on, teeth bared, the distance shrinking.
Ten meters.
A burst cut across him.
The horse took the hit.
It folded as if the ground had opened beneath it, and Ahmet was thrown—rolling hard through ash and mud, breath crushed from his chest. His saber flew from his hand and vanished. He came up against the broken wall, close enough to smell burnt powder and hear voices inside—short, clipped sounds in a harsh language he did not know but recognized at once.
German.
He drew his pistol.
The wall was low now—just a heap of shattered stone. He climbed it in two desperate movements, boots slipping on wet brick. Smoke stung his eyes. At the top, the room opened before him: fogged, half-collapsed, a single window punched through to the killing outside.
One of them stood there—green, wrong, reloading his rifle.
And without hesitation Ahmet fired.
The shots struck—hard sounds, dull impacts—one catching the man in the side, another glancing high. The figure staggered and dropped the rifle but did not fall.
Ahmet raised the pistol again—
—and the Moss Man moved.
The draw was impossibly fast. Three flashes. Three impacts like hammer blows into Ahmet's chest.
He reeled, the pistol sagging in his hand. The world narrowed to sound and pressure and a terrible refusal to fall.
The Moss Man closed the distance in a heartbeat and kicked him squarely, a brutal, efficient blow. Ahmet flew backward off the stones, the sky spinning, the ruined house tearing away above him.
He hit the ground in wet ash and sank into it, staring up at cloud and pale morning light. The noise faded to a distant, roaring hush.
And he did not rise.
The view pulled back.
Cavalry closed on the ruin from every direction, drawn to it like a swarm to flame. The flame did not wait for contact. Machine-gun fire scythed through them in steady arcs. Rifles spoke from shattered windows. Each burst struck, paused, struck again—calm, deliberate, inexhaustible. Horses screamed and collapsed. Men fell over men. Still the swarm pressed forward, feeding itself into stone and ash, until motion itself congealed into a single, lifeless knot of flesh and steel.
And this was not one place.
Across the Mávros Defensive Line, the same pattern repeated. When the rains lifted on the fifth of August, the attacks resumed—charges and counterfires, brief breakthroughs followed by sudden collapses. Bulgarian garrisons and militias fought where they could, but without heavy guns or depth they were steadily consumed.
Where it mattered most, the Moss Men intervened.
They did not fight the war for Bulgaria. They slowed it. They disrupted advances, laid traps, staged ambushes, and held ground only long enough to make the next step cost blood and time. Wherever they could not hold, they delayed.
It was not enough.
The line bent, then fractured. Gaps opened, and through them the Ottomans poured—4th Army driving inland from the southern landing while the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armies broke through elsewhere along the front. The advance spread like floodwater through a shattered dam, relentless and indiscriminate. Villages emptied. Civilians fled inland, toward Greece, toward anywhere not yet touched.
Led and stiffened by small Moss Men teams—such as the ones who half-jokingly called themselves the Cripple Squad, or worse, the Suicide Squad—resistance began to take shape. They did not replace Bulgarian fighters; they taught them. How to hold a street for an hour. How to rig a trap that bought minutes. How to withdraw without turning flight into slaughter.
Slowly, larger towns pushed back.
In the north, Bulgarian field armies began to peel away from other fronts and shift south as ceasefires were signed elsewhere. Montenegro. Romania. Greece. Serbia. The war was ending around Bulgaria—
even as it continued to burn inside her borders.
The Ottoman advance continued, but it bled as it moved. Disease spread through the ranks. Wounded men lay untreated. The sick died where they lay coughing, comforted only by prayers that could not replace medicine. Units stalled. Faith thinned. Morale eroded day by day.
Still, for five days after the rains ended, the push did not stop.
On the tenth of August, Bulgaria signed the Treaty of Bucharest. Peace came to the Balkans.
But not to the Ottomans.
The Young Turk government argued while the guns continued to fire. Some called for consolidation, for holding what had already been taken. Others demanded more—Adrianople, so close it felt within reach.
That voice prevailed.
And so the war did not end.
Instead it hardened. Through August, Bulgarian armies met the Ottomans in open, grinding combat—no longer raids and probes, but full frontal war. Lines formed, broke, reformed, and broke again.
Back in Germany, Oskar followed it all through dispatches, photographs, and grainy reels smuggled home by war correspondents. What he saw refused to align with the history he remembered. This war had not been brief. The Ottomans had not swept the field. In the history he knew, disease had been their greatest killer and casualties had numbered in the thousands. Now the estimates spoke of the dead alone reaching into the hundreds of thousands, with the wounded many times that. The land itself was being ruined in a way that would scar generations.
Time seemed to move too slowly—until, abruptly, it did not.
By early September, Ottoman forces had been driven back toward the beaches from which they had landed. The invasion of Thrace began to reverse. Then, on the third of September, blood was spilled in Constantinople. The government fractured openly. Men who argued for peace were shot in the streets. Retaliation followed. For days, the Young Turk leadership devoured itself.
Enver Pasha rushed back from the front with ten thousand veterans to restore order. He succeeded in the capital—and in doing so, broke the war.
The front collapsed not from defeat, but from exhaustion. The will to fight thinned. Faith in the cause cracked. By mid-September, Bulgarian forces again approached the Çatalca Line. There, where it had begun, peace was finally signed.
Some on both sides wanted to continue. None could.
The Ottomans were forced into heavy reparations—paid not in coin, but in what they had left. Much of the Ottoman navy was sold to Bulgaria. Assets were stripped away. Concessions piled up.
Only then did the Great Powers step in, determined to freeze the moment before it ignited something worse. A shattered Ottoman Empire was a prize many desired—but for now, restraint prevailed. The Ottomans turned inward, struggling simply to keep themselves from breaking apart.
For Oskar, the relief was quiet and profound.
In September, as summer waned, the companies of the Eternal Guard returned to Germany—bloodied, diminished, but not broken. Nearly a third of the six hundred who had gone into the Balkans did not come back. Their bodies—or what remained—were buried, returned, or lost to the ground where they fell.
Funerals followed. Speeches. And in the gardens of the palace at Potsdam, a monument was raised: the Stone of Eternity, carved with the names of the fallen.
For the moment, the Balkans were set aside.
Quietly, an alliance was sealed between Germany and Bulgaria.
Officially, Germany had remained neutral throughout the war. Unofficially, no one believed it. Across Europe, stories spread of German mercenaries—the "Moss Men"—who had appeared where battles turned, armed with weapons no one could identify and tactics no one could match. A handful of men, it was said, had broken charges, stalled armies, and rewritten the balance of the war. No flags. No insignia. Only results.
Who they were, no one could say for certain. Whom they answered to, no one could prove. Their presence was carried from mouth to mouth, from survivor to survivor, growing darker and more distorted with each telling.
When questioned, Berlin denied everything.
When pressed, Sofia claimed ignorance as well—speaking vaguely of hired specialists, of foreign volunteers, of mercenaries employed in desperation. Nothing more. Nothing concrete.
The answers satisfied no one.
The Entente watched Germany with open suspicion. The Ottomans, humiliated and exhausted, cursed Berlin in silence. Demands for explanation circulated through embassies and newspapers alike, but they found only shrugs, careful wording, and polite refusal.
And Germany, as ever, claimed to know nothing at all.
For the moment, it was enough.