History had bent—but it had not broken.
Elias sat in his study within the fortified halls of his primary HQ, listening to the report of his scribes who scoured foreign dispatches.
Outside, autumn winds rattled the shutters, carrying the smell of woodsmoke from the camps below where his men drilled ceaselessly.
Yet his mind was not on Montenegro this evening, but on the world beyond.
As he thought about the last decade.
Most of the time he was almost completly idle... at least militarily that is.
The French Second Empire had collapsed.
Napoleon III, humiliated at Sedan, had been carried away into captivity while the Prussians marched triumphant into Paris.
The German Confederation, once a fragile league, had hardened into an empire under the banner of Prussia.
Wilhelm had taken the crown as Kaiser, and Europe—though bloodied—had resumed a course Elias had foreseen a decade ago.
It struck him as strange.
For all his interference in America, for all the blood spilled by his Greybacks across Kentucky and Indiana, the balance of Europe seemed unchanged.
Austria had been humbled after Königgrätz.
Italy had bound itself together under Rome.
France had fallen to German might.
The same tide as before.
And yet across the Atlantic… a different story entirely.
The American Civil War had ended in october of 1865 as history demanded, but its cost had been multiplied.
Nearly four million dead overall, another million maimed the once burgeoning young nation had under its own hand slain over ten percent of its total population in the war.
The rivers of Tennessee and Virginia ran thick with bones; the soil of Pennsylvania and Georgia was salted with grief.
The Greybacks' brutal campaigns in the early years had forced the Union into total war far sooner than it otherwise would have, which also forced the confederates hands before the war had bled their reserves allowing for greater warfare to be required overall.
Entire towns had been emptied to fuel the conflict.
Draft riots had burned cities.
When victory finally came, it was ash rather than triumph.
The Union had preserved itself, but at such a price that its people were left hollow, both sides still lingered on with hatred for the other even with peace having been declared.
Now, in the 1870s, America limped forward like a wounded giant.
Reconstruction dragged under the weight of casualties.
Entire states were depopulated, their farmlands left fallow.
The railroads sputtered; industries grew in fits and starts.
Expansion westward—once the lifeblood of American ambition—was delayed.
Where settlers should have surged across the Plains, there were only scattered bands, wary of Native resistance and too few in number to claim vast lands.
And in Mexico, the absence of American strength left a vacuum.
France, though now humbled in Europe, had earlier planted its flag with Emperor Maximilian.
Without Washington to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, European soldiers had marched openly across Mexican soil, their banners raised in defiance of old American warnings.
Maximilian had ruled longer, his empire propped by Austrian and French officers.
Even after his fall, European merchants and financiers had kept a grip on Mexico's ports.
The Western Hemisphere, once jealously guarded by American pride, was now porous to European ambition.
Elias leaned back in his chair, folding his hands.
His officers had asked him once if America might rise again, might one day stretch its grasp across the seas.
He had laughed then, but not cruelly.
America would heal, he knew—but not quickly.
Its strength would be turned inward for decades, mending its wounds while Europe continued its endless rivalries.
It was not the end of America, but it was a delay—a pause in the great machine of expansion.
And to Elias, every year America lost was another year his own designs could grow unchecked.
In Europe, the German Empire's birth rippled outward.
Britain eyed the new power warily, its empire vast but its army small.
Austria, licking its wounds, turned southward, fixing its gaze once more on the Balkans. Russia, triumphant in its own war against the Ottomans, stirred with dreams of Constantinople, and freedom from the Black sea.
And the Ottomans themselves?
Their grip weakened by revolt after revolt, they clung to their European possessions with desperation.
Serbia plotted, Bulgaria smoldered, and in the mountains of Montenegro, Elias's men stood ready.
He considered the irony.
America, which had bled so terribly, now hesitated to shape the world.
Europe, which had moved as though nothing had changed, marched toward inevitable new storms.
Two continents, two fates—one slowed by blood, the other rushing headlong to its destiny.
Elias saw opportunity in both.
In Richmond, where the Confederacy had once proclaimed itself a nation, weeds now grew between broken stones.
Southerners mourned not only their dead but their pride, their cause drowned in blood.
Elias's spies told of a bitterness that lingered still, but no appetite for renewed war.
America could scarcely govern itself, let alone challenge foreign powers.
In New York, black-draped windows still marked streets where families had lost sons.
The newspapers, once fiery with calls for expansion, now filled their pages with debates over pensions and the cost of rebuilding.
Politicians spoke of healing, not conquest.
The West would wait.
Alaska, though purchased, lay neglected.
The Pacific coast remained a distant frontier, not yet the prize it might have been.
Elias knew the lesson: he had bought time. Time with blood not his own.
By 1871, his own power dwarfed what it had been a decade prior.
Fifty thousand men stood ready in Montenegro.
His fleet lay docked in his ports along the adriatic, waiting statues for his called to arms once more.
His arsenals produced rifles to rival Prussia's, and his refineries still endlessly processed mined ore, and stone from within the mountain ranges.
As he dismissed his scribes, Elias rose and walked to the balcony.
The mountains stretched before him, their peaks sharp against the crimson dusk.
Below, the glow of campfires shimmered—his army, his creation, his promise of a future.
The world has hardly changed, he thought to himself but not to worry i'll be sure to change all of that soon enough.