Dawn came over the Royal Palace of Potsdam like a pistol being drawn from it's holster.
The first pale light slipped through the tall windows and stretched across marble floors, polished banisters, old carpets, and the cold painted faces of dead Hohenzollerns watching from the walls. It caught for an instant on steel helmets, loaded rifles, and the pistol hidden in the hand of the fallen Crown Prince before Wilhelm drew it deeper beneath the shadow of his black cloak.
He walked at the head of the procession. Behind him came the Royal Guards.
They did not move in ceremony or parade. They advanced with rifles held ready across armored chests, boots striking the floor in a hard, steady rhythm that drowned the palace's morning peace beneath the sound of approaching violence. Reinforced steel helmets sat low over tight faces. Black M1 carbines gleamed in the dawn. Behind the front ranks came men carrying heavier tools of war: grenades hanging from their belts, pistols at their hips, ammunition pouches heavy against their sides, and the darker shapes of machine-gun equipment moving through the corridor behind them.
The old palace woke around them as if nothing had changed.
A maid near the windows froze with a dust cloth in one hand. From the kitchens came the smell of coal smoke and coffee, the clatter of silver trays being set out, the neat obedience of porcelain cups arranged for breakfast. Somewhere below, servants coaxed fires awake as they had done every morning before this one.
Habit still believed the empire was safe. The boots told another story.
As Wilhelm passed, guards posted at side doors stiffened in confusion. Some joined when ordered. Others hesitated for only a breath before falling into line, because hesitation before a Crown Prince surrounded by armed men felt too much like treason already.
The procession grew.
Outside, in the courtyard, engines rumbled. Trucks and armored vehicles were arriving through the gates, waking horses in the stables and sending gardeners shrinking behind hedges and trimmed shrubs. Moltke was already there, pale and urgent, preparing the men he still believed would restore Germany.
But this was no longer Moltke's plan. It was Wilhelm's vision.
For nearly eight years he had waited in Babelsberg. Eight years in darkness, rage, silence, and whispers only he could hear. Now the palace opened before him again, and every step felt like prophecy becoming flesh.
His cloak dragged behind him, whispering over the marble like a shadow given cloth. The hood still hung low over his brow, but beneath it his mouth curved in a faint, private smile.
Then, for a moment, the smile weakened. The dawn moved across the walls, and the shadows shifted. For one strange heartbeat, the corridor changed.
The armed men vanished from the edge of his sight. The old portraits seemed younger. The palace seemed warmer. He saw children running ahead of him, laughing beneath the same windows. He saw Louise standing to one side, smiling. He saw their mother catching little Oskar by the arm and scolding them both while Oskar giggled, bright-eyed and annoying and alive.
Memory struck him harder than he expected.
He had been loved here once. He had belonged here once. The palace had been his world. His birthright. His playground. His stage. Even his younger siblings had once been amusing little things to him, dolls that laughed, cried, followed, obeyed, and entertained him when he wished to be entertained.
Then the shadows moved again, the warmth died, and only Oskar remained. Not as a laughing child, but as a small broken body lying in blood at the bottom of a staircase.
Wilhelm remembered the night clearly. The fall. The impact. The stillness. The thrill that had moved through him when he believed the annoying little creature was finally gone. He remembered thinking he would be free of him. That no one would know. That Oskar would simply remain where a good little brother belonged.
Down, dead, silent, but Oskar had risen. Worse, he had changed.
Wilhelm's eyes twitched. The whites reddened at the edges, veins crawling wider through them. The blue of his irises seemed to shrink, pushed back by pupils too black and too hungry, as if something inside him were opening wider to see the world through his flesh.
His fingers tightened around the pistol.
"Oskar," he murmured. "If only you had stayed down like a good little brother."
The memory vanished. His pace quickened. Ahead, the corridor widened toward the guarded wing of the palace, where Oskar's household had been placed. The double doors stood at the far end, tall and dark, carved with old imperial patterns now half-swallowed by morning shadow.
Before them stood two Eternal Guards in full black armor. They had moved into place deliberately, blocking the way.
Wilhelm smiled wider.
Beside him, the captain from Babelsberg swallowed hard, sweat running down his brow. One hand held his rifle, the other pressed again and again, against the small cross and locket hidden beneath his tunic.
And far away, where the same dawn burned over the Baltic Sea. Oskar stood aboard the former Russian destroyer Novik and looked toward the coast.
The dawn was behind him now. Ahead lay the port city of Stettin, the railways, and beyond them Berlin and Potsdam. Barely more than one hundred and fifty kilometers separated him from the heart of the Empire.
Yet within his chest, he felt as though he were already too late.
His heart burned.
That strange red strength within him pulsed beneath his flesh, not with rage this time, but warning. Something pulled at him from the west, something sharp, something wrong.
He gripped the rail and stared toward the unseen capital.
"What is happening?" he muttered.
Behind him, the former Russian sailors moved quickly across the destroyer's deck. They now wore red cloths around their arms and heads, and above them flew the black two-headed dragon flag. They shouted orders, pulled lines, and prepared to bring the ship to port.
Oskar did not wait for the ship to fully dock. The moment the pier came close enough, he moved, and he leapt.
For one impossible second, his vast body crossed the open air like some half-naked barbarian god, trousers whipping in the wind, sword across his back. Then he struck the pier with a crash that made dockworkers and soldiers throw themselves aside in alarm.
Wood cracked beneath his feet, men shouted. Oskar did not explain, he ran, full speed.
The dockworkers stared after him in awe as the Iron Prince tore toward the station, bare-chested, sword-backed, and silent except for the words he breathed under his breath.
"Please, Karl," he breathed as he ran, voice barely audible beneath the wind and the thunder of his own feet. "My little man… protect them all."
Unknown to him, south of Stettin, another train was already racing toward the same storm.
Tanya was returning from Warsaw.
Word had reached her that Oskar was on his way back to Potsdam, and she had left almost immediately after finishing what could not be delayed. Gundelinde rode with her. So did Luise and Imperiel, guarded closely by the fifty men of First Company she had taken east.
None of them yet knew what waited in the capital.
They did not know that Berlin and Potsdam were already waking beneath silent alarms.
Unease had begun to move before any official bell was rung. Wounded Black Legion soldiers on leave saw strange traffic in the streets and reached for pistols hidden in drawers. Eternal Guard men recalled to duty ran through the morning with sidearms at their hips and coats thrown over half-fastened uniforms. Servants, drivers, factory clerks, priests of the New Dawn, police informants, and the quiet watchers of Tanya's web all carried the same message in different ways.
Something is wrong.
At Karl's manor, across from the Royal Palace, the warning had already been received.
Karl had been awakened before dawn by Captain Dieter and the silent alarm that passed through his household like a cold wind. There was no shouting or panic, only quiet knocks, whispered orders, and armed men moving quickly through dark corridors.
His family had already been taken below.
Heddy and the children were hurried into the reinforced basement shelter behind armored doors, escorted by Eternal Guards with pale, controlled faces. Servants followed in silence, clutching children, blankets, documents, and whatever small valuables fear had told them to grab. Then the doors shut. The locks turned.
Now Karl stood at an upper window with a revolver in his hand.
Beside him stood Captain Dieter of the Second Eternal Guard Company, fully armed, his face hidden behind discipline but not calm.
Beyond the manor courtyard, across the street, the Royal Palace loomed in the grey light of morning. Its reinforced stone walls were already manned by Royal Guards moving along the parapets and gatehouse as if preparing for a siege. Military trucks had entered the courtyard. Men were unloading crates, taking positions, closing approaches.
And before the palace gates, two tanks sat like iron beasts in the dawn, their guns silent, but present enough to change the meaning of everything.
More vehicles were arriving, with more armed men. Royal Guards by the look of them, called in from nearby royal holdings. And among them, by their field gear and the machines they had brought, men of the Seventh Army as well.
Karl stared at the sight, his mouth tightening.
"Dieter," he asked quietly, "you are certain the police are coming?"
"Yes, sir," Dieter answered. "They have been informed. The alarm was passed through the proper channels."
Karl's expression did not soften. Because the police would not be enough. Dieter knew it too.
After a brief hesitation, he said, "Sir… neither the police nor the SEK detachments are equipped to bring down tanks. They can hold streets. They can storm houses. They can fight infantry. But against armor, we will need the local garrison, or Marines, if any can be brought in quickly enough."
Outside, one of the tanks shifted slightly, tracks grinding against stone.
Dieter's voice lowered.
"And I fear we may not have that time. Please, sir—go below with your family. Stay behind the armored doors. We will speak with the Royal Guard and learn what is happening. If there is still room for words, we will use them. And if there is not…"
His jaw tightened.
"…then we will fight our way through those walls and reach the imperial household ourselves."
Karl tightened his grip around the revolver.
"Oskar's family is my family as well," he said without hesitation. "I am not leaving them."
Dieter fell silent.
Karl's eyes remained fixed on the palace.
"Instead, Captain, get me my batsuit."
For one second, even Dieter's discipline nearly broke.
Karl did not look at him.
"I have a plan. Keep the men ready, but hidden. Do not let the enemy know our intentions before we are prepared to act. Send a servant to the gates and have him learn what he can. Quietly."
His voice turned cold.
"And if these men are truly traitors…"
He looked down at the revolver in his hand.
"…then we will kill them all."
Dieter did not argue.
He understood Karl's friendship with Oskar better than most. He understood what that household meant to him. So he struck his fist to his chest, turned, and left to carry out the orders.
Karl watched Dieter leave, watched him vanish into the corridor as the manor around him began to move with quiet urgency.
Time was tightening around them.
If he meant to reach the people trapped inside, he would have to move quickly.
And yet, beneath the fear, beneath the awful weight pressing down on his chest, Karl felt a sharp sting of relief. For the warning had come early. Thank God, it had come early. Without it, his family would still be sleeping. His guards would still be scattered. The police would know nothing.
If the alarm had come even half an hour later, all might already have been lost.
But it had not come late. It had come from the very belly of the conspiracy itself.
Half an hour before the first light of dawn, before the tanks and trucks had reached Potsdam, the military train carrying the Seventh Army detachment had rolled into Berlin under cover of darkness and steam.
It arrived without proper announcement, carrying no wounded men from the front, no frightened boys, no raw conscripts, and no rabble of half-mad conspirators.
It carried something far more dangerous.
Professionals.
Older veterans, officers, and hard men of the old order, two hundred and sixty-eight in all, armed, organized, and grim. White armbands were tied around their right sleeves. Reinforced steel Pickelhauben rested upon their heads. Rifles, carbines, machine guns, ammunition crates, twelve troop trucks, and two tanks came with them.
The force was led by Maximilian von Prittwitz.
As the train slowed toward the station, its speaking system crackled to life. Prittwitz's voice rolled through the cars, hoarse with belief and sharpened by old rage.
"My loyal, God-fearing men of Germany, listen well. What we are about to do is not for the faint of heart. It is a hard duty, a righteous duty, and a necessary one. Every man aboard this train knows why he has come."
Inside the cars, men lifted their heads. Some gripped the crosses at their throats. Others bowed in prayer.
"The Iron Prince has given our nation strength, yes. He has given us machines, wealth, victories, and wonders. Even the modern train that carries us now bears the mark of his age. No honest man denies what he has built."
Prittwitz's voice darkened.
"But behind these gifts, he has brought something foul into Germany. He has led our nation away from God. Toward vanity. Toward excess. Toward sin. Toward a false dawn that shines without heaven's blessing."
The train rolled beneath the station lamps.
"He seeks to remake the Empire in his own image. To bend the Crown. To cast aside the old order. To raise heathen ways over Christian duty. To place his blood, his women, his masked soldiers, and his strange new church above the sacred laws that made Germany great."
A low murmur passed through the men.
Prittwitz nodded to himself, as if his own words were necessary to steady his courage.
"We cannot allow this to continue. Today we restore our nation before it is too late. We will secure the Iron Prince's family, his loved ones, and his household. Through them, we will bring him to reason. We will make him kneel. We will make him confess his sins. We will return him, the Kaiser, the monarchy, and all those deceived by this so-called New Dawn back beneath God's truth."
Several men crossed themselves.
"So rise. Arm yourselves with steel and with shields of faith. Put on your helmets and your spiritual armor. Take up your rifles. Prepare for the restoration of our nation. For God, for the true Crown Prince, and for Germany."
The train ground to a halt.
No cheers rang out.
There was only discipline.
Doors opened. Boots struck the platform. Cranes moved. Chains rattled. Trucks were unloaded. Tanks rolled from flatbeds, engines coughing awake in the cold. The men formed not like zealots drunk on passion, but like soldiers who had received an order and meant to carry it out.
But the train had carried more than Prittwitz knew.
In the coal tender, hidden beneath grime, shadow, and black dust, the Suicide Squad had heard everything.
Their mission had never been this.
They had gone west to recover Ronald and Hilary Tolkien from the front and bring them back alive, because Oskar had decided the brothers were too valuable to be wasted in the mud and fire of ordinary war. They had succeeded. They had brought the brothers back toward German command.
Then, in Luxembourg, they had seen too much.
Moltke's desperation. Prittwitz's meetings. The strange movements of Seventh Army officers.
The gathering of old men who no longer looked like soldiers obeying orders, but like conspirators waiting for a door to open.
Suspicion had become pursuit. Pursuit had become infiltration.
For ten hours, the Suicide Squad and the Tolkien brothers had ridden inside the coal tender of the very train that now unloaded treason into Berlin. They wore stolen officer's military uniforms and light gear, with only knives, a few sidearms, and Günther's backpack radio hidden beneath their disguises. Whenever they dared, they sent short warning bursts through loyal channels, alerting units in the capital and beyond to prepare for the worst.
So the first alarm had not come from the palace. Nor from some hidden informant in a smoky room. It had come from the train itself.
At the head of that train, the fireman stood beside the coal tender, tying a white armband around his sleeve and preparing to join the others outside.
Then suddenly a faint creak of metal sounded behind him, followed by light footsteps.
He never finished tying the knot.
A hand clamped over his mouth from behind, and a knife drove up beneath his jaw with brutal precision. His body jerked once, hard, then sagged as the strength went out of it.
The driver heard the muffled struggle and turned.
"What—?"
A dark figure sprang at him, and a second blade drove into his eye. He staggered back, struck the controls with one hand, slid sideways, and collapsed across the floorboards, blood spreading beneath his cheek in a dark, widening pool.
Max pulled the knife free, looked down at the body, and snarled, "Traitorous swine."
Behind him, Adolf wiped his own blade on the dead fireman's sleeve, already glancing toward the platform for the next threat.
Coal shifted behind them.
Ronald Tolkien climbed awkwardly from the tender, his stolen officer's coat black with soot, his face pale beneath the grime. He saw the two bodies and froze.
"What did you do?" he hissed. "You killed them?"
Adolf glanced at him without much interest.
"They were Germans," Ronald said, horrified.
Max answered coldly while searching the driver's pockets. "They chose their fate. We rendered judgment."
"That is not judgment," Ronald said. "That is murder. You could have tied them up. Knocked them unconscious. Questioned them. Something."
Adolf gave a short, humorless laugh.
"Do not start preaching now, poet. How many Frenchmen did you send to God on the road to Paris? How many men died because you gave orders and they followed them?"
Ronald's mouth tightened.
"That was battle."
"And this is not?" Adolf asked, looking up at him. "They wear white armbands. They brought tanks into the capital before dawn. They march to seize the palace and take the Iron Prince's children. You chose to come with us. That means you are in this now. So stop whining and move."
The words struck Ronald harder than he expected.
He wanted to answer. He wanted to say there had to be lines, rules, some difference between killing an enemy in war and cutting down countrymen in the dark. Yet the bodies lay there at his feet, and outside the train men wearing German uniforms were preparing to march against other Germans while calling themselves patriots.
That disturbed him more than the blood. Not merely Germans killing Germans.
Men of the same nation, the same language, the same flag, each believing the other had betrayed the Fatherland. The world, he realized with a slow chill, was not divided neatly into black and white. Loyalty could split. Duty could turn. Evil did not always come wearing a foreign uniform. Sometimes it came with prayers on its lips and a cross against its chest.
Then Günther emerged behind him, the radio pack scraping against the edge of the tender as he pulled himself free.
He placed one large, steady hand on Ronald's shoulder.
"Calm down, poet," he said. "Today is simple. Those who stand with the Iron Prince are our brothers. Those who stand against him are enemies. You can wrestle with your conscience later. Right now, our brothers are about to be surrounded in the palace."
Ronald looked at him, troubled.
Günther had already turned away.
One by one, the others climbed out: Otto, Max, Adolf, Göbels, and finally Hilary Tolkien, still wearing part of his airman's uniform beneath a stolen coat. Hilary looked at the bodies, went grim, but said nothing for a moment.
Then he clapped Ronald lightly on the shoulder.
"You wanted adventure, didn't you?" Hilary said quietly. "You wanted to see the world properly, gather stories, understand what men become in war." His mouth twisted without humor. "Well, here it is. Our little fellowship, off to save royalty from a dark plot."
Ronald stared at him.
"That is not funny."
"No," Hilary said. "It is not. But we are still going."
Outside, Prittwitz's men were forming up. Trucks coughed awake. Chains rattled. Tank engines growled beneath the station roof like beasts being dragged from sleep.
Günther moved to the side door of the cabin and looked out.
"Time is against us," he said. "The Eternal Guards in the palace will hold for a while, but looking at what the enemy brought, they will need every hand they can get."
He checked the street beyond the platform.
"Move fast, stay low, kill only when needed."
Max smiled faintly.
"And if needed often?"
"Then kill often."
Günther opened the door.
One by one, they slipped from the head of the train, crossed the tracks beneath drifting steam, climbed a low brick wall, and vanished into the waking streets of Berlin, racing toward the Royal Palace.
They were not the only ones moving.
Across the capital, men were beginning to run before the first shot of the day had even been fired. Police, Eternal Guards, wounded Black Legion soldiers, messengers, watchers, servants, officers, and loyal citizens—all drawn by the same invisible alarm toward the same place.
The palace.
And while the city began to wake around him, Crown Prince Wilhelm advanced toward Oskar's wing.
Before him stood two Eternal Guards in black armor, blocking the double doors with rifles held low but ready.
Beyond those guarded doors, time was running out.
Anna and Cecilie moved barefoot through the inner corridor, dressed only in white nightgowns, their faces pale with fear and discipline. They tried to appear calm for the children. They failed only when no child was looking.
Around them, four Eternal Guards worked with silent urgency. Two covered the inner corridor. Two helped move the children.
Most had already gone below.
The youngest had been sent first, wrapped in blankets, sleepy and confused, their little faces pinched with fear. One had whimpered for Oskar. Another had clutched a stuffed bear so tightly its seams had nearly torn. Anna had kissed each forehead before passing them into the narrow service lift hidden behind a paneled wall—an old kitchen elevator Oskar had secretly widened and reinforced years ago, officially to move supplies between the basement and the palace above.
Now it carried his children into hiding.
The mechanism groaned softly as it descended again and again, lowering them toward the secret basement level, toward the hidden conference room of the Oskar Industrial Group, toward steel doors, armed guards, and the laboratory buried beneath the palace.
Below, Eternal Guards received the children one by one and carried them deeper into safety.
Above, only four remained. Two boys of Tanya, Azarael and Liorael. And two girls of Anna, Juniel and Lailael.
Anna gathered one child close. Cecilie held another against her chest, her hands trembling despite herself.
Then the footsteps came closer, heavy and many in number.
The women turned toward the double doors in horror.
The four Eternal Guards inside moved at once. Two pulled Anna, Cecilie, and the remaining children back toward cover. The other two took positions behind corners and pillars, rifles rising toward the entrance.
Outside the double doors, Wilhelm stopped before the two black-armored sentries. For a moment, he only studied them. Then he smiled.
"By order of the true Crown," Wilhelm said, his voice smooth and poisonous, "you are commanded to lay down your arms and abandon your posts. Refuse, and you will be judged as accomplices in my little brother Oskar's conspiracy against the rightful monarchy."
Silence followed.
The two Eternal Guards glanced at one another. Neither stepped aside.
Then one answered through his black mask, voice flat and cold.
"We do not recognize your authority here, fallen Prince of Germany. We recognize only the authority of the Iron Prince and his family."
Wilhelm's smile twitched.
"So," he murmured, "it is treason then?"
His gaze slid toward the Royal Guard captain.
"Very well. Captain… arrest these men."
The Royal Guards hesitated for only a heartbeat. Then they moved. And in that same instant, the Eternal Guards' rifles rose to meet them.
The hallway held its breath.