With the smoke of Balaclava still drifting across the valleys, winter came down upon Crimea like a great iron shroud.
The skies darkened early, the winds turned sharp with the bite of salt and frost, and the ground itself froze hard beneath the boots of weary soldiers.
For both sides, it marked the end of movement.
The great armies that had clashed so violently now found themselves prisoners of the season, bound not by enemy lines but by hunger, cold, and sickness.
The Allies, dug into their camps around Balaclava and Kamiesch, soon discovered the harshness of a land they had underestimated.
Supplies from the sea could not be carried inland quickly enough, and the winding roads turned to rivers of ice and mud, while the black sea itself was treacherous causing the loss of thirty ships.
Horses starved, men shivered without proper winter coats, and whole regiments wasted away not from Russian fire but from fever and frostbite.
The grand camps that had been raised with confidence now became sprawling fields of misery, where tents sagged under snow and the groans of the sick echoed through the night.
General Winter had arrived, and he brought down the hammer.
The Russians fared little better.
Though they fought on their own soil, their logistics were stretched thin.
The countryside was already picked clean of food and fodder, and what little could be brought to the front often arrived spoiled or insufficient.
Typhus, cholera, and dysentery spread through their ranks as swiftly as among the Allies.
Winter in Crimea was merciless, and the dead piled up in equal measure on both sides, their graves shallow, their names often lost.
For the Iron Hand, however, the season marked a turning point.
Elias, watching the war's tempo slacken, made the fateful decision to withdraw his regiment from the scattered raids and counterattacks.
Through the system that bound his command, the order went out: the Iron Hand would concentrate in Sevastopol itself.
There, within the bastion of Russian power, they would make their stand.
Two thousand hardened riflemen took up positions among the walls, bastions, and gun emplacements.
Their days of ranging across the countryside were over; the winter would see them become the city's shield.
Sevastopol was a city transformed by war.
Once a thriving naval port, it now resembled a fortress in ruin.
Buildings had been gutted to supply timber for defenses, streets were choked with rubble, and civilians huddled in cellars while above them soldiers dug deeper trenches and mounted heavier guns.
Yet amid the exhaustion and despair, the arrival of the Iron Hand breathed a grim resolve into the defenders.
Their reputation preceded them—men who had shattered British lines and stood against the greatest fleets of Europe.
Their very presence whispered a promise: Sevastopol would not fall.
Throughout the winter, their discipline steadied the garrison.
When disease sapped the regular troops, the Iron Hand held the walls, while the field medics tended to and restored the russians.
When Allied night raids probed the outer defenses, the Hand's sharpshooters answered, their crackling rifles cutting short each attempt.
Their skill with marksmanship made no-man's-land a place of constant dread for the besiegers, who could never tell if the dark eyes of the Iron Hand were watching from some unseen ridge or loophole.
Yet even the Iron Hand could not fight the cold forever.
And due to their limited numbers it meant that the watch was not always solid.
Fires were lit in hidden dugouts, but smoke betrayed positions to enemy gunners.
~
Across 1855, the war became a contest of endurance.
Russian offensives were launched in spurts, small thrusts meant to test Allied lines or raid their supply chains.
Each gained ground briefly, then stalled, as fatigue and shortages dragged them back.
The Allies, too, found themselves incapable of the decisive push.
Their French and British commanders quarreled, their Austrian neighbors wavered in commitment, and their publics at home grew restless.
Newspapers in London and Paris printed daily accounts of suffering, of wasted lives and endless stalemate.
The glory that had once driven men to volunteer now curdled into bitterness.
The Iron Hand, dug into the defenses of Sevastopol, bore witness to it all.
They saw wave after wave of Allied assaults falter against the bastions, their dead heaped in front of Russian guns.
They saw French engineers labouring to dig trenches closer, only for counterfire to collapse them.
They saw British regiments, once immaculate, now ragged and hollow-eyed, staring across the no-man's-land with nothing but loathing and fatigue.
And still the city held.
By summer, it was clear the war had lost its momentum.
Sevastopol had not fallen.
The Russians, though bloodied, had not yielded.
And the Allies, for all their sacrifices, had little to show but graves and debts.
Discontent boiled at home.
In Britain, the government faced fierce criticism in Parliament.
In France, voices grew louder that the Emperor's gamble was bleeding the nation white.
Even Austria, hesitant and watchful, pressed for an end rather than risk being dragged further into the quagmire.
When the autumn of 1855 came, the decision could no longer be delayed.
Exhaustion gripped all.
Diplomats met in hurried conferences, envoys shuttled between capitals, and terms of peace began to take shape.
For the Allies, the cost had become untenable.
For the Russians, the survival of Sevastopol was enough to claim that their honor was intact.
The war had burned too brightly, too fiercely, and now its flames guttered for lack of fuel.
In the end, in Elias's view it was the Iron Hand who'd ended this conflict months earlier than it shouldve, their efficient killing of the allied forces brought blood red ink to the home countries far faster than previously.
Without their two thousand riflemen holding Sevastopol's crumbling lines, the city might well have fallen in the fall as it shouldve.
Its loss could have stretched the war another half-year, or more.
Instead, their presence turned every Allied assault into a bloodletting too costly to sustain.
By autumn, the balance tipped—not toward victory, but toward exhaustion.
And exhaustion, in war, is enough to decide the peace.
When the armistice was finally declared in the fall of 1855, months earlier than in another history that might have been, the remaining men of the Iron Hand stood upon Sevastopol's battered ramparts and looked out across a battlefield that had consumed so many.
They were not jubilant.
Their numbers had dwindled, their faces hollowed by hunger and loss.
Yet they had done what Elias demanded: they had held, unbroken, until the war itself broke instead.
And as the General Mud was about to make his appearance the remnants of the Iron Hand slipped away into the shadows bound for home, returning to the fold, and Elias's grasp.