High above the Bay of bar, where the black cliffs of Montenegro plunged into steel-gray waters, Elias sat within his fortress of stone and iron, built into the mountainside not far from the village of Bar.
The air smelled of salt and smoke, the sea below dotted with the faint shadows of his hidden fleet.
The war in America raged thousands of miles away, yet through the tether of his will, every report, every dispatch, every dying scream reached him as if carried on the wind.
Maps lay sprawled across the great oak table before him.
The Peninsula, the Mississippi, the Carolina coast—each marked with pins of iron and threads of crimson string.
Williamsburg, Shiloh, New Orleans: names that would be written in history, reshaped by his hand.
He traced them with a long, pale finger, the gaslamp light gleaming on the cold metal of the rings he wore.
He had overturned battles, bent the fate of armies, and for a moment the Confederacy had walked taller for it.
But now, as he sifted through the reports from his spies in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, he frowned.
The North was learning.
Factories thundered day and night, pouring out rifles, uniforms, and boots by the tens of thousands.
Ironworks glowed hot with the making of cannon and shells.
The Union Navy grew with each passing month, shipyards birthing steam frigates and armored rams like an endless brood.
The newspapers screamed for vengeance, for total victory.
The North had thrown itself into the crucible of war with the full weight of its industry.
And the South?
The South remained itself—proud, stubborn, complacent.
Richmond celebrated each battlefield reprieve as though it were final deliverance.
Plantations still demanded men for the plow, governors quarreled with Davis over states' rights, and few truly grasped the scale of the storm that was gathering against them.
Elias leaned back in his chair, exhaling smoke from a Turkish cigar.
His smile was thin, tinged with irritation.
"The South believes itself winning,"
he murmured, his voice low but edged like a blade.
"Fools. Each victory I gift them only dulls their hunger. They do not scale their strength to match the North. They stagnate, while the Union multiplies."
He tapped the map of Virginia with one finger, just above Richmond.
"Unbalanced. Always unbalanced. If they are to depend upon me, they must not grow comfortable. They must need me, always."
He considered long into the night.
He could summon more Greybacks, send in another troop of reinforcements to prop the Confederacy upon his shoulders.
But that would make Richmond overconfident, blind to its peril.
And worse—it would be wasteful.
Six thousand had been his total number in the Americas even accounting for the new arrivals, the campaign was a bloody one and after more than a year of war, he's lost more than 10% of his forces and for no profit.
Profit... in the end it all came down to profit, his purpose was to grow, and while Montenegro had mines he could exploit, the true growth of his forces had come from the loot of battle, Cannon, and shot smelted down in his refineries had provided months worth of credits, and that was from just a small scale skrimish with the ottomans.
His gaze drifted to the harbor below, where lanterns swayed aboard his blockade runners.
Sleek, dark-painted ships, their engines muffled, their holds once filled with crates of rifles and barrels of powder.
They had carried lifeblood across the Atlantic under the very nose of the Union Navy, slipping through storms and patrols alike.
But supply alone no longer satisfied him.
"Why give,"
Elias mused,
"when one might take?"
By dawn his orders were already in motion.
The runners would cease to serve as mere lifelines for the Confederacy at least not in the same way.
Instead, they would turn to piracy—not the crude raiding of coastal smugglers, but systematic strikes upon American shipping, even capturing military vessels when possible.
Fast frigates and cutters fanned out across the Atlantic lanes.
They did not hunt warships; they hunted fat merchantmen, grain ships from New England, coal barges from Pennsylvania, timber rafts from Maine.
The blockade had stretched American logistics thin, and Elias knew exactly where the arteries lay.
Meanwhile his oceangoing ironclads and ship of the lines targetted american military ships.
Captured vessels were stripped bare.
Rifles, pistols, sabers, cannon and shot—all of it melted in hidden foundries for their iron, copper and bronze.
All of it rendered into credits to feed his war machine, while the goods and foodstuffs was sold off to the confederacy to carryon their own faltering economy.
Survivors were left adrift aboard their stripped ships, or sometimes not left at all if they resisted boarding to stiffly.
The sea kept its secrets.
After only a few months the Union navy was alerted to the presence of a possible confederate navy to oppose them, however all fleets sent out to clash with them failed to spot the raiders.
All the while ships vanished without trace, or limped into port nearly crewless and gutted.
Insurance rates soared in Northern ports, merchants cursed the sea.
In Montenegro, the vaults swelled.
Elias could only crack a smile that threatened to split his face, as he watched his credit amount skyrocket compared to the idle gain his mining bases provided.
Profit.
Even if he could not steer the war toward his ultimate vision, even if Richmond squandered his gifts, he woulld gain from this war even if he could not cause them to bleed each other dry.
He turned once more to the great map of America.
His fingers brushed the Mississippi, where Union gunboats steamed toward Memphis.
Then to the Shenandoah, where Jackson limped from his first great defeat.
Then to the coast, where Union armies pressed Savannah and Charleston.
"Every yard,"
he whispered,
"will cost them more than it should. Every mile will be bought with rivers of blood. And while they bleed, I shall grow rich enough to build empires."
Then came a ping from his system alerting him that one of his lieutenants was trying to contact him through the system link.
Without pausing Elias accepted the connection like answering a phone call.
"Reporting in sir, we've siezed another prize, commander. A coal tender seized off Newfoundland. Two hundred tons of good stock."
Elias smiled at last, his teeth flashing in the candlelight.
"Good,"
he said softly.
"Bring it back, we'll melt it down. Every ounce has its worth."
He rose, his cloak sweeping behind him like a shadow.
The war in America would drag on—for a few more years at the least.
And with the recent gains from looting American shipping and vessels, Elias had the capital to summon forth a true army of his 'greybacks' all while further expanding his own ironclad navy to wreck true havok upon the Union forces.
Men would die by the thousands, yet he would sit here in his mountain keep, weaving profit from carnage, his hand unseen, his design eternal.
The world thought the American war was about Union and Confederacy, slavery and freedom, state and nation.
But here, on this cliff above the Adriatic, Elias knew the truth.
It was his war.
His crucible.
And from it, he would forge not a new nation, but a dominion of iron, blood, and shadow.