Anica sat so close to the bed that her knees pressed against its frame.
Oskar lay beneath the white sheets with her crooked flower crown still resting upon his head, while the little girl slowly buried him beneath even more blossoms.
She had gathered them into a small basket and now treated each one like treasure. One by one she selected a flower, lifted it toward the light and turned it carefully between her fingers, studying its petals with grave concentration before deciding whether it was worthy.
"This one is for Mama," she whispered.
She placed it gently upon Oskar's chest.
"This one is for Papa."
Another joined it.
"This one is for big brother."
She paused over the next flower, her small brow knitting as though confronted by some serious problem. Then she seemed to reach a decision.
"And this one… is for Mama again."
Another flower settled upon the sheets.
The room smelled of antiseptic, old blood and crushed petals. Beyond the closed door, the hospital continued working with mechanical urgency—boots striking tile, hurried voices passing through corridors, nurses calling for instruments and the occasional metallic clatter of something being dropped into a tray.
Near the window sat an Eternal Guard soldier in full equipment, a cup of coffee balanced in one hand while the other rested near his weapon. His attention wandered occasionally toward Anica and the absurd floral burial taking place beside him, but his eyes never remained away from the street outside for long.
Sarajevo had grown quieter.
The shooting had largely stopped. Most of the surviving conspirators were dead, captured or being hunted through the city, while soldiers, police and civilians searched buildings and guarded intersections. Now another sound had begun replacing the gunfire.
Mourning.
But inside Oskar's room, Anica continued her little ceremony. Mama, Papa, Big brother, Mama again. Each word came with the simple certainty of a child naming the most important things in existence.
And somehow it was that one word—Mama—that slipped through everything.
Through the morphine. Through the bandages. Through the dull ache of stitches and the constant buzzing that still lived somewhere behind Oskar's ears.
It found an old door inside him.
One he had spent more than a decade trying to keep shut.
Oskar struggled to keep his eyes open. He fixed them upon the flowers covering his chest, upon Anica carefully inspecting another blossom, upon the white walls and moving curtains around him.
He was here, Sarajevo, 1914, he had survived, Ferdinand had survived. The world he remembered had already been changed in ways that should have been impossible.
This was not that other life, not that other century. Not the ruined future from which he had somehow awakened in 1903 wearing the body of a dead German prince.
Yet Anica kept whispering.
"Mama…"
And the memories came anyway with it, not violently, not all at once. They seeped upward slowly, like water finding its way through a crack that had been sealed for years—quiet, patient and impossible to stop.
The peaceful future Oskar had been imagining only moments earlier began to fade. Rockets, moonlight, factories and flags dissolved into darkness, not suddenly but slowly, the way a candle dies when two fingers close around its flame.
At first there was nothing. No light, no pain, no voices. Only blackness.
Then weight pressed down upon him.
A familiar crushing weight dragged at his shoulders—straps biting into flesh, armour plates pressing against his ribs, pouches and equipment hanging from him like chains. The air was bitterly cold, sharp enough to sting every breath, and the world smelled of damp earth, smoke and burned fuel.
Mud clung greedily to his boots with every step, as though the ground itself wanted to drag him down and keep him there.
Nearby, an armoured vehicle sat half-canted inside a crater, one side buried deep in churned earth. Smoke crawled from its damaged flank, one headlight shattered, while the ruined engine clicked and ticked as it cooled, sounding almost like some wounded animal trying unsuccessfully to breathe. Something inside crackled faintly.
Oskar did not question any of it.
Within the dream, he was no longer Oskar. He was Zhang Ge again. And directly ahead of him, half-submerged in the mud, a wounded man reached upward with trembling hands.
His face was slick with blood and dirt. His mouth opened and closed uselessly while his eyes remained wide, wet and strangely childlike, as though the war had stripped away everything adulthood had built around him and revealed whatever frightened little boy had always remained underneath.
"Mama," the man sobbed.
The word was not German now. It was not Bosnian.
It did not matter.
War never changed the language of panic.
"Mama… mama…"
Zhang Ge dropped into the mud beside him and hooked his arms beneath the man's shoulders. His gloved fingers found torn fabric, warm blood and angles beneath the flesh that did not feel right. A strap dug painfully across his palm. Something hard shifted beneath the skin where bone should never have shifted.
"It's alright," Zhang Ge heard himself saying, his own voice already beginning to break. "It's alright. I've got you. I've got you."
He tried to lift.
The man screamed, not a shout, not even something entirely human. It was the raw, helpless noise of an animal that understood only pain.
Zhang Ge stopped for half a second, then tried again, harder this time, desperate to do something useful.
The body did not behave like a body. It seemed to come apart beneath his hands. Not suddenly and not cleanly. Small things failed first. A sleeve ripped. A strap slipped free. Flesh yielded where it should have held. The man's shoulder moved horribly inside him, and the sound of tearing cloth became mixed with his screaming until Zhang Ge could no longer distinguish one from the other.
Suddenly his hands seemed full of something far too soft, like melting ice cream. Like cheap decorations pulled from a Christmas tree—bright and whole until someone touched them too roughly, and then ruined beyond repair.
No.
No, no—
Zhang Ge let go instinctively.
The wounded man sank back into the mud, still alive, still reaching toward him, still begging.
"Mama…"
Zhang Ge's stomach twisted.
"I didn't mean to—" he whispered, staring at his bloodied hands. "I didn't mean to hurt you."
A hand slammed into his shoulder and spun him around. A medic stood over him, helmet crooked, armband dirty, eyes shining with equal parts fury and terror.
"What are you doing, Zhang Ge?!" the medic screamed into his face. "He's finished! Look at him! Leave him—leave him! We have to move NOW or we all die!"
Behind them waited an ugly medical truck with a red cross painted across its side, engine running and rear doors thrown open. Men lay packed inside. Some moaned softly. Others begged for water. One man coughed again and again until the coughing turned wet and then became a horrible rattling sound.
The medic ran for it.
Zhang Ge remained where he was. He could not move. Because leaving the wounded man there felt too much like murder.
He looked down.
The soldier was still reaching toward him. His fingers trembled weakly above the mud, his terrified eyes asking for something Zhang Ge had no idea how to give.
"Mama…"
Zhang Ge swallowed the bile rising in his throat and grabbed him again.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry—"
He dragged the man upward and forced him across his shoulder. The weight hung unevenly against him, horribly loose in places where a human body should have remained firm. The soldier screamed again as his injuries pulled against themselves with every movement.
Zhang Ge staggered forward. Each step through the mud stole another second.
Behind him, the medic shouted something, but distance, engines and smoke swallowed the words. Zhang Ge heard none of it.
All he could hear was the broken crying beside his ear.
"Mama… mama…"
Don't leave him.
Don't be that person.
Don't—
Then came the buzzing.
A thin mechanical whine descended from somewhere above them, almost delicate at first, like an insect made from metal.
Zhang Ge froze.
His body understood the sound before his mind did.
He looked up, but too late.
A black shape dropped from the sky with cold, indifferent precision.
There was a flash, then concussion. The world folded inward and exploded outward at the same time.
Zhang Ge was thrown backward into the mud, the wounded man torn from his shoulder as the impact drove every trace of air from his lungs. His hearing vanished beneath a violent ringing, leaving only a strange roaring silence where the world should have been.
For several moments there was nothing but smoke.
Then his vision began returning. The truck was gone, not moved.
Gone.
Where it had stood was a burning crater surrounded by twisted metal and pools of flaming fuel. One wheel rolled slowly away from the wreckage, wobbling once before falling onto its side.
Something screamed from inside the flames. Then stopped.
Zhang Ge rolled onto one elbow, choking on smoke and mud. Only then did he notice the man beside him. The wounded soldier had gone limp. The crying had stopped.
Mama…
had become nothing.
Zhang Ge stared at him. His hands hovered above the body, trembling, suddenly afraid to touch him again.
The man's eyes remained open, but whatever terror had lived inside them was gone.
Zhang Ge opened his mouth, but nothing came out. And somewhere deep within the darkness behind the memory, another voice drifted toward him.
Small, soft, calling out saying, "Mama…"
The battlefield dissolved, the mud disappeared beneath his feet, the smoke vanished.
And suddenly Zhang Ge was small again. Much too small for the room surrounding him.
He stood alone inside an apartment that had become quiet in a way homes were never supposed to become quiet.
There were no footsteps moving between rooms. No adult voices. No kettle beginning to boil. No television muttering from somewhere nearby. No familiar warmth suggesting that someone else existed just beyond the next doorway.
Only the low electrical hum of a building that neither knew nor cared whether a child lived or died inside it.
"Mama?" he called.
He walked into the next room.
"Mama?"
Nothing.
"Papa?"
No answer.
He opened doors. Looked beneath tables. Pulled curtains aside and peered behind them with the irrational determination of a child still young enough to believe that perhaps his parents were simply hiding somewhere, waiting to be discovered like misplaced toys.
His chest hurt from trying not to cry. Crying had not brought anyone back before. He knew that much already.
Then the front door opened, and adults entered.
Police.
Their expressions were too careful. Their movements too gentle. They looked at him the way adults looked at something fragile they were terrified of breaking. One crouched, another spoke softly.
Zhang Ge asked the same question he had already asked every empty room.
"Where is Mama?"
Nobody answered properly.
So he asked again.
"Where is Mama?"
Still they would not tell him.
Instead came the useless words adults reached for when the truth was too ugly to place inside a child's hands.
"It's going to be fine."
Then unfamiliar hands took hold of him and led him away.
And somewhere during that walk, without anyone ever needing to explain it, the child learned something he would remember for the rest of his life.
Being taken care of was not the same thing as being wanted.
The dream shifted again.
A Shaolin temple rose around him—stone courtyards, incense curling beneath old roofs, monks moving with the effortless precision of men who seemed less trained than legendary.
Zhang Ge watched them closely.
He watched the way they moved, but more importantly, he watched the way everyone else watched them. The crowd's attention followed every motion like sunlight, turning ordinary men into something larger than life.
Then he looked toward his foster parents.
Their eyes were not on him, they were on the monks. Interested, impressed, alive in a way they so rarely seemed when looking at him. And somewhere inside that lonely child, a simple equation formed.
If I become like that, perhaps they will look at me too.
When they returned home, he found a camera. Then he began practicing.
He filmed himself trying things he barely understood. He fell. He bruised himself. He failed repeatedly, then tried again because failure hurt less than being ignored.
"Mama," he would say breathlessly, holding up the camera or dragging her toward whatever ridiculous thing he had learned that day. "Look."
Most attempts earned little more than distracted praise.
Then one day she actually stopped.
She watched.
When he finished, she knelt beside him, smiled and called him a good boy.
The warmth of those few words struck him like a drug. So he did it again, and again, and again.
The tricks became larger. The falls became harder. The videos became funnier, stranger and more dangerous. People began watching. Then more people watched. Laughter followed him everywhere.
But it was never quite the laughter he had first been searching for. It was the laughter of spectators.
The child slowly became a clown, and the clown kept performing because performance remained the closest thing he knew to being wanted.
Eventually even that stopped being enough.
He was not happy, so he changed. He stopped chasing bruises and applause quite so desperately and began spending more time with games.
At first they were simple things—shooters, soldiers, weapons, battles.
Then came maps, countries, borders, economies, armies, politics. He discovered strategy games in which entire nations could be moved around like pieces upon a board, and there he learned something quickly.
Diplomacy was slow, compromise was slow, talking was slow, force was fast, and audiences loved fast. They cheered when he conquered. They laughed when an enemy collapsed. They celebrated when he stopped worrying about whether anyone liked him and simply began trying to win.
Zhang Ge told himself it was only a game.
Most of the time he believed it.
Yet somewhere beneath the screen, something in him still recoiled, because he understood what those games rewarded. The same impulse mankind had followed for thousands of years—the desire to reach for the hammer because the scalpel required patience.
He tried to escape that part of himself. Tried to prove that he was more than pixels, jokes and commentary. In a strange way, he began searching for legitimacy the same way he had once searched for love.
So eventually he went to war, to learn, to help, to become someone real. Perhaps, without admitting it even to himself, to finally stop being that little boy wandering through an empty apartment calling for his mother.
Instead he found the same emptiness wearing uniforms.
He found men trembling before orders they pretended not to fear. Men smoking because their hands needed something to do. Men laughing far too loudly because silence left room for thoughts they did not want.
He asked them why they were there. What they believed. What they were fighting for.
The answers changed depending upon the man, but not by much. Family, money, duty, faith, country. And when Zhang Ge pushed farther—when the bravado ran out and the rehearsed answers stopped working—another response eventually appeared, quiet, embarrassed, honest.
"I don't know."
Many of them did not know.
They fought because someone above them had decided they should. Because a story had been told about land, enemies, honour or survival. Because borders drawn before they were born had somehow become sacred. Because governments needed bodies, and generations of boys had been taught that obedience became virtue once the uniform was put on.
The strangest part was that both sides believed themselves righteous.
Almost nobody imagined himself the villain. So villains had to be manufactured.
The enemy became animals, orcs, pigs, rats, demons, anything except human. Because once the man across the battlefield became human again—once he became another frightened person with parents, children, hopes and stupid little dreams—killing him became much harder to call duty. It began to resemble murder. And murder was considerably harder to live with than war.
That was what Zhang Ge had eventually come to understand.
Again and again, humanity tore itself apart because neither side could endure the possibility that the people across the line might be human too.
Might want much the same things, a home, food, children, dignity, safety, a future. Yet flags changed, stories hardened and frightened men convinced themselves that those simple desires belonged only to their own side.
Then they tore at one another like starving dogs fighting over scraps of pride.
And Zhang Ge—Oskar—stood somewhere in the middle of it all, hands that had spent years trying to heal the world stained with blood anyway.
He had killed men who believed themselves heroes. He had watched others die who had never chosen a side at all. And again, like an old wound tearing open, he saw the family in Sarajevo disappear inside a flash of fire while a little girl's crying continued behind a doorway that no longer had a mother to answer it.
He thought of Anica.
Small hands wrapped around a teddy bear. Pale hair stuck to tear-streaked cheeks. Blue eyes staring out at a street she did not yet understand, searching for people who would never return.
Oskar had taken her with him not because it fixed anything and not because one rescued child somehow balanced the dead. It did not, nothing could.
He had done it simply because leaving her there would have been worse. Because some stubborn, unreasonable part of him still believed that if you could not save everyone, then you saved the one standing in front of you.
And what came after that thought was no longer anger.
Only exhaustion.
Why did it always have to become this?
Why were neighbours so easily turned into enemies? Why did men cling so desperately to flags, myths and inherited grievances that they would feed fathers, mothers and children into the fire merely to keep those stories alive?
And if this was only the beginning—if even now, after everything Oskar had built, changed, bribed, threatened and dragged into existence, mankind still reached instinctively for violence—then what came next?
How many more would die?
Would war come anyway?
Would the century burn itself down until nothing remained but bones beneath mud and slogans carved into memorials?
Was compromise truly so difficult?
Could no one admit fear without disguising it as hatred? Could no one admit they had been wrong? Could no one look across a border and accept that the people standing there might be frightened too, might love too, might want nothing grander than the chance to live?
Oskar wanted to believe they could.
He wanted to believe that someday men might look at one another and recognize the same hunger, the same loneliness, the same love of home, the same desire for warmth, safety and children who would be allowed to grow old.
It was a simple hope. Almost embarrassingly simple. Perhaps even childish.
Yet it was that desperate want that finally began breaking the grey world apart.
The darkness loosened its grip, not like mercy. More like something ancient had simply grown tired of being ugly.
The mud beneath him softened into ordinary soil. Craters collapsed inward and vanished. The ruined battlefield receded like a black tide withdrawing from a shore, while scattered patches of green began pushing through the ash.
At first there were only a few blades of grass. Then more. Then the earth seemed to surrender completely.
Sunflowers rose around him. Hundreds at first, then thousands, impossibly bright against the fading remnants of war, their yellow faces turning upward as though the world had decided, for one brief moment, to forgive itself.
Above them the sky cleared into an endless blue. White clouds drifted slowly across it. Peace made visible.
And people appeared—not in uniforms, not in helmets and plates and mud-stained gear, but in ordinary clothes. Workers and farmers. Mothers with children beside them. Students carrying books beneath their arms. Old men walking carefully beside young women who slowed their pace without being asked.
They carried flags—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. Different colours, different symbols, different names stitched into cloth.
Yet none of those flags faced another in challenge. Everyone was walking in the same direction. Side by side.
Ahead of them stood a distant hill washed in golden sunlight, bright enough that it seemed less like a place than a promise. The great river of humanity flowed toward it through the sunflowers, and whenever someone stumbled another person reached down and lifted them without first asking what language they spoke, what church they attended or which banner they carried.
No one screamed for his mother because mothers walked beside their children. No one begged for mercy because no one was trying to kill anyone. No one needed to turn another man into an animal before raising a rifle against him, because there were no rifles.
The field moved like one enormous living thing, and somewhere within it Zhang Ge—Oskar—felt something he almost failed to recognize.
Belonging, not to a village, not to a tribe, not even to a nation.
To mankind.
One enormous family that had finally grown tired of devouring itself.
Around them the sunflowers turned their yellow faces toward the light, and Oskar walked with everyone else toward the hill. Toward a dawn that could exist only if people chose it, if they learned, if they changed, if they finally loosened their grip upon the old hatred long enough to let something better take its place.
Then his foot caught.
There was no great warning. No thunder. No sudden darkness.
Just one stupid, perfectly human misstep.
Oskar went face-first into the flowers with a soft and deeply undignified thump.
For several seconds he lay there, tasting soil and pollen, more embarrassed than hurt.
"Damn it," he muttered into the ground.
A weak smile tugged at his mouth. He waited for someone to laugh. For someone to call his name. For a hand to reach down and pull him back onto his feet.
Nothing came, only silence. Far too much silence.
The smile faded.
Oskar slowly pushed himself upward—and froze. The ground beneath his hands was no longer soft. It was hard, cold, unforgiving.
He stared downward.
Those were not Zhang Ge's hands. They were huge, bandaged and scarred. The old bullet wound through his right palm stared back at him like a brand burned into the flesh.
His breath caught.
Oskar looked down at himself. Bandages crossed his chest and abdomen. Stitches pulled at bruised skin beneath them. Fresh wounds throbbed underneath linen that had already begun darkening in several places.
This was not the body of Zhang Ge. It was not some vague dream-body borrowed from memory. It was him, Oskar. Fresh from Sarajevo. Fresh from bullets and blood.
He pushed himself slowly to his feet, and the beautiful world was gone.
The sunflowers had vanished. The people had vanished. The laughter, the flags carried in friendship, the golden hill beneath a peaceful sky—everything had disappeared as though it had never existed.
Above him stretched a sky of black and red.
Clouds hung across it like torn flesh, while the sun had become a dead black coin swallowed by shadow. The air felt thick enough to breathe through cloth, heavy and wrong, carrying the smell of mud, rust and something ancient that had long since finished rotting.
Oskar turned, and saw the bones.
They covered everything. Skeletal remains stretched across the landscape farther than he could see. Skulls protruded half-buried from churned earth. Ribcages collapsed into mud. Rusting helmets rested beside empty eye sockets, while bomb craters filled with black stagnant water reflected the dead sky above them.
And among the dead were flags, hundreds of them. The same flags he had seen only moments earlier, with so many different colours and names. Except now they remained clutched between skeletal fingers, frozen in death as though their bearers had spent their final moments charging toward one another—or desperately trying to reach something beyond them.
Oskar followed the direction in which so many of the bodies pointed.
The hill was still there, the same hill. But there was no sunlight upon it now.
Near its base, an Austro-Hungarian banner hung in torn strips from a broken pole, blackened with dirt and smoke. Beneath it lay a skeleton that had collapsed before reaching the summit, one hand still tangled stubbornly within the ruined cloth.
Higher up were more bodies, more flags, more bones. Then, near the summit, Oskar saw black, white and red.
The Imperial German flag.
Broken, it's pole had splintered halfway through. The cloth hung in torn strips that moved weakly in the dead wind.
And beneath it lay a small body. A skeleton much shorter than those surrounding it, compact and unmistakably dwarfish even after everything that had once made the man recognizable had been stripped away.
One bony hand remained wrapped around the broken flagstaff. Even death had apparently failed to convince him to let go.
Oskar stopped breathing.
"Karl?"
The name sounded impossibly small when spoken into such an enormous wasteland.
He staggered backward.
"No."
Something cracked beneath his boot, a skull.
Oskar looked down.
Then noticed another, and another. Some were small, far too small. His legs almost gave beneath him. He crouched slowly, hands beginning to tremble as shapes within the bones became horribly familiar—not because a skeleton should have been recognizable, but because dreams possessed no obligation to be merciful.
A familiar jaw, the curve of a brow. Something delicate in the shape of a skull that his mind knew before reason could object.
"Tanya…?"
His voice broke.
Another small skeleton lay nearby, Imperiel, beyond that, others. His daughters, his sons, friends.
People he loved.
All of them reduced to bone beneath flags that no longer meant anything to the dead.
Oskar surged upright as though standing quickly enough could somehow deny what he had seen.
"This isn't real," he said.
His voice carried across the wasteland and came back faintly from somewhere far away.
"This is a dream. It has to be."
He stared again toward the hill, toward the ruined German banner and Karl's little skeleton lying beneath it, and desperately tried to force logic back into the world.
"I changed it," Oskar whispered.
Then louder: "I changed it."
He had saved Ferdinand, he had reached Sarajevo. The Archduke was alive. Therefore the chain was broken.
"There will be no Great War."
He said the words like prayer, then again.
"There will be no Great War."
Germany was too strong now. Everyone knew it. Russia would have to be insane to mobilize against them. Serbia could not possibly survive a continental war with Bulgaria on one side and Austria-Hungary upon the other. France would understand the danger. Britain would understand it.
Everyone would understand.
"If Austria-Hungary moves against terrorists," Oskar said into the dead landscape, "the world will understand."
They had to.
"They must understand."
His breathing quickened.
"It would be suicide to challenge Germany."
And that was true, surely it was true. Germany would probably win. With its weapons, industry, communications, medicine, motorization and everything Oskar had spent eleven years building, how could it not?
"Yes," he whispered. "Germany would win."
Then his voice weakened.
"But at what cost?"
He looked again at the bones surrounding him.
"Our sons."
A pause.
"Their sons."
The numbers came without invitation. Millions, perhaps tens of millions. Young men buried in fields they had never heard of until somebody handed them a rifle and told them the soil was suddenly sacred.
"For nothing," Oskar whispered.
His certainty began draining away.
"Surely there is a peaceful path…"
There had to be another way.
Diplomacy, pressure, reform, trade, compromise. Everything Oskar had spent his second life building toward had been meant to create alternatives to slaughter.
He nodded faintly to himself, desperately trying to force the nightmare back beneath the weight of reason. That was all this was, after all. Fever. Morphine. Old memories and newer fears being stitched together by an exhausted mind.
All he had to do was continue as he always had.
Keep building. Keep guiding. Keep dragging the world away from its worst instincts whenever they surfaced. Whenever history closed one road, force another open. Whenever hatred threatened to overwhelm reason, give people something better to choose instead.
Eventually it would work, there would be peace, a lasting peace. Surely one day it would be like so.
Then something changed.
Oskar felt it before he understood it—not a sound or a footstep, but a pressure descending across the wasteland.
The air itself seemed to acquire weight, as though something impossibly vast had leaned close enough for its presence alone to press against the world. The hairs along Oskar's arms rose. His breath caught. Across the endless field of bones, torn banners that had fluttered weakly in the dead wind suddenly fell still.
Even the wind stopped.
For one terrible moment the entire wasteland seemed to hold its breath, as though the dead themselves had noticed the arrival of something greater than death.
Oskar slowly raised his eyes.
High above the hill, suspended within the red-black sky over the ruined flags and countless dead, hung a being of white light.
There was no face he could see, no body he could understand. Nothing recognizably human at all.
Only light.
Pure, silent, almost unbearable to look upon. And somehow Oskar knew that it was looking back. Watching him with the cold stillness of a blade resting against a throat.
Judging him.
His mouth went dry.
"You," he whispered.
Then the anger came, immediate and burning, for the audacity of that silent gaze struck him almost like an insult.
"You judge me?" His voice trembled. "Who are you to judge me?"
He stepped forward, bones cracking beneath his boots.
"You sent me here—didn't you? You threw me into a prince's body with no language, no memories, no instructions. You gave me nothing but time and expectations and silence."
Oskar raised his bandaged hands before the light, smeared with ash and blood that was not entirely his own.
"So what do you want from me?" he demanded. "Tell me."
The light gave no answer.
His voice rose.
"What did I miss? What did I do wrong? Have I failed—how? Just show me. Give me a sign. Give me anything."
His hands curled into fists.
"One word!"
The light flickered once, cold and indifferent.
Then it turned away.
There was no anger in the gesture, no condemnation Oskar could understand. Somehow that made it worse. It felt almost like disappointment—as though whatever watched him had heard enough, found him wanting, and decided he was no longer worth answering.
The presence began to ascend.
"No," Oskar breathed.
It drifted higher through the torn red-black sky, passing silently between the broken clouds.
His expression twisted.
"No. Don't you dare."
The light continued upward.
"Come back!"
Oskar stumbled after it, boots crushing brittle bones beneath every step as he climbed over the dead toward the hill.
"Tell me what I'm supposed to do!" he roared. "Tell me!"
Still there was no answer.
The white presence climbed farther into the heavens, growing smaller as it passed through the wounded clouds, leaving Oskar alone beneath the eclipsed sun and the endless field of dead.
Something inside him finally snapped.
Rage flooded through Oskar so violently that it seemed to become physical. Heat surged beneath his skin. The veins along his forearms rose dark and swollen before beginning to glow red beneath the flesh, molten lines pulsing with every furious beat of his heart. The air around him shimmered and warped.
Then the earth cracked.
Great fissures ripped through the field of bones, splitting corpses and broken standards apart as they raced toward the horizon. Deep within those wounds, molten light began to pulse, as though the very heart of the world had been cut open.
Lightning tore across the eclipsed heavens.
For an instant the wasteland flashed white, thousands upon thousands of empty skulls grinning beneath the storm before darkness swallowed them again.
Oskar threw back his head.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!"
The scream tore from him until his throat burned raw.
Its echo rolled across the wasteland like thunder. Ruined flags snapped violently in skeletal hands. The ground trembled beneath his feet, and somewhere high above, the broken sky itself seemed to fracture beneath the force of his rage.
Then the dream shattered with it.
Oskar exploded upright in the hospital bed with a roar, sending flowers flying from the sheets and scattering petals through the room like torn confetti. Anica shrieked as the sudden movement threw her sideways from the edge of the mattress, her little arms flailing as she began to fall.
Oskar moved before he was properly awake.
One bandaged hand shot out and caught her around the waist, hauling her safely back onto the bed before she could strike the floor. For several seconds he remained there, wild-eyed and breathing hard, his mind still trapped somewhere between the red-black wasteland and the room surrounding him.
White sheets.
Bandages.
Sunlight pouring through the window.
The sharp smell of antiseptic mixed with crushed petals.
Anica stared back at him with her teddy bear squeezed tightly against her chest, her own heart apparently hammering almost as violently as his. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Then her frightened expression slowly tightened into offended seriousness.
"You have a weird way of waking up," she said.
Oskar swallowed. His throat felt scraped raw.
"Anica…?"
She nodded briskly, as though confirming something that should have been obvious.
"And you talk a lot in your sleep," she added, leaning toward him as if sharing a secret. "You know that? You're silly."
Oskar stared at her, still trembling, still half inside the nightmare, and found himself uncertain whether he wanted to laugh or cry.
Anica blinked at him and hugged the bear closer.
"You're such a big silly man," she repeated with the blunt certainty only a child could manage.
For a heartbeat Oskar almost laughed. A dry, broken sound escaped him instead.
"Yes," he muttered hoarsely. "I suppose I am."
Then something inside him finally gave way.
His hand snapped toward the iron railing beside the hospital bed and closed around it. Metal shrieked beneath his grip. With one violent pull, the bolts tore free from the frame and Oskar ripped the entire handrail loose before hurling it across the room.
It struck the wall with a deafening clang and crashed onto the floor.
"Shit!" he roared. "Fuck—fuck!"
Anica recoiled immediately, eyes widening as she shrank backward against the pillows.
Oskar sat there shaking, both hands now buried in the mattress, breath coming ragged and uneven. Slowly he dragged his palms down over his face, smearing sweat, dried blood and the faint scent of crushed flowers across his skin.
"Damn it," he whispered. "I'm such an idiot."
His head bowed.
For several long seconds he balanced upon an uncomfortable edge between stubborn pride and something much harder: the possibility that perhaps he had been wrong about something fundamental. That perhaps continuing exactly as he always had was not enough.
Anica watched him carefully.
Then, after some hesitation, she reached out.
Her tiny hand settled over his.
"There, there," she said softly. "It's okay. Don't be angry. It's okay."
The simplicity of it struck harder than any accusation.
Oskar went still and looked at her.
This little girl had lost her mother, father and brother less than a week earlier. Nobody from her family was coming through that hospital door again, and yet somehow she was sitting beside him, trying to make him feel better.
His jaw tightened.
Enough.
Self-pity was useless. Rage without direction was worse.
Oskar inhaled slowly and forced the breath back out.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "I'm fine now."
He wasn't.
But he was steady.
His gaze shifted toward the window, where an Eternal Guard soldier had been standing watch. The man immediately snapped to attention.
"How long?" Oskar asked. "How long have I been out?"
The Guardsman stepped forward at once and dropped to one knee beside the bed.
"Your Highness," he said in a controlled voice, "nearly a week. You slipped in and out of consciousness. The doctors feared internal bleeding. The nurses—and… Anica—have been feeding you whenever you were responsive enough to swallow."
Oskar blinked at him.
"A week?"
Anica immediately brightened.
"Yes!" she declared proudly. "And I gave you cookies and milk. Like you wanted."
Oskar slowly turned his head toward her.
"…Thank you."
She beamed.
The Guardsman hesitated before continuing.
"There is more, Your Highness."
Whatever faint amusement remained in Oskar's expression disappeared.
"Go on."
The soldier straightened slightly while remaining on one knee.
"Captain Carter ordered that you be informed the moment you properly woke. The political situation is deteriorating rapidly. Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia several days ago. They demand that Austro-Hungarian police forces be permitted to enter Serbian territory to root out the Black Hand, the remnants of Young Bosnia and other associated radical organizations. Serbia has rejected several of the principal demands."
Oskar closed his eyes.
Too fast.
Everything was moving far too fast.
"And?"
"Austria-Hungary has begun mobilization. Partial at first, but expanding."
The Guardsman swallowed.
"And this morning, Russia authorized partial mobilization as well."
Silence settled across the room.
A week.
Barely a week since Sarajevo.
In the history Oskar remembered, the crisis had simmered before it boiled.
This time it was already boiling.
"And Germany?" Oskar asked quietly.
The soldier's jaw tightened.
"The Kaiser is enraged, Your Highness. News of your shooting reached Berlin within hours. His Majesty cancelled the Norway voyage and publicly affirmed Germany's full support for Austria-Hungary. The ultimatum was pushed forward with unusual speed, and Berlin's position has been… uncompromising."
Oskar almost smiled.
So this was how it began.
Again.
Only faster.
This time the conspiracy had been impossible to dismiss. This time hundreds of people had died in Sarajevo. This time the heir to Austria-Hungary had nearly been murdered in what amounted to a small urban battle.
And this time Wilhelm's own son had been shot repeatedly while trying to stop it.
The Guardsman lowered his head slightly.
"Your Highness… matters are escalating beyond diplomacy."
Oskar inhaled slowly.
Then exhaled.
For an instant the nightmare returned behind his eyes: the endless field of bones, the sunflowers, the white presence turning away from him without an answer.
He could stall.
He could plead with Wilhelm. Pressure Ferdinand. Demand another conference, another exchange of notes, another careful attempt to balance one frightened empire against another.
He could search desperately for one more compromise.
Or perhaps he could finally accept something he had spent eleven years refusing to believe.
History did not fear him.
Oskar opened his eyes.
"Alright," he said calmly.
For a moment nobody moved.
"We will fight."
Anica understood absolutely nothing about mobilization, Serbia, Russia or the political catastrophe unfolding around them.
She understood the tone perfectly.
Her little fist shot enthusiastically into the air.
"Yes!" she declared. "Let's fight!"
The Eternal Guardsman rose sharply and struck his fist against his heart.
"Yes, Your Highness."
Oskar remained sitting amid white bandages, ruined sheets and flowers scattered across the bed. Sunlight still poured peacefully through the hospital window, absurdly indifferent to armies beginning to move beyond it.
Something inside him had shifted.
He did not yet know whether he had chosen the right road.
Only that, once again, the road had chosen him.