While the women of Oskar's household sat around the first-floor dining table, eating fine food, drinking fine drinks, and discussing the Black Legion's future field uniforms, the sun began to sink in the west.
Yet before true darkness could settle, another light rose in the east.
Beyond the palace windows, beyond the Vistula, the horizon began to burn. The true sunset lay behind Warsaw, red and gold over the city roofs. But in the east there was a second dawn, dirtier and more terrible: orange, red, and black-gold beneath vast curtains of smoke.
Across the city, people noticed.
Conversations died at supper tables. Men and women rose from chairs and went to windows. Servants stopped in corridors. Guards stepped out onto balconies and looked east. In the palace dining room, the women fell silent one by one and turned toward the glass. In the war room, officers and generals did the same.
Even men long accustomed to maps, casualty lists, and orders felt their mouths go dry at the sight.
It looked as if the end of the world had begun somewhere beyond the river and was slowly walking toward them.
"My God," someone whispered.
Others crossed themselves.
Hindenburg stood heavily by the window, his broad face unreadable beneath his cap. Ludendorff stood beside him, thinner and sharper, his jaw tight in the reflection of the glass.
Both men knew what they were seeing.
They had ordered it.
Across the eastern front, the more than one hundred thousand Black Legion soldiers facing the Russian advance had begun to burn the land.
It was the old logic of the Moss Men in Thrace, carried north and magnified until it no longer looked like tactics, but catastrophe. During the Second Balkan War, the Eternal Guard had delayed Ottoman masses by refusing to stand where they could be surrounded. They had laid traps, sprung ambushes, burned the land, vanished before the enemy could bring heavy guns to bear, and forced the Ottomans to pay for every kilometer of ground.
Now the same principle was being applied across the eastern front on a scale Thrace had never known.
This was not a narrow Balkan theater.
This was an empire's width of land.
And there were far more people trapped inside the design.
Aircraft had already been pulled from quieter sectors and concentrated wherever Russian pressure threatened to become decisive. That left parts of the south thinner, more exposed, and more dependent on mines, traps, movement, fire, and retreat.
There, Lieutenant General Hermann von François and his I Corps, a little more than forty six thousand men strong, reinforced by police formations and support troops, carried out their orders which were simple: "Pull back everything useful. Remove every civilian still foolish enough to linger near the front. Drive livestock west. Strip supply depots bare. Destroy bridges. Burn what cannot be carried. Bleed the enemy, slow him, vanish, and make him pay more time than Germany paid ground."
Those were the order's, and much the same was happening all along the line.
From the safety of the Royal Palace in Warsaw, the strategy looked clean enough when placed on a map. Unit's withdrew, fires created obstacles, bridges vanished and the Russian columns were slowed wherever possible. While further back the second defensive belt was being prepared.
But at the front, where the orders were being carried out, there was no clean strategy.
There was only hell.
Black Legion detachments moved through fields, villages, orchards, and forest edges like coordinated arsonists, setting the land alight while Russian cavalry snapped at their heels. The heat was intense, at times nearly unbearable. Smoke rolled low across the ground and crawled between trees. Small firefights broke out in half-burning villages, in deep forest lanes, and across open fields where Legionaries raced on motorcycles, only to skid to a halt, throw themselves into ditches, and fire back at horsemen pursuing them through the smoke.
The Black Legion was retreating constantly.
But not blindly.
Every withdrawal had a purpose. Every fire had a place. The burning was not random destruction, but direction. Fire narrowed the flat country. It turned open land into corridors. It forced the Russian advance toward roads, fields, forest paths, river crossings, and gaps that had already been marked for mines, traps, machine guns, and artillery.
To the Black Legion, fire was not merely a weapon of ruin.
It was a way to give shape to Poland's open ground.
To do it quickly, they carried the same crude weapon the Moss Men had used in Thrace: Oskar's firebombs. Glass bottles filled with flammable liquid, stoppered with cloth or fitted with simple ignition, made to be lit and hurled against stone, wood, wagons, barns, tree trunks, or dry brush. In another world, another name might have clung to them. Here, they were simply firebombs — ugly little bottles made not to pierce armor or shatter walls, but to make the world catch.
Not long ago, the Russians had burned much of the land in retreat, determined to leave Germany nothing useful.
Now the Black Legion doubled the destruction.
German engineers had built pontoon bridges to replace crossings the Russians had destroyed. Now those same bridges were soaked, fired, cut loose, or blown apart. Whole sections drifted downstream in flame, turning rivers into black mirrors streaked with burning wreckage.
Fields grown wild beneath the September sun were set alight.
So were hedges, orchards, hayricks, empty farmhouses, roadside sheds, abandoned barns, and strips of forest where the underbrush was dry enough to burn. Late August and early September rains had left much of the land damp, but not damp enough to stop more than a hundred thousand men deliberately trying to burn it.
So the fires caught.
And spread.
Animals fled from the heat. Birds rose in dark flocks from the tree lines. Smoke thickened until whole stretches of country vanished behind it.
Still, the Russians came.
Men ran through smoke and sparks, desperate to stop the Legionaries before everything useful disappeared into flame. Cavalry pushed forward where roads remained open. Infantry stumbled after them, coughing, cursing, and firing at shadows. But the pace of the Russian advance began to slow.
By late evening, in some places, Russian troops had still advanced thirty to forty kilometers on foot and horseback through fire, smoke, and ruined country before crashing into the second Black Legion defensive belt, where they were stopped.
Although, as night approached, aircraft began to become less effective. And along parts of the front, the war seemed to pause, not from mercy, but because men needed darkness, breath, and the flames themselves to die down before they could continue.
But at Riga, there was no pause.
The battle that had begun in the darkness before dawn still raged deep into the evening and showed no sign of ending cleanly. There were no open fields here, no wide forests, no long views across wheat and river mist. Riga was a crooked city of brick, timber, cobblestone, warehouses, church towers, courtyards, stairwells, cellars, and narrow streets that bent back upon themselves like traps.
There were holy places everywhere—churches for every confession, old chapels, synagogues, graveyards, shrines tucked between buildings—but holiness did not protect stone from shells.
Where Russian defenders ran into churches and tried to turn them into strongpoints, Black Legion tanks rolled up and fired into the walls. Where men gathered behind doors, the Legion did not rush the entrance like fools. Grenades went in first. If the door was covered, they made another door. Grenade launchers punched holes through walls. Folding shovels, sharpened and hardened, broke plaster and timber to make firing holes. Machine guns poured fire through floors, windows, and partitions until whatever had been hiding behind them stopped moving.
The battle became street by street, room by room, floor by floor.
This was not the kind of war the Russians had imagined when taking up arms to defend their motherland. There were no glorious banners, beating of drums, or clean lines of men beneath the sun charging courageously into the fight. This was uglier, closer, more mechanical, and far more modern.
Because the Black Legion did not rely on individual heroism or the mass of men. Instead it, especially during urban combat relied on overwhelming firepower.
Sometimes that firepower came from a single infantry squad: carbines, grenades, a machine gun, a grenade launcher, a medic, a radio, and men trained to move as one. Sometimes it came from tanks or armored trucks forcing their way down cobbled streets. When that was not enough, artillery was called. In some sectors, even naval guns reached into the city and turned Russian-held buildings into rubble, although naval guns were far too destructive and too Imprecise to be used openly, unless you wanted to level entire city blocks. Thus Aircraft had been preferred while they remained overhead, because aircraft could strike with greater precision, but as the day wore on and more planes were pulled away, the Legion's choices became cruder.
And Riga suffered for it.
The deeper the battle moved into the city, the harder movement became. Fighting through clean streets was one thing. Fighting through a city whose roads were blocked by rubble, overturned carts, shattered masonry, burning beams, fallen church stone, and smoke thick enough to blind and choke men was another matter entirely. Engines overheated. Men coughed behind masks. Officers cursed over radios. Engineers worked under fire to clear streets that were blocked again ten minutes later by another collapse.
Still, the Legion moved.
By late evening, almost the entire southern part of Riga, south of the Western Dvina, had fallen under Black Legion control, as had much of the western parts of the city as well. While in the north, the German marines who had first sealed the outskirts were now pressing inward, tightening their grip street by street, while tanks and assault squads drove up from the south with Oskar and Shadowmane in the lead.
The Russians still held parts of the east, along with scattered pockets in cellars, warehouses, churches, railway offices, and apartment blocks. But those pockets were no longer a city defense. They were fragments.
The reason the Black Legion could keep advancing was simple: Riga Castle was theirs, and the stone bridge beside it still stood.
That bridge mattered more than any single street.
Across it came ammunition trucks, medical cars, fuel wagons, engineers, barrels of water, spare parts, field telephones, wire, and soldiers. Everything the battle consumed came over that crossing.
The Legion did not merely push deeper into Riga.
It fed itself forward.
As long as the bridge remained open, the Black Legion could sustain the one advantage that mattered most in urban war: overwhelming, uninterrupted firepower.
Yet even then, the city did not collapse into the clean rout Oskar had hoped for. The Russian defense had broken, yes, but it had not vanished. It had shattered into pieces, and each piece had found somewhere to die slowly: a cellar, a stairwell, a church tower, a warehouse, a row of apartments, a railway office, a burning tenement, a schoolhouse, a shop.
There was no longer one clean Russian command directing the defense. There were only pockets of men fighting for survival, revenge, duty, or terror.
Riga had become something from a later age of war. A dirty, close quarters, broken merciless form of battle.
Where Russian defenders held wooden houses, the Black Legion did not waste time.
Tanks rammed them.
Engines growled. Tracks ground over cobblestones. Armored hulls punched through timber walls and support beams, collapsing rooms inward and sending roofs, furniture, plaster, glass, and men down together in choking clouds of dust. Infantry followed close behind, firing into the wreckage, clearing corners with grenades, killing anyone still holding a weapon, dragging out civilians where they found them, and moving on before the smoke had settled.
Behind the assault teams, supply trucks crawled forward street by street.
The Black Legion had built moving lungs behind its attack.
Those lungs breathed ammunition, fuel, water, medicine, and men into the front as quickly as Riga consumed them.
That was why the assault did not stop.
But near the center of the city, were homes were larger and sturdier, the work had become harder.
Brick did not yield like wood.
Stone did not fold so easily.
And near Thirteenth Street, close to the ruined railway bridge and the station north of the river, the advance stalled.
The street ran open from north to south, exposed and murderous. Across it, on the eastern side, stood a line of heavy buildings and the railway station itself—a broad, stubborn structure that no longer looked like a civilian station at all. It looked like a fortress.
Two square office blocks flanked the main station hall like towers. The station's roof was torn. Its clock had been shattered. Smoke curled through holes in the upper floors. Sandbags filled windows and doorways. Railway benches, crates, furniture, and overturned carts had been dragged into barricades. South of the station lay the river, guarding one flank. From the west, the approach was open ground under fire.
The Russians had turned the station into a castle.
From the western tower, two MG 08 machine guns hammered down the street.
Rifles joined from broken windows.
Every attempt to cross became suicide.
One hundred and fifty meters away, behind the corner of a burning brick-and-wood building, a twelve-man Eternal Guard squad of Third Company was pinned down.
They were hot, sweating, half-blinded by smoke, and trapped beneath a storm of bullets. Their equipment, so useful in open war, felt heavy and suffocating now under the heat of the burning structure behind them. Every time one of them leaned toward the corner, fire snapped across the stonework and drove him back.
At the center of the road sat their abandoned armored truck.
It had been torn apart by bullets and fragments. Its plates were scarred. Its glass was gone. One door hung open like a broken jaw. Its tires were ruined, its engine dead, its body sagging slightly on damaged wheels. It offered cover only because the Russians had not yet destroyed it completely.
The squad sergeant crouched at the building corner with a backpack radio set beside him and the field receiver pressed hard to his ear.
"Station western tower! Two machine guns! We need armor or air support on Thirteenth Street! Repeat, armor or air support!"
Static answered.
Then voices.
Too many voices.
The airwaves were crowded with Riga's death. Reports, pleas, coordinates, corrections, warnings, screams, artillery requests, infantry requests, calls for medics, calls for tanks, calls for engineers, calls for anyone who could hear and still had ammunition.
The city was eating signals as greedily as it ate men.
The sergeant cursed and tried again.
Nothing useful came back.
Most of the armored fist was still clearing the south or pressing north. Other formations were already engaged near the station approaches. Air support had been seen leaving the sector. No one knew where Oskar was.
Or so they thought.
From the west, down the smoke-choked street, came a sound that made the ground tremble.
At first the squad thought it was a tank.
It was not.
A black figure emerged through the smoke, running low, sword across his back, armor streaked with soot, dust, and blood.
The Iron Prince.
The Russians saw him almost at once.
The station tower erupted.
Both machine guns opened together, hammering the street in hard, bright lines. Rifles joined from windows and rooftops. Bullets sparked from cobblestones, punched into the dead armored truck, and whipped through smoke.
Oskar dropped low and rolled behind the ruined vehicle, hitting the stones hard enough to shake dust from its broken frame.
The Eternal Guard stared.
"Your Highness!"
Oskar looked toward the squad as if appearing alone in a machine-gun-swept street were the most natural thing in the world.
His voice came through the smoke, calm and sharp.
"Grenadier. Two rounds."
The grenadier did not hesitate.
He tore two spare rounds from the grenade belt across his chest and tossed them.
Oskar caught both with his right hand.
With practiced ease, he snapped open the grenade-launcher attachment fixed along his left gauntlet. Six short tubes sat empty beneath the armored housing. He slid the two rounds into place, locked the mechanism shut, then turned to the sergeant.
"Air support?"
The sergeant looked up.
Through smoke and dusk, five aircraft could be seen far overhead, already moving south in formation, their dark shapes slipping away into the dirty red sky.
"Your Highness," the sergeant said, "I believe the aircraft have been recalled south. There seems to be a Russian counteroffensive underway. A large one. Command channels are chaos. I cannot make out details, but everyone is calling for support."
Behind the skull helm, Oskar went still.
For one dangerous heartbeat, surprise nearly escaped him.
He held it in.
He could not show shock in front of his men, but the sergeant's words struck harder than any Russian bullet had that day.
The Russians were attacking?
Now?
After Warsaw. After the march to Riga. After the shattered armies, the broken commands, the dead officers, the burned roads, the airborne assault, the tanks, the aircraft, the terror of Shadowmane, and the black shape of the Legion spreading across the east like judgment.
After all that, they were attacking.
By every logic Oskar trusted, they should have been thinking only of survival. Retreat. Negotiation. Anything but another advance into the teeth of the Black Legion.
Had he not shown them enough?
Had Shadowmane not terrified them enough?
Had the Legion not made the truth plain enough?
For a moment, his mind caught on the contradiction.
He stood in a burning city, taking streets with machines the enemy scarcely understood. His horse had become a battlefield myth. His soldiers fought like something dragged out of a future war. The Russians in Riga were being cut apart, pocket by pocket, room by room.
And yet elsewhere, Russia was not surrendering.
Russia was coming forward.
The confusion hardened into anger.
Not at one man. Not even at one general. At the war itself. At the stubbornness of empires. At the endless appetite of states for corpses. At the fact that no amount of terror, slaughter, speed, or proof seemed enough to make men stop sending other men forward to die.
He had wanted Russia out quickly.
Break the first armies. Crack confidence. Take cities fast. Make the Tsar and his ministers see defeat clearly before the war swelled beyond control.
But he had miscalculated.
The Russian fighting spirit—brave, stupid, holy, mad, whatever name one gave it—had not broken.
And now more men would have to die.
By his armies, by his weapons, and by his own hands.
That thought enraged him precisely because he took no pleasure in it.
Killing in battle was simple for his body. Too simple. His strength made men into obstacles. His armor made bullets into sparks. Shadowmane turned infantry into broken shapes beneath iron hooves. Together, they could do things that belonged in legends and nightmares.
But Oskar was not blind to what those legends were made of.
People.
Sons. Fathers. Brothers. Boys. Men who had prayed that morning. Men who had perhaps never hated him until someone placed a rifle in their hands and pointed them west.
He wanted them to stop.
He wanted them to understand.
They did not.
His icy eyes flashed cold beneath the helm.
Inside his chest, something red and furious stirred.
The muscles beneath his armor tightened, as if the machine of his body had accepted the next order before his mind fully had.
He looked at the sergeant.
"All right," Oskar said. "Follow my lead."