Chapter 415: Beneath the Weight of History
The sun gazed through the sacred halls of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. Tapestries, murals, frescoes, and portraits of a forgotten and almost mythical age of kings, knights, and emperors adorned the great hall built by the very men depicted within them.
A new generation, centuries later—forged from the same steel, cut from the same cloth, descended from the same lineage—stood beneath the visages of their ancestors. Their grand feats, etched into the marble and oil of imperial glory, had built an empire.
An empire that, today, officially came to an end. The Habsburgs, with all their titles as kaisers and emperors, would finally conclude their legacy here and now, in the spring of 1918.
Ironically enough, had this been Bruno’s former life, the Central Powers would be launching a final, pyrrhic push into France—a campaign that achieved victory on the battlefield but collapse at home, betrayed by politicians, revolutionaries, and profiteers.
But this world was not that one. The three sisters who wove the golden tapestry of fate had seen their threads burned, twisted, and rewoven by Bruno’s hand. Bitter though they may be, today was not their day. Today belonged to another force entirely.
It was a day of submission.
Dignitaries, nobles, generals, and ministers—along with their wives and children—had gathered to bear witness. This was no ordinary ceremony, but a funeral for an epoch, and the baptism of a new world order. The Kaisers of Germany and Russia, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II, stood beside their houses in solemn observation.
And at the center of it all, beneath the glimmering chandeliers and golden eagles of Habsburg majesty, stood the man who had brought about this transformation—not in his usual Prussian field uniform, but in a magnificent, decadent gala uniform.
His red trousers, gold-trimmed white tunic adorned with the Hungarian knotwork of nobility, bore the sash and chain of the Order of Saint Stephen, and medals gifted by Emperor Franz Joseph in years past—after Serbia had been brought to heel.
Bruno von Zehntner.