Chapter 469: The Last Knight of Austro-Hungary
The year was 1919, and Franz Joseph had beaten the reaper’s grasp by well over two years as a thanks to Bruno’s heavy investments into medicine, specifically things like antibiotics, but there was only so much medicine that could keep death at bay for so long.
Age itself could be a cause of death, and the aging Emperor was damn near nearing 90 years old, an age that was almost primeval in the era he currently lived in. As a result, his body had begun to deteriorate, and his soul had given up after Bruno had dealt the final blow to his family’s sovereignty.
Austria was now just another incorporated realm into the Reich, as it was always meant to be, but that didn’t bring the man who had once been crowned an Emperor any pride, nor any comfort, rather the opposite.
He had sold his soul, and that of his realm to the hands of a devil, who had come to him bathed in moonlight, cloaked in white, and proclaimed by the cries of angels, and yet it was only after it was too late that those were black wings bleached to a state of false purity.
It was a thought that weighed heavily on his old soul and had ultimately caused his condition to worsen rapidly. Today, on February 2nd 1919, the former Emperor of Austro-Hungaria, had met his end.
He would be remembered as the man whose might, vision, and wealth had forged an Empire from the ruins of the old, an Empire that was now nothing more than words etched through the annals of history.
And why was this empire gone and forgotten? Because it was an empire built on shaky foundations, in the end those unstable roots had not been capable of bearing with the tides of history.
All the monarchs of the German Reich had gathered for the funeral precession of their most recent peer, and his otherwise untimely demise. Bruno himself, though gazed upon with complicated expressions by the Habsburgs, was also present, not in civilian formal attire, nor his German field marshal uniform.
Rather, he wore the extravagant gala uniform once given to him by the now deceased Emperor, with all the medals he had earned from the Habsburgs during the Great War, a testament to a dead empire, and the House who had survived it.
It was a gesture of remembrance, of venenation for a legendary historical figure now gone from this world, and in a subtle way a silent promise between men who had been adversaries at the end of their lives, not for personal animosity, but conflicting loyalties and the duty to those who demanded it from them. The promise:
"Your family may no longer be sovereign monarchs wearing the crowns of Emperors, but so long as I draw breath, and my blood flows strongly through my own line, your kin will have a lion guarding them in the west."