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.