Chapter 714: Heir to an Empire
Dunkirk had once been a graveyard of pride.
Now it was a city of scaffolds and new scaffolding dreams, steel rising where fire had once fallen, cranes like skeletal fingers combing the skyline.
The Channel breeze rolled inland carrying salt, diesel, and the faint echo of hammers.
All around, the bones of war were being buried under concrete and reborn as monuments to peace.
Oberstleutnant Erich von Zehntner stood at the edge of the promenade, his black gloves folded behind his back, wind stirring the hem of his greatcoat.
His boots clicked softly as he moved along the damp stone walkway, his eyes fixed on the horizon where the English coastline was a ghostly blur.
German destroyers and supply vessels dotted the gray water, heading westward in measured columns, relief ships bringing fuel, food, and bureaucracy to the remnants of the British Commonwealth.
Behind him, Dunkirk breathed. Rebuilt. Obedient.
Order reigned here.
Children played football in the newly cleared courtyards.
Market stalls reopened under the protection of German guards and French Gendarme.
French, Flemish, and even former English collaborators now wore administrative uniforms.
The few who resisted had long since vanished, exiled to Quebec or given a shallow grave outside Paris.
Erich’s battalion, once a proud airborne regiment that had dropped into France under flak and fury, now wore polished boots and patrolled café-lined avenues.
Their rifles were mostly ceremonial now. Their enemies were time, boredom, and the occasional thief.
Still, he made no complaint. A soldier served where he was needed.
He paused near the base of a newly erected statue.
It depicted a German medic kneeling beside a wounded civilian, hands outstretched, helmet off. "He who heals conquers more than he who kills," read the inscription in both German and French.
Erich admired the sentiment, though he found it a bit naive.
His grandfather would’ve called it "noble propaganda."
A young lieutenant approached from behind.
"Oberstleutnant, the Belgian liaison is awaiting you in the mayor’s hall. Civil transit issues again."
Erich didn’t turn around.
"Let them wait. They’ll understand the value of patience soon enough."
"Yes, sir."
The lieutenant hesitated.
"Something else?"
The young man stiffened. "A message from High Command. Encrypted, priority mark Omega. Delivered by courier."
That made Erich turn.
"Omega?"
The lieutenant nodded, clearly uncomfortable. "From Berlin. From the Chancellor’s inner office."
Erich took the slim black case without another word, breaking the wax seal as he walked away from the channel edge.
He opened it beneath the partial shadow of a ruined clocktower now under restoration.
His eyes scanned the contents, brief, but unmistakable.
Phase One Preparations Authorized. Transatlantic Contingency Mobilization. Confirm readiness.
His jaw clenched.
He looked back toward the water. Toward England. Toward the vastness beyond.
So it’s true. Grandfather wasn’t being paranoid.
He closed the case and slipped it into the interior pocket of his coat.
He stood still for a long while as gulls wheeled overhead, indifferent witnesses to the grinding of history.
Later that evening, Erich sat in the garrison’s central command office, his fingers idly tracing the worn brass trim on his desk.
Reports flickered across the wall projector: supply counts, disciplinary logs, civilian integration summaries.
Nothing urgent. Nothing new.
But his thoughts kept returning to the message. And to the weight it carried.
They’d won the war in Europe. And they had done it within a matter of weeks.
However, the battle for France had not been the conclusion of the war.
That was the myth. This is the prelude.
His grandfather had warned of this.
Reichsmarschall Bruno von Zehntner... A hero of seven wars, and decorated beyond an tactician before him. In Berlin they called him the savior of the Reich.
He had always known the Americans wouldn’t remain idle.
That across the sea, their industry, once shackled by democracy, would rise unrestrained beneath the steel heel of a new autocracy.
And now... that awakening had begun.
There was a knock at the door.
"Come."
A sergeant entered, saluting. "Sir, the city’s evening curfew has been initiated. All districts report compliance."
"Good," Erich said. "Send a patrol along the waterfront. Quietly. No flashing lights. Just presence."
"Yes, sir."
The man left.
Erich stood and approached the wide window overlooking Dunkirk’s central square.
The city was draped in golden lamplight, quiet as a held breath.
He could feel it. A lull. A strange tension beneath the calm.
The peace here was real, but fragile.
And across the ocean, another storm was gathering. A storm that made all previous conflicts feel like practice.
He raised a glass of brandy from the sideboard and held it aloft to the window.
"To stillness," he muttered. "May it last long enough for the next generation to forget what we’ve done."
He drank, then added under his breath:
"But I doubt it will."
Erich let the brandy linger on his tongue a moment longer.
"May it last long enough for the next generation to forget what we’ve done."
The words echoed in his skull, and not for the first time.
He hadn’t meant to say them aloud. They had simply slipped out, like an inherited instinct.
And that frightened him more than he cared to admit.
He turned away from the window and sat once more, gloved fingers tightening around the glass until it trembled.
That phrase, it wasn’t his.
It was his grandfather’s.
He’d heard Bruno say it once, years ago, when he was studying beneath his tutelage as an adolescent boy.
He remembered it clearly. The two of them had been within Bruno’s office in Berlin, looking over maps, discussing tactics, strategies, and logistics used by history’s greatest Generals.
As Bruno applied that knowledge to the future he had had taken a pause to sip from his flask.
"History," he had murmured, "is just memory made tolerable by distance and lies. We do what we must, so they can live without knowing the price."
At the time, Erich hadn’t understood.
Now he did.
All too well.
He exhaled slowly, setting the glass down beside a stack of reports.
He felt possessed. Not haunted, but inhabited.
As if his grandfather’s will had burrowed into him during the war and taken root like a parasite.
Bruno did not need to give orders directly to his grandson.
He was the order. His expectations were law. His legacy was armor. His shadow reached across the sea.
And though Erich wore the uniform of an Oberstleutnant in his early twenties.
He had never once been handed anything without earning it in blood and bone.
No favors. No nepotism. Just iron and blood.
He remembered the day of his academy graduation as vividly as any battle.
Rain had been falling on the cobblestones. The courtyard had been filled with proud families, speeches, salutes.
But Bruno had not stood with the crowd.
No, he had waited alone inside the officer’s wing, behind closed oak doors.
When Erich entered, soaked and trembling with pride, his grandfather had turned to him like a verdict.
And said:
"The privilege you have been gifted by bearing my name is the dirt beneath your feet. Every medal, every promotion, every position and honor you earn in your career will be solely by your own will, and the making of your hands.
Never forget that should I be forced to trade the lives of a thousand of my men, or a captured enemy general, for your safe return, it is a price I will not pay.
You are my blood, my kin, and potentially the heir to my legacy...
Or you are not."
Those words had stayed with him more than any tactical lecture or war poem. More than any battlefield commendation.
They were not encouragement. They were commandment.
He had returned to the barracks that night, silent, soaked, and shaking.
But from that day forward, he had never once allowed himself to rely on his lineage.
When men called him "the grandson of the Reichsmarschall," he did not flinch, but he did not lean on it either. Let them think what they wanted. He would be feared for his actions, not his ancestry.
Still... he could not deny it now.
Bruno was inside him. Beneath his skin. Pressing at the back of his thoughts.
A conqueror’s ghost whispering not of peace, but of preparation.
Erich looked down at the orders again.
Phase One Preparations Authorized. The transatlantic war was no longer a question of "if." Only "when."
He leaned back in the chair, staring up at the ceiling of the once-French municipal building now converted into a fortified complex for the German occupation command.
Ornate plaster molding above, faint with soot and age. The face of a lion stared down from the central dome.
Erich smirked faintly.
"The old bastard," he muttered. "From the moment I chose a path of the soldier he stopped treating me like a grandson, and instead became my drill sergeant. I never knew the peace and love my father had been given.... I had known nothing but a boot on my neck since I was but a youth...."
And then, quieter, without bitterness:
"Perhaps that’s why we now rule the world from the shadows."
The thought carried no pride. No malice. Only understanding.
It was the same understanding one found in the eyes of executioners, architects, and wolves.
The understanding that if you must bear the weight of empire, to become a Lord of War, there can be no softness.
And perhaps that, too, was the legacy he would pass down one day.
If any world remained to inherit it.