The room was silent. It was a silence built from thick walls and heavy doors, a quiet that cost a great deal of money and power to maintain. The air smelled of old paper and the faint, clean scent of ozone from the humming filtration unit. Outside, rain fell on Berlin. It was a city that knew how to keep secrets.
Otto von Stahler stood before a large mahogany desk. The surface was polished to a black mirror. It reflected the room’s single, controlled light source. A cone of clean, white light from a brass lamp. Everything on the desk was arranged in perfect geometric alignment. A pen. A blotter. A velvet cloth.
On the cloth was a ring.
His hand moved. The hand was gloved in thin black leather. The glove was immaculate. His fingers closed around the ring. He picked it up. The weight was substantial. Crude. It was a heavy piece of blackened steel, the sort of thing a peasant might forge. A large, imperfectly cut piece of obsidian was set in its center. The Volkov Ring. Recovered from the epicenter of the collapse at Kavkaz-4. It was the only thing the scavengers had found of the Red Directorate general.
Von Stahler held the ring to the light. He was not a sensitive, not in the raw, chaotic way of men like the one he now hunted. He could not feel the emotions trapped in the object. He saw only the structure of its memory. The ring’s history was a mess. A loud, brutal narrative of power seized and held through force. There was no finesse. No understanding of the deeper art. It was the signature of a butcher who thought himself a surgeon. Volkov had been a blunt instrument, and he had built a weapon to match.
He felt a flicker of contempt. The Red Directorate’s methods were wasteful. They erased history with the subtlety of a forest fire, feeding the Whispering Plague with their ideological purges. They created instability. They left behind scars like the Frontline Fractures and messy, chattering Pavlovian Loops. The Ahnenerbe sought purity. Control. To edit the script of the world, not burn the pages.
He placed the ring back on the velvet cloth. Exactly in its center. A problem solved. Volkov was a ghost, consumed by his own machine. A satisfying, logical conclusion.
His attention shifted. To his left was a file. It was bound in dark grey leather, the Ahnenerbe eagle embossed in silver on the cover. The report from the Kavkaz-4 incident. His fingers traced the edge of the file. His teams had been on site within seventy-two hours of the collapse. They were efficient. They were professional.
He opened the report. The pages were crisp, the type precise. The first section detailed the physical findings. The fortress had not simply been destroyed. It had imploded. The mountain itself had folded inward, crushing the facility into a knot of concrete and steel. The area was now a dead zone, a high-density concentration of the Plague. A permanent wound in the world.
A map was included, a topographical survey of the new reality. The epicenter was marked with a red circle. Within that circle, the laws of physics were described as ‘unreliable.’ The report noted a complete absence of organic matter. Not even bacteria survived. Only the ring.
He turned the page. The next section was the energy analysis. Data streams from long-range sensors, cross-referenced with seismic readings. The numbers were stark. The event had registered as a reality-shear of over 1200 chronon units. An unprecedented figure. The feedback loop that caused it was not a simple mechanical failure. The math did not support it.
The report was clear. The Oscillator, Volkov’s crude sledgehammer, had been turned back on itself. It had been force-fed a massive amount of unprocessed memory, causing the catastrophic overload. The official conclusion was that the captured scientist, Dr. Viktor Sokolov, had weaponized the machine before his death.
Von Stahler did not believe it. Sokolov was a man of theory. A man of conscience. He had the knowledge, but not the will. He was a runner, not a fighter. To channel that much power, to control a feedback loop of that magnitude, required something more. It required a psychic locus of immense, raw talent.
He moved to the next page. A list of all known individuals involved in the incident. The Directorate personnel were all accounted for, listed as erased. Sokolov was listed as erased. Then came the rogue unit. The partisan, Zoya Koval. Her file was thin. A history of brutal, effective sabotage. Presumed killed in action during the fortress assault. The sergeant major, Boris Kulagin. A long and distinguished service record. Killed in the ambush prior to the main assault. The political officer, Pavel Morozov. Captured, interrogated, and broken by Volkov. His current status was listed as ‘reassigned.’ A Directorate euphemism for being fed into a grinder somewhere.
Then there was the commander. Sineus.
Von Stahler paused. He picked up his pen, the metal cool against his leather glove. He drew a neat circle around the name. Sineus. The man Volkov had chosen to hunt Sokolov. The man who had filed the false report. The man who had led the chase across half a continent.
He cross-referenced the name with other intelligence summaries. The firefight in the Pripet Marshes. The escape from the rail junction. The incident in Istanbul, where Sineus had somehow located the Chronos Anomaly Detector. An artifact hidden so well even Ahnenerbe assets in the city had not known its location. It was a trail of chaos, but a chaos with a purpose. A purpose that always seemed to benefit the rogue commander.
The report from Istanbul had been specific. The broker, Adem Kurtoglu, had noted the commander’s unusual intensity. His unnerving calm in moments of extreme stress. The way he seemed to anticipate events.
The final piece of the puzzle was in the appendix of the Kavkaz-4 report. An analysis of the energy signature’s psychic resonance. The feedback loop had two distinct focal points. One was Sokolov, the psychic lens. The other was a ghost. An unregistered, untrained, and incredibly powerful wild variable. A second sensitive.
Von Stahler looked out the window. The rain fell in straight, clean lines down the dark glass. His own reflection stared back at him. A pale, lean face. Sharp aristocratic features. A thin white scar on his left cheek. The image was perfect. Whole. Unbroken.
This Sineus was the opposite. A fractured power. A man of noble blood serving a peasant state. A loyal soldier turned traitor. A man with an immense gift he likely did not even understand. A force of nature in a uniform.
He was not a problem to be solved. He was a resource. A weapon waiting to be claimed. The Red Directorate had been too stupid to see it. They had tried to use him as a dog. Von Stahler would not make that mistake.
He pressed a small button on his desk. The intercom hissed softly.
— Yes, Herr Standartenführer? — The voice was clipped, professional.
— Send for Krebs, — von Stahler said. His own voice was quiet, a precise tenor that carried absolute authority.
— At once, Herr Standartenführer.
He closed the file. The circle around the name Sineus was a perfect, sharp line of black ink. A target designated. A new operation authorized. The hunt for Volkov was over. A new, more interesting hunt was about to begin.
The scent of old paper and rain filled the quiet room.
The city of Berlin was washed clean in the night.
The hunt for the nobleman began
