Marshal Wolfgang Mittermeier stepped out into the provisional palace’s garden with Felix in his arms. The storm was over at last, but an unseasonal coolness still filled the summer air and froze the starlight. When dawn came, the kaiser’s death would be announced to the public and preparations for the state funeral would begin. Presumably, von Oberstein would need a funeral too. Things would be busy. But that was for the best. Without vast quantities of work to ground him, Mittermeier was not sure he could bear the grief and sense of loss that ate away at his heart.
Suddenly, the Gale Wolf heard a voice calling to him from right beside his ear.
“Vater…”
As Mittermeier stood, slightly stunned, his son impatiently seized his honey-colored hair and spoke again.
“Vater!”
On the night on which Mittermeier had lost the great ruler he cherished and respected, he now experienced a surprise that brought him very near to joy. Hard as it was to imagine, his face even showed something like a smile. It seemed to him that the kaiser’s spirit had entered the heart of his infant son and inspired him to speak his first word. Only a fantasy, of course, but Mittermeier wanted to believe it. He hoisted his son onto his shoulders and looked up at the night sky.
“Do you see them, Felix? All those stars…”
Every one of those stars had lived for billions—no, tens of billions of years. They had shone since long before the birth of humanity, and would shine on long after humanity’s demise. Seen from the stars, a human life was the merest twinkle. This had been known since ancient times. But it was humans, and not stars, who were aware of this—who knew that while stars were eternal, their own lives were fleeting.
Will you someday feel this too, my son? These frozen eons and moments of combustion—and which of those two the people will value more? The way a shooting star that shines only for a moment can imprint its course on the galactic abyss and a human’s memory?
One day, you too will look up at the stars like this. You will dream of what lies beyond them, and burn with the desire to conquer it, to throw yourself into that dazzling brilliance. When that day comes, will you set out alone? Will you take your father with you? Or will you go with Alexander Siegfried, to whom you swore fealty at the age of one?
“Wolf?”
A voice called to him, and Evangeline approached with starlight in her hair. He turned himself partly toward her.
“Felix just said his first word! He called me ‘Vater’!”
“Oh, my!”
Looking somewhat confused, Evangeline approached her husband and took Felix into her arms, feeling the warmth of his tiny body. Her husband extended his arm around her shoulders. The two of them turned their gaze to the overwhelming, even fearsome profusion of stars, and stood for a few seconds in silence.
Felix raised his hands toward the sky and closed his fists, trying to grab the stars. He did not know what he did. Was it not, after all, simply his way of expressing the longing that runs through all of human history for what lies beyond reach?
“Let’s go inside,” Evangeline said gently. Mittermeier nodded, and with his arm still around her, the two began to walk. The provisional palace overflowed both with grief over the kaiser’s passing and a strange energy aimed at ritualizing his death. Toward this, Wolfgang Mittermeier walked.
✦ ✦ ✦
The legend ends, and history begins…