Re: Blood and Iron - Chapter 778: Prophecy or Madness
Chapter 778: Prophecy or Madness
The lamp on Bruno’s desk cast a faint amber glow, barely reaching the edges of the vast study.
Beyond the tall windows, Innsbruck slept beneath a sheet of fog, unaware that across the Atlantic a nation was discovering its terminal diagnosis.
Bruno leaned back in his leather chair, one hand wrapped around a glass of Kentucky bourbon, Roosevelt’s own preferred poison, acquired decades ago for the sake of poetic irony.
The ice clinked softly as he swirled it, listening to the Oval Office through a channel no American intelligence officer had ever located.
He had visited that room many times in the past, and now Roosevelt occupied its seat of power.
Some of his wires had been found, but that hardly mattered. He had left so many ways in that they could tear the walls apart stone by stone and still never reach the roots.
Tonight, the line carried only Roosevelt’s ragged breathing.
Then came the papers. The shifting. The disbelief.
And finally, silence, thick and heavy.
Bruno set down his glass and dialed the private number that only world leaders, and one German prince, had ever possessed.
The phone rang once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then:
“What is it!? Do you have any idea what ti—”
Roosevelt’s voice stopped dead the moment Bruno spoke.
“So,” Bruno said quietly, “you’ve finally pieced it together.”
Silence slammed into the room on both ends of the line.
Bruno continued, voice steady, almost gentle:
“Five administrations have risen and fallen since your nation first realized I had slipped a hand into its machinery. For thirty years I have waited for someone, anyone, among you to grasp the shape of my design. Half of my life wasted on your blindness, and my best years….”
He let the words sink in.
“Imagine my disappointment, Franklin,” Bruno said softly, “that even now… you still have to ask why.”
The receiver creaked in Roosevelt’s tightening grip.
Bruno allowed himself a low, cold chuckle, nothing joyous, nothing playful. The sound a hunter makes when the trap finally snaps shut exactly as planned.
“Hughes uncovered only one of my methods,” he said calmly. “You purged a third of my assets when you crowned yourself dictator. Yet you believed, truly believed, that would uproot me?”
A pause. Heavy. Suffocating.
“A magician never reveals all his secrets.”
Roosevelt’s breath trembled audibly.
“You’re… listening even now?” he whispered.
Bruno smiled, not kindly, not cruelly, but knowingly.
“I have been listening since your Republic was still young enough to believe itself invincible.”
He set his bourbon aside with a precise clink.
Roosevelt’s next question was dragged from his throat with visible pain.
“Why?”
Bruno closed his eyes for a moment. Not in sorrow… but in something quieter. Older.
“Why you?” Bruno murmured. “Why your people? Why your nation?”
He inhaled slowly.
“Such a simple question… and an answer you would not survive.”
Roosevelt’s voice cracked.
“Tell me anyway.”
Bruno exhaled a soft, almost mournful sound.
“Do you remember Cassandra?” he asked. “The prophetess cursed not because she was wrong, but because she saw too much truth for mortal minds to bear.”
Roosevelt’s breathing hitched.
“You,” Bruno continued, “could not endure the truth I carry.”
Then Bruno’s tone changed. He straightened in his chair, spine rigid, gaze distant.
“But it does not matter, Franklin. You have already lost.”
Roosevelt made a sound; something between a breath and a sob.
“You are no longer a president,” Bruno said. “You are a cornered animal. And any hunter worth the title knows you do not charge recklessly at a creature you have driven into such a desperate state.”
He gave Roosevelt a moment to suffocate beneath the truth.
“So what story will you tell your people now?” Bruno asked. “What lie will numb their pride? What fiction will you craft to soothe a nation that only tonight learned it was dying?”
Roosevelt trembled.
Then Bruno spoke, quieter, aged, almost mythic.
“Let me ask you something, Franklin.”
The line hummed.
“If you knew, with absolute certainty, that your neighbor would one day come to your home… burn it to ash… slaughter your family not once, but twice… and then salt the earth so nothing could ever rise again…”
Bruno’s voice dropped to a reverent whisper.
“…would you wait for him to strike?”
Roosevelt could not answer, not because he refused, but because he suddenly understood he could not.
“Or,” Bruno continued softly, “would you spent every waking hour of your being plotting his undoing long before he was ever capable of raising his hand?”
The line went dead quiet.
Then Bruno said the words Roosevelt would remember as long as he lived:
“Some wounds, Franklin, do not belong to this lifetime.”
A faint clink followed as Bruno lifted his glass again.
“And some enemies,” he added, “do not deserve a third chance.”
Roosevelt swallowed, throat constricted.
Bruno’s voice changed again, no longer that of a strategist or a hunter, but something that felt older than either.
“My Father in Heaven placed me in this world for a reason,” Bruno murmured. “I do not pretend to know his will. Only the burden He set upon my shoulders.”
Roosevelt stiffened with disbelief mixing with terror.
“A man born into my place does not have the luxury of choosing another path,” Bruno said. “You lament that I have wounded you… but you do not understand.”
His voice hardened… crystalline and cold.
“To do nothing would be to commit the greatest sin of all. To sit idle knowing what your Republic would become… What sins it would wrought upon this world…. It would have damned me far more surely than anything I have ever done in this life.”
Roosevelt felt the room tilt, reality slipping.
Bruno placed his empty glass down with surgical calm.
“I did not choose this out of malice, Franklin. I was given a duty by providence, by fate, by the heavens themselves if you believe such things.”
A breath.
“And I will fulfill it to the end.”
A soft click.
The line went dead.
Roosevelt sat frozen, hand still on the receiver, unable to breathe, unable to move. He did not know whether he had spoken to a madman… or a prophet.
But he knew the truth.
Whichever Bruno was…
America would not survive him.
