The train rattled through the cold Bavarian night, clattering over joints in the track, slowing and groaning at every tiny rural station where almost no one got on and only one or two got off.
Every few minutes, the sliding door at the end of the carriage banged open and the conductor came through, boots thudding on the wooden floor, breath puffing white in the chilly air as he checked tickets and barked half-whispered reminders for people to sit properly and "keep the corridor clear."
Eventually, Augsburg and its faint glow vanished behind them, swallowed by darkness.
The countryside took over—fields, forests, and small towns hinted at only by the distant pinpricks of oil lamps and gas lights.
Oskar sat on the hard wooden bench, Karl to his left by the window, staring out at the darkness where the glass reflected more of the interior than anything outside.
Inside the carriage it was barely brighter.
A few smoky lamps in metal brackets flickered weakly along the ceiling. The conductor's lantern threw moving circles of yellow light as he passed. The only truly steady light belonged to a clerk-type man holding his own small lantern above a folded newspaper, reading with squinted eyes.
Opposite them, three soldiers in plain greatcoats huddled together, caps pulled low, speaking quietly. Along the side benches:
six factory workers, faces grey with fatigue,
three mechanics, clothes smelling of oil and metal,
two mothers with five children between them, trying to keep little ones from crying about the cold and the noise,
one thin girl silently chewing on a piece of hard bread on her mother's lap,
an old priest clutching a Bible in his hands as his head nodded forward and back,
and a pair of farmers with large sacks, boots muddy, trying to doze upright.
There was no real heating. If there had been a small stove somewhere in the carriage, it was either empty or doing nothing noticeable. The only warmth came from bodies crammed into too little space, from heavy coats and wool shawls, from shared breath in the stale winter air.
And the coughing.
It came in waves—dry, wet, rasping, punctuated by sniffs and the occasional muffled sneeze. The workers and mechanics in particular coughed almost continuously, like men whose lungs were permanently full of factory air.
The silence, otherwise, was heavy.
Part of it was the late hour.
Part of it was sheer exhaustion.
And part of it was him.
No one had taken the empty seats directly opposite Oskar and Karl. The space across from them remained awkwardly vacant, even when people boarded at small stations and cast hopeful glances at every spot to sit.
Oskar could see it: the way eyes slid over him and away again.
They recognized the uniform, the bearing, the size.
They recognized who he was.
And they were terrified to sit in front of him.
He frowned.
He didn't like it.
In his previous life, he'd ridden in crowded Chinese subway cars, sweaty buses, Russian trains jammed with soldiers and wounded men. He'd seen cramped, noisy, chaotic public transport in a hundred forms.
But he had never seen a winter train like this one:
nearly no lighting,
nearly no heating,
wooden benches instead of seats,
no comfort whatsoever apart from the low ticket price.
He watched the two young mothers trying to hush their children, rubbing their little hands to keep them warm. The girl with the bread gnawed it in grim silence; her eyes were too tired to cry.
It made something coil uneasily in his chest.
He turned to Karl.
"What the hell is this, Karl?" he muttered in German. "Is this normal? Do people really ride like this in winter? In the middle of the night? With no heat beyond their own bodies and whatever leaks from the engine up front? This is a bit much, even for me."
Karl didn't meet his gaze.
He hunched his shoulders against the cold, rubbed his hands together, then glanced briefly around the carriage.
"It is what it is, Your Highness," he said quietly. "These trains aren't cheap to run. Improvements cost money. New cars, better lighting, heating… all very expensive. So things change slowly. As long as it moves and gets people from one place to another, that's what matters to the men who own the lines."
Oskar's jaw tightened.
He was a breath away from launching into a rant on the importance of improving the railway network—on heating, comfort, dignity, how Germany expected its workers to build an empire and couldn't even give their families a warm ride home.
But even as the anger rose, the practical part of his brain cut in.
The truth was, the Oskar Industrial Group had already taken on: a shipyard, a lottery empire, safety equipment manufacturing, Pump World and AngelWorks, now diesel engines and future engine factories.
If he threw railway reform on top of that right now, he'd risk overstretching even his absurd finances.
Business needed time.
You poured money in, prayed, and only later—if you'd made good choices—did the profits begin to flow back. Only then could you safely expand again without turning into a very impressive, very bankrupt cautionary tale.
He let out a long breath.
"Fine," he said at last, more to himself than to Karl. "One thing at a time."
The railway problem, the third-class misery, the coughing, the freezing children—
that would be a battle for another year.
For now, he tried to sit with the discomfort as the train rocked through the dark countryside, carrying him back toward Berlin and whatever came next.
A small, dry cough snapped Oskar's attention back to the present.
The little blonde girl with the chunk of hard bread on her mother's lap had stopped chewing. She coughed again—sharper, higher—and her face screwed up in discomfort. Her tiny hands flew to her throat.
Her young mother, still half-turned toward her friend, mid-sentence about some trivial gossip, glanced down with only mild concern at first.
"What is it, Lotte?" she asked. "Come now, don't—"
The girl tried to swallow.
Her eyes went wide.
She made one more sound—not a cough, but a strangled, broken squeak—
—and then nothing.
Oskar saw it immediately.
At first, he didn't panic. To him, it was obvious: a simple case of a child choking on food, something a halfway competent adult could handle. A few firm thumps between the shoulder blades and gravity would do the rest. He stayed where he was, watching, expecting the mother to do exactly that.
But the woman's smile vanished as if someone had sliced it off her face.
"Lotte?" Her voice trembled. "Lotte, what is it? Talk to me, sweetheart."
The little girl's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. No gasp, no cry, nothing. Her small chest barely moved.
Across from them, the other mother's lips parted in horror. She began muttering the first clumsy lines of a prayer. The other children shrank back against the wooden wall, eyes huge, clutching one another. One of the girls—likely Lotte's sister—started to wail, a thin, terrified sound that cut through the carriage.
Heads turned all down the car.
People shifted on the benches, craning for a better view.
The three soldiers were on their feet first, looking from one to the other, from the child to the mothers, unsure what to do. The factory workers stood and edged closer, boots scraping on the floorboards. The priest jerked awake, blinked twice, and tightened his grip on his Bible.
One of the soldiers, a big man with broad shoulders and honest eyes, pushed in front of the mothers.
"Something's gone down the wrong way!" he announced, as if naming the problem would fix it. "She's swallowed wrong! Let me—let me help."
He wasn't wrong about what had happened.
He was completely wrong about how to fix it.
He grabbed the girl under the arms and shook her—once, twice—like she was a jammed piece of machinery. Then, in a panic, he turned her upside down and shook again. Her head bobbed, her small body jerked, but nothing came out. Her lips were starting to lose their color.
"It's no good—here, take her!" he blurted, thrusting the child back into her mother's arms as if she were burning his hands.
The little face was red now. Too red. Red edging toward purple. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused.
Around them, people seemed to collectively make a decision: that it was already too late.
Murmured prayers rose like steam.
The mother's mind snatched at the only thing she'd ever seen done in kitchens and cramped rooms when someone choked.
She shoved two fingers deep into the girl's mouth, scraping at her tongue, clawing blindly toward the back of the throat, trying to hook out something she couldn't see.
Karl went grey.
"Poor child…" he whispered, crossing himself.
Oskar's stomach lurched.
He had been waiting for a few solid blows between the shoulder blades—basic, sane, simple. That probably would have been enough.
What he was watching instead was an absolute disaster. You never jammed fingers into someone's throat like that. If there was something lodged there, all you did was push it deeper. Or make them gag without clearing anything.
The mother's fingers were already slick with spit and crumbs.
Oskar couldn't watch it any longer.
Realizing that nobody here had the faintest idea what they were doing—not the mothers, not the soldiers, not even Karl—he surged to his feet.
"STOP, YOU FOOLS!" he roared.
His voice tore down the carriage like a cannon blast.
At once, everything froze.
The priest's mouth hung open around half a prayer.
A worker's hand stopped mid-reach.
The woman's fingers halted inside her daughter's mouth.
Even the coughs seemed to die for a heartbeat.
From the next section over, people leaned toward the connecting door, suddenly silent, eyes wide.
The little girl was still choking.
The mother tore her gaze away from her daughter's face and finally seemed to realize who was standing there—
a massive figure in an officer's coat, shoulders nearly touching the carriage ceiling, eyes blazing, the Fifth Prince himself, for some unfathomable reason, riding third class with them.
Her hand slipped out of the girl's mouth.
She stared at him as if an angel or executioner had materialized in the aisle.
Oskar held out his arms.
"Give her to me," he said, voice clipped and iron-hard. "If you want her to live."
There was no hesitation.
Shaking, barely able to stand, the mother placed the choking girl into Oskar's arms—
as if handing her to some vast, ancient protector, hoping he could do what no one else could.
Oskar knelt beside the mother, lowering himself onto the narrow wooden bench with the girl cradled firmly against his massive chest. He gently laid her across one of his thighs, steadying her with a warm, large hand.
Then he leaned her slightly forward.
And gave three firm, expertly placed pats between her shoulder blades.
Not too hard.
Not too soft.
Exactly enough.
The entire carriage held its breath.
As he worked, his mind snapped backward—
to another life, another uniform, another winter.
A Russian battlefield road.
A ruptured supply truck.
A soldier screaming, his right leg torn apart by shrapnel.
Oskar remembered himself, a truck driver then, hands shaking as he fumbled with a tourniquet for the first time.
He remembered driving full-speed to an abandoned barn turned into a makeshift medical station—
remembered standing in the doorway watching the medics work at a pace and precision that felt divine.
That night, something in him had changed.
He didn't want to be the man who merely "got the wounded to safety."
He wanted to understand.
He wanted to save.
So between missions, he used every spare hour to study:
battlefield first aid
emergency response
how to treat burns, stabilize wounds, stop bleeding
how to respond when someone collapsed or couldn't breathe
how to keep a dying man alive long enough to reach help
He had used those skills again and again.
A crushed lung.
Crushed ribs.
Concussions.
Shock.
Bleeding.
And now, in a quiet German train carriage in 1904—
a choking child.
One more case.
One more life.
He knew exactly what to do.
After an additional fourth pat—
a tiny, hard lump of bread flew from the girl's mouth, bounced off Oskar's boot, and landed on the floor.
A collective gasp swept the carriage.
The girl inhaled sharply—
and began to cry.
Her mother burst into sobs, clutched her daughter to her chest, kissing her face, whispering frantic thank-yous through tears.
The other children whimpered in relief.
The priest silently crossed himself.
Workers exhaled shakily.
Karl sagged against the seat, whispering, "Thank God…"
Oskar placed a hand briefly on the girl's back, feeling her chest rise and fall normally again.
Only then did he exhale.
A small, relieved smile touched his face.
"You're alright now," he murmured, handing her back gently. "Just scared. She'll be fine."
The mother choked out, "T-thank you, Your Highness, thank you, thank you—"
But before she could finish, the whispers began.
"The prince saved her…"
"With his bare hands…"
"A miracle…"
"A blessing…"
"He knew exactly what to do…"
Faces lit with awe, gratitude, relief.
And Oskar—
Oskar stood.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
The carriage went silent again.
The mother, still crying, clutched her daughter protectively.
Then—
Oskar turned.
His expression was no longer gentle.
It was furious.
He towered over the passengers like some wrathful figure from old saga legends.
"You idiots," he roared, voice shaking the wooden walls. "Do none of you know anything?!"
People cowered.
Even grown men shrank back.
His gaze snapped to the large soldier who had shaken the girl upside down.
"And YOU," Oskar thundered.
The soldier's eyes widened.
He actually stumbled backward.
"Are you deaf? Blind? Or just a FOOL?" Oskar demanded, stepping toward him. "Didn't they teach you anything in the military? ANYTHING AT ALL?! Answer me!"
The soldier opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
Oskar grabbed him by the front of his coat—
and without effort—
lifted him off the ground.
The man dangled there, boots scraping at the air, eyes bulging in terror.
Gasps erupted.
Children whimpered.
The priest stared in naked horror.
The other two soldiers scrambled forward, stammering:
"Your Highness—!"
"Please—mercy—!"
Oskar released one hand from the man's coat.
The soldier did not fall.
He hung there, suspended by Oskar's single remaining fist.
"And YOU TWO!" Oskar barked, pointing at them with his free hand—still holding the full weight of a grown man effortlessly. "What's your excuse?! You didn't EVEN TRY to help!"
The soldiers froze as if turned to stone.
Around them, people pressed back as far as the benches allowed. The train seemed smaller, the lamps dimmer, as if the carriage itself feared him.
The prince was no longer merely "Your Highness."
He was a force of nature.
Something mythic.
A giant in uniform who had saved a child and now stood in judgment over them all.
Oskar wasn't truly angry at them—
not personally.
But he was furious at the idea that in his empire, a child could die because no one knew the simplest basic lifesaving act.
His voice dropped, low and dangerous:
"A little girl almost died—on a train full of grown men—and not ONE of you knew what to do."
Silence.
Cold, frightened silence.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
The entire carriage felt frozen around Oskar, as if he'd turned into a vengeful statue of some old Germanic war-god who'd stepped straight out of a saga and into third class.
Then something small and fast broke through the fear.
"YOUR HIGHNESS, KARL IS HERE—!"
Karl burst through the wall of bodies like a panicked rabbit squeezing under a fence. He half-stumbled, half-sprinted to Oskar's side, arms flailing in frantic urgency.
"Your Highness! Calm down, calm down!" he squeaked. "Please—PLEASE—calm yourself!"
Oskar blinked at him, still seething.
Karl scrambled up onto the nearest bench so he could reach Oskar's shoulder, grabbing a fistful of his sleeve like a drowning man clinging to a rope.
"Your Highness!" he cried. "They didn't know because they couldn't know! Nobody ever taught them anything like that! Even I—working in the palace and reading more books than is healthy—even I have never seen someone saved like that! The soldiers couldn't have known. No one here has ever seen a child pulled back from death like that. What you did was amazing, Your Highness—please, calm down."
He jabbed a finger around at the passengers.
"Look at them! They're terrified because they thought she was already dead. Now they think you performed a miracle!"
Oskar's anger hit a wall.
He looked around.
The soldiers were nodding frantically, like boys caught misbehaving in front of a terrifying father.
"We–we were never taught anything like that," the big one stammered from where Oskar still held him. "In training we learned marching, drilling, firing rifles… not this. Nobody knows such things. Please have mercy, Your Highness."
"Never seen it before," murmured the second soldier.
"Not once," added the third, voice barely above a whisper.
Oskar stared at them.
Then at the mothers.
Then at Karl.
Slowly, the raw fury drained out of him, replaced by something much heavier and far more disturbing.
He released the big man.
The soldier dropped to his knees in pure terror, as if afraid that even standing without permission might get him killed.
Oskar pressed a hand to his forehead and let out a long, pained groan.
"My God," he muttered. "Just how primitive is everyone's medical knowledge…? Don't they teach you anything at all? Not even the soldiers?"
The entire carriage flinched, as if he'd just condemned the whole of Europe.
Then Oskar's hand fell from his face.
His eyes sharpened.
"I see," he said quietly. "Then I suppose I have to teach all of you."
He reached down and hauled the big soldier back to his feet—not cruelly this time, but with steady, unshakeable control. The man trembled like a leaf in a storm.
"I apologize, my man," Oskar said—an actual prince apologizing to a commoner—with calm sincerity. "But I'll need to make use of you a little longer."
The soldier swallowed hard.
"…Yes, Your Highness."
Oskar turned to the rest of the carriage.
"Now," he commanded, voice cutting through the air like a whip, "MOVE BACK, ALL OF YOU. I am going to teach you First Aid, Lesson One—the absolute basics."
The crowd parted like the Red Sea before Moses.
Space opened in the center of the carriage. People clambered onto benches, clutching the luggage racks to see better. Even passengers from the next carriage were pressing against the connecting door, stretching to catch a glimpse of what the Fifth Prince of Germany was about to do.
Oskar lifted the big soldier by the shoulders and turned him sideways so everyone could see.
"WHEN A CHILD CHOKES—listen carefully—this is what you do."
He spoke slowly, each word sharp and measured.
He showed them:
how to support a small body,
how to lean the child slightly forward,
exactly where to strike between the shoulder blades,
how hard to hit—firm, not wild,
and why that angle mattered.
He demonstrated the "back blows" technique using the soldier just for body positioning, then, with a gentle smile and a formal, "Mit Erlaubnis," he pantomimed the motion with one of the older girls—careful, delicate, turning her only as far as needed to teach.
"For women, children, and the elderly," Oskar said, projecting his voice so it carried down the carriage, "their bones are softer. Use controlled force. You are trying to help them breathe, not break them."
There were nods. Murmurs. People repeating the motion in the air, memorising it.
Karl whispered, wide-eyed, "This is insane… and brilliant."
Oskar wasn't finished.
"Now," he said, positioning the big soldier again, "for grown men choking. This—" he slid his arms around the man's abdomen, fists placed correctly—"is another method."
He performed the thrusting motion once, firmly but without actual pressure.
"I call this the Royal Maneuver," Oskar declared proudly.
He wasn't about to name-drop a 20th-century doctor who might not even be born yet.
A wave of impressed gasps swept the carriage.
Nobody questioned the name.
Who would?
Then he went on, relentless:
what to do when someone faints,
how to see if they are still breathing,
what to do when they collapse from exhaustion,
what to do during a seizure ("DO NOT PUT ANYTHING IN THEIR MOUTH!" he thundered),
what to do when someone shows signs of a failing heart ("Prop them up, knees bent—keep air moving, don't let them flop like a sack!").
He used:
the big soldier,
the smaller soldier,
Karl (to Karl's deep horror and the passengers' amusement),
the two mothers (with much laughter),
and even one brave child (under his mother's watchful eye) as demonstration volunteers during the impromptu lesson.
People from other carriages crowded into the doorway to watch. Voices whispered down the train: "The Prince is teaching something… medical… he saved a child…"
Oskar had them practice:
gentle back blows on one another's backs,
the proper stance for the "Royal Maneuver,"
how to ease someone onto their side if they were unconscious,
even rudimentary chest compressions—lightly, carefully—on the big soldier so everyone could see the rhythm.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a man huddled near the door with paper and pencil, scribbling furiously, sketching figures and postures.
Not just a clerk.
A journalist.
Oskar snapped his fingers.
"You!" he barked.
The man jumped so hard his pencil flew from his hand.
"Write down EVERY WORD I say," Oskar ordered. "Exactly. Draw diagrams. I want this in every newspaper in Germany as soon as humanly possible."
The journalist went pale.
"Y-Yes, Your Highness! At once!"
"So," Oskar continued calmly, "we repeat everything. Slowly this time."
He repeated the entire set of instructions from the beginning, having people come forward, practice motions on each other over and over, while the journalist wrote and sketched as if the future depended on it.
Once the essential medical knowledge had settled a little—at least enough that nobody in that carriage would ever be completely helpless again—Oskar shifted gears without breaking stride.
"Now," he said, clapping his hands once, "since your medical training is nonexistent, I have a suspicion about your hand-to-hand combat as well."
The soldiers looked like they wanted to melt into the floor.
Oskar smiled—too pleasantly.
He moved the big soldier into the center of the cleared space again.
"You're strong," Oskar said, circling him. "But you stand like a drunk barrel. Widen your legs. Yes. Bend your knees slightly. Lean forward—not backward. Good. Now… this is how you restrain a man without breaking him."
He slid behind the second soldier, applied a smooth joint lock to an elbow and wrist. The man yelped in surprise as his arm folded into an unnatural angle—but Oskar held him firmly, not painfully.
"See?" he said, turning him for everyone to see. "The human body can only move in certain directions. If you understand that, you use it against him. You don't rely only on strength. You use angles."
He released the soldier, who staggered away rubbing his arm.
The carriage chuckled nervously.
"And THIS—" Oskar said, grabbing the third soldier by the lapels and shifting in one seamless motion—"is how you bring down a man twice your size."
He stepped, twisted his hips, and flipped the soldier cleanly over his hip onto the floorboards.
The thud echoed.
The carriage screamed.
Mothers gasped.
Children clapped like they were at the circus.
The priest crossed himself for what might have been the fourth time.
Oskar continued, tireless:
showing where not to hit ("Here? You'll kill him. Don't be stupid."),
showing where to strike for a stun, a knockdown, or a clean knockout,
demonstrating how to punch like a piston, driving from legs and hips, rather than flailing with the arm alone,
how to use bodyweight for a proper kick instead of flapping a leg uselessly.
He corrected stances, repositioned feet, tapped knees and shoulders, lectured on leverage, balance, the weakness of the human jaw and solar plexus, the strength of the hips.
By midnight, half the carriage was practicing stances in the aisle.
Nobody was cold anymore. They were sweating, breathing hard, and still asking questions.
Karl, recovering from the indignity of being a demonstration dummy, began helping—pointing out posture errors, repeating key phrases, scribbling notes in his own book.
By 1 a.m., workers and passengers from three carriages away were quietly sneaking in to watch the impromptu class.
By 2 a.m., even the soldiers—red-faced and humbled—were begging for more.
The journalist sat wedged near the door, eyes wide, notebook crammed with cramped handwriting and rough diagrams—material that, if published, would be decades ahead of what the world should know in 1904.
And all through the night, the train rattled onward through the black winter countryside—
while Prince Oskar von Preußen held court in a third-class carriage, unknowingly delivering:
a full first-aid course,
a hand-to-hand combat seminar,
and a proto-science lecture on the human body.
He did this to a crowd of stunned, awe-struck citizens that now were armed with knowledge that, long after this ride ended, might save thousands of lives and reshape how an entire nation handled crisis and danger.
By the time dawn crept over the winter horizon, the rattling old train had changed in a way none of its passengers could have imagined when they boarded it the night before.
In that one cramped wooden carriage, something had shifted—
not just in minds,
but in the hearts of everyone who had witnessed the night-long transformation of Prince Oskar von Preußen.
He had boarded the train as a prince.
He stepped out of it as something closer to a legend.
A myth-in-the-making.
A demigod forged out of flesh, anger, compassion, and impossible strength.
The three young soldiers—simple low-ranking men who only hours earlier had been grumbling about their pay, their officers, and their plans to leave Germany for America like so many others—now stood straighter than they ever had in uniform.
They didn't feel sleepy after the long night.
They felt reborn.
Once, they had been half-hearted monarchists and half-interested Social Democrats. Disillusioned. Tired. Ready to abandon the Kaiserreich entirely for the promise of American wages.
But after watching Oskar:
save a child with knowledge no doctor they knew possessed,
hold a full-grown man in the air with one arm,
throw another soldier like a toy,
teach more real survival skills in one night than they had learned in years—
the three young men now looked as if the very idea of leaving Germany was a sin.
One whispered to the other:
"If that man is the future of Prussia…
then I'm damned proud to serve."
Another murmured:
"America can rot.
Germany needs us.
He needs us."
The third clenched his fists, trembling—not with fear, but with conviction.
"As long as Prince Oskar lives…
we will never abandon this land."
Where there had once been doubts, now there was fierce loyalty.
And not to the abstract monarchy.
To him.
To their prince.
Their demigod.
As the train screeched to a halt in Berlin's early-morning bustle, the soldiers and workers and mothers and children poured out onto the platform—
but they did not scatter.
They followed Oskar.
They wanted to follow him.
Karl hurried beside him, clutching his satchel full of scribbles and diagrams, looking as proud as if he himself had created a new German Empire overnight.
The two mothers, holding their now safe, smiling children, hurried behind, as if afraid the prince might vanish if they looked away for a moment.
And the passengers who had watched the night unfold stepped out of the train like pilgrims stepping off a holy site.
It started with a few voices:
"Long live Prince Oskar!"
"The People's Prince!"
"Hope of Germany!"
Then more:
"Bless you, Your Highness!"
"You saved that child!"
"You taught us all!"
And more still, until the entire platform thundered with cheers, startling early-morning travelers and railway workers alike.
People who had no idea what the commotion was about saw the massive prince step from the train with peasants, mothers, soldiers, and children flocking behind him—and they joined in the cheering simply because the emotion was infectious.
Word spread on the platform like wildfire:
"He saved a girl's life!"
"He taught them medicine!"
"He lifted a man with one arm!"
"He threw a soldier like a sack!"
"He did it all on a third-class train!"
Oskar blinked at the crowd.
He wanted to be embarrassed.
He wanted to panic.
He wanted to duck into a corner and hide from the hundreds of eyes staring at him.
But something swelled inside him—
something unstoppable, like the force that had carried him through the night.
He raised a hand.
And the cheering redoubled.
The little girl he saved squeaked happily and waved from her mother's arms.
Oskar, overwhelmed and yet strangely calm, spoke loudly:
"Later today—and tomorrow as well—come to Pump World in Potsdam!
Anyone who wants to learn first aid, self-defense, or how to protect their families—come!
All of you are welcome!"
The platform erupted in applause.
Even people who hadn't been on the train cheered without knowing why.
Oskar waved again, stunned at himself—
stunned that he had just addressed a crowd so confidently,
when in his past life he would have shriveled at the thought.
Karl leaned toward him, smiling from ear to ear.
"You did good," he whispered. "I'm glad I was here to witness history, Your Highness."
Oskar huffed something between disbelief and pride.
A carriage driver—an ordinary working man—ran up, pale with shock.
"Your Highness—my carriage is at your service!"
Oskar and Karl climbed aboard.
The driver stared at them through the mirror, unable to believe that a prince—the prince—was riding in his humble cab.
Behind them, the crowd kept cheering, waving, chanting his name as the carriage pulled away.
Prince Oskar von Preußen rode toward Berlin, and unknowingly took his first step toward becoming not just the most beloved man in Germany, but a true legend.