The damp winter fog clung to London like a funeral shroud.
Elias stood at the rail of the clipper Mercury, watching the towers of the city fade into the haze.
The Thames was crowded with barges, ferries, and black-smoked steamers, all moving like ants in their endless labor.
For most passengers, this was farewell to home.
For Elias, it was merely a pause—one more step in a design stretching decades ahead.
Sonya was not beside him.
Their last argument had ended only hours before departure.
She had pleaded, demanded, reasoned that she could accompany him to the North portions at least, that she was not a child to be hidden away.
Elias had remained unmoved.
"You will go back to Montenegro,"
he had said, his tone final.
"You will continue your training there. I cannot risk you in the Southern states. Too much attention, too many questions. If anything happens, you are safer in Europe, where i can protect you."
She had left with a glare that cut deeper than a blade.
Whether she would forgive him, he did not know.
He could only trust that time—and success—would mend the rift.
Now, with the sails billowing and the tide carrying the vessel into the open sea, Elias let the quarrel drift from his mind.
He was alone again, and that suited him.
Some ventures demanded solitude.
The Atlantic crossing was long, the endless heave of waves broken only by the cries of gulls and the occasional storm.
Elias kept to himself, conversing little with the merchants, missionaries, and families who crowded the decks.
Instead, he spent the voyage with maps, ledgers, and the familiar scratch of pen on paper.
He charted the Eastern Seaboard as if planning a campaign—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans.
Each was a node, a potential port of entry, a staging ground for men and materiel.
He studied shipping registers, memorized trade flows: cotton outward, manufactured goods inward, immigrants arriving in swelling tides.
At night, when the passengers huddled against the cold Atlantic winds, Elias wrote orders for his unseen lieutenants.
Engineers: continue with expansion, and use excess funds to begin the founding of companies that will serve 'the crown'.
Spies: focus newly created units into becoming merchants or immigrants embedding themselves in both the north and south of the US.
Garrisons: Hold the line and remain hidden our war is not yet ready for us.
Recruitment: Once all current forces have been upgraded begin recruitment of new forces who will trickle into the southern states to become future sons of the south.
The Mercury pitched violently one night under black clouds and shrieking wind.
While others prayed or retched, Elias braced himself at his desk, calmly noting the rhythm of the storm.
"Even the ocean is only chaos until measured,"
he muttered.
"A storm is still bound by the laws of nature."
When at last land came into sight, it was not the grand spires of New York but the low dunes of the Chesapeake.
The ship turned north, the great harbor opening before them like a mouth.
Elias's first glimpse of the United States was Baltimore: warehouses of red brick, forests of masts, and above them the Stars and Stripes (minus a few stars) fluttering in the sharp March wind.
Here was the new world.
Young, brash, already sprawling beyond its borders.
Disembarking, Elias passed under the watchful eyes of customs officials.
To them, he was just another European gentleman, papers in order, bound for "business inquiries."
They did not know the weight of the baggage he carried in his head—plans enough to drown a continent in blood and iron.
Baltimore itself struck him as raw compared to London.
Streets of cobble gave way quickly to mud.
Shops spilled goods into the open air, mingling the stench of tobacco, fish, and horse manure.
The people bustled with a restless energy, unpolished, quick to laugh or curse.
Reminding him of the frontier villages of Montenegro where people were completly disconnected from life in the rest of the world.
He did not linger.
Within days he had traveled north by rail, first to Philadelphia, then New York.
The iron tracks fascinated him almost as much as the speed of the locomotives—proof of a nation racing ahead, heedless of the fractures beneath its skin.
New York dazzled even his disciplined mind.
Immigrants thronged the docks, Irish fresh from famine, Germans bearing the memory of failed revolutions.
Elias studied them closely.
"Here lies an army already,"
he thought.
"Unclaimed, restless, desperate for belonging. The Union will have them, but so might I."
He rented discreet rooms in the city, corresponding with agents already seeded among the shipping companies.
Money would change hands in the future, modifying manifests and opening the gateway to smuggle his advanced weapons into the nation, alongside his men who would bear them.
Southward he went, travelling as any European gentleman might: observing, noting, keeping his accent softened but never concealed.
Washington impressed him little—a provincial capital wrapped in pomp.
Richmond, by contrast, intrigued him.
The pride of the South was palpable in its broad avenues and stately homes.
Yet beneath the confidence, he saw fear: fear of being outmatched, outnumbered, left behind by the industrial North.
The campaign trail was already starting, where four primary candidates were in the running rather than the more modern and far more idiotic two.
With only one party, Lincolns Republicans caring to promise freedom for slaves, while the other three were more conservative in their views, choosing to stay the course, or fight tooth and nail to uphold the Constitution.
Histories great blunder, where less than 5 million americans voted, and in doing so declared war on themselves in doing so.
If the democrats could have found common ground, their overall votes would have been greater than the republicans, possibly prolonging the war itself from happening or giving the nation time to adjust less radically.
But the two origional parties had fractured, both splitting in two, resulting in four parties, two democrat, one republican and one constitutional.
He spoke with planters, merchants, lawyers.
He listened more than he revealed, drawing out their grievances.
To many Southerners, war already seemed inevitable, though most believed it would be short and glorious.
Elias filed their confidence under the same heading as every general's first boast: delusion.
At night, in rented lodgings, he refined his strategy.
To prolong the war: strike where casualties can be maximized.
Do not seek decisive victories.
Bleed both sides until hatred calcifies.
Strike supply lines, rail junctions, rivers.
Force the Union to pay in blood for every mile gained, while actively destroying their infrastructure and increasing the costs of rebuilding.
He imagined his five thousand riflemen appearing like ghosts on those battlefields.
Union regiments armed with smoothbores would break under the first disciplined volley of bolt-action fire.
Cavalry would fall in heaps before machine-like skirmishers firing from carbines.
And then—retreat, allow them to recover, amass troops again to reclaim the lost ground before targetting them once again.
A devastating legion that could help subjectively reinforce the Confederates across the line, but not become the crutch upon which it can rest, the most important thing would be to ensure that while they fought for the confederates they were not subject to their orders, if ever the time came, and the confederates turned on his men, the war would come to a crashing end, the confederates would have slit their own throats, but if the war can be waged enough for their high command to realize the coming dread, they would be more likely to use Elias's men first and only after obtaining victory would they remove the threat.
By autumn, Elias had returned to New York.
After six months of living and travelling the states some of his summoned men had already started to immigrate in, only a few at a time but it was enough for now.
Standing on the Battery one evening, he watched the harbor burn with sunset, sails gilded, steamers trailing black smoke toward the horizon.
Around him, children played, vendors hawked roasted chestnuts, sailors brawled.
A republic, loud and unruly, surging forward with the vigor of youth.
Elias allowed himself a thin smile.
"Grow strong,"
he whispered.
"Grow proud. The higher you climb, the harder the fall when my hand tips the balance of the scales."
Behind him the city roared with life, unaware that a shadow had just crossed its threshold, a man with the patience of years and the ambition of empires.
The voyage was over.
The real work had begun.