The city no longer screamed. It whispered.
The guns had fallen into an uneasy silence, replaced by the sound of boots crunching frost-coated rubble, of rats gnawing in walls, of the wind moaning through the shattered ribs of Stalingrad's skeleton. Christian moved like a shadow through those ruins, and everywhere his eyes landed, he saw a mirror of death.
A doll's head buried in soot, its painted smile split in half. A frozen hand poking from the rubble, clutching nothing. A blackened helmet rolling in the snow like an empty skull. The Sixth Army called this "victory," though Christian saw only ashes. The Soviets had been pushed back from street to street, house to house, but in their retreat they had left a graveyard.
He thought of the officer Antonov and the way the Russians had mourned him; not with cold efficiency but with trembling hands, with tears, with rage that made them fight harder. Nothing here was mourned. Nothing here was sacred.
Christian passed a group of German officers huddled around a fire made from splintered furniture. They laughed, one of them swinging a bottle of schnapps in a hand swollen red with cold. Their voices carried above the ruins:
"Another rat nest cleared!"
"They'll learn to fear the Reich!"
Their laughter cut him like a knife. Behind them, a boy no older than fifteen, cheeks hollowed by hunger lay sprawled in the snow. His eyes were open, glazed, his lips blue. No one noticed him. No one cared.
Christian did not stop. He could not. He walked on, boots sinking into drifts of ash and snow, until he reached what had once been a church. Its steeple was shattered, the cross melted into a grotesque bent shape by fire. Inside, the pews had been torn out for kindling. Only the altar remained, cracked and broken, its white cloth smeared with soot.
He sat there, in the ruin, and finally allowed his body to tremble. He pressed his hands together but could not find words to pray. Not to God. Not to Führer. Not to anyone.
Instead, his hand went to his chest, fumbling beneath his tunic until his fingers found it; the ring. Kristina's ring.
He closed his fist around it, pressing it so hard the edges dug into his palm. It was the only warmth left in this place.
Her face came to him, her voice, her defiance, her tears. She had given him the ring once as if it were a promise, and he had returned it like a coward trying to sever chains. And yet here it was again, always here, the only thing not consumed by fire.
His throat tightened. For the first time in months, he let the tears come. They burned as they froze on his cheeks.
"What am I fighting for?" he whispered into the dark.
The candle stub he had lit flickered once, then died, leaving him in blackness.
Above him, faint and terrible, came the sound of singing — German soldiers, drunk, raising their voices into the night: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles…"
Christian pressed the ring to his lips and closed his eyes. He no longer felt part of their song, their victory, their world. He was already slipping away.