Interlude – Between Storms (1919–1938)
The guns of the Great War had fallen silent, but silence did not mean peace.
To Ivar, the 1920s and 1930s felt like the pause between lightning strikes — the world catching its breath, pretending the storm was over, not realizing another was already gathering on the horizon.
He had seen it before. Rome before its fall. France before its guillotine. Empires puffing themselves full of pride, only to collapse under their own arrogance.
The world had not learned. It never did.
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1919 – Versailles
Ivar was in Paris when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. He stood among the crowds outside the Hall of Mirrors, listening to speeches that promised peace, stability, and a new order.
He did not cheer.
Inside, men with pens drew borders on maps as if lines could bind hatred. They carved Germany into humiliation, demanded reparations too heavy for any nation to carry, divided empires like spoils.
When the doors opened and diplomats poured out, Ivar only muttered, "You've written the next war, not the last."
A French officer nearby overheard him. "Nonsense. This is peace."
Ivar's sea-colored eyes were cold. "No. This is bitterness dressed as peace. And bitterness always comes back with a sword."
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The Roaring Twenties
The 1920s pretended to dance. Cities like Paris, Berlin, and New York pulsed with jazz, with cabarets, with lights that never dimmed. Cars crowded streets, radios filled rooms, and planes stitched the skies together.
Ivar lived among it, moving through cities like a ghost who never aged. He wore suits instead of uniforms, learned the rhythm of jazz, drank in smoky bars where flappers laughed too loud. For a time, he almost believed the world had found a new rhythm.
But he also saw the cracks. Veterans begging in the streets, their limbs gone. Families torn apart by grief. Nations piling debt upon debt, trying to forget the scars of the trenches.
He danced, yes, but he did not believe the song would last.
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America – Prohibition
In America, he drifted through Chicago and New York during Prohibition. Speakeasies hid behind false walls, men in fedoras traded liquor like gold, and crime families carved cities into empires.
Ivar worked for no family, but he fought beside them more than once. When bullets tore through bars, his blades flashed in the dark, silent and quick. Men who saw him fight whispered that he was a legend from the old country, a ghost with knives sharper than Tommy guns.
Once, a gangster named Salvatore raised a glass to him.
"You don't drink, you don't smoke, you don't age. What the hell are you, kid?"
Ivar smirked, sipping water. "Just someone who's seen too many wars."
The gangster laughed. "Then stick with me. We're in one every day."
But Ivar never did. He walked away when men grew too greedy, too proud. He had seen how that story always ended.
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The Great Depression
The crash came in 1929. Markets collapsed, banks shuttered, families lost everything. Breadlines stretched down streets. Men who once wore suits now begged for work, their children thin with hunger.
Ivar worked where he could, hauling bricks, repairing rail lines, farming. He gave his wages away more often than he kept them, slipping coins into the hands of children, sharing bread with the starving.
He remembered Pompeii. He remembered plague. He remembered the fall of Rome. To him, this was not new — only another trial.
When a boy asked him once, "Why are you helping? You don't even know us," Ivar smiled faintly.
"Because the gods remember those who survive. And survival is easier when we stand together."
The boy never forgot him.
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The Rise of Fascism
But while America struggled to rebuild, Europe burned again — not in fire, but in speeches.
Ivar was in Italy when Mussolini's blackshirts marched. He saw the hunger in their eyes, the pride in their chants. He knew the sound of men drunk on strength. He had seen it in Rome, in France, in Napoleon's armies.
In Germany, he saw worse. He stood in beer halls as a short man with fire in his voice — Adolf Hitler — raged about betrayal, humiliation, and vengeance. The crowd roared back, desperate to believe in something greater than their hunger.
Ivar leaned against a wall, watching, his jaw tight. He could feel it — the same storm he had felt before every great collapse. Pride. Fear. Hatred.
When he left the hall, a young German soldier asked him, "Do you believe in him? Do you believe he can save us?"
Ivar looked at him for a long time before answering. "He will not save you. He will use you. And when he is finished, you will wish you had never listened."
The soldier frowned, confused. He was too young to understand. But Ivar knew. He had seen this pattern a hundred times before.
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1936 – Spain
The Spanish Civil War was the dress rehearsal for what was to come. Fascists and republicans tore Spain apart, while Germany and Italy sent weapons to one side, and the Soviet Union armed the other.
Ivar fought there, as he always did — not for politics, not for ideology, but because survival demanded it. He fought in the streets of Madrid, blades flashing against bayonets, bullets sparking off stone walls. He carried children from burning buildings, hauled wounded men from barricades.
He saw German planes bomb Guernica, reducing the town to rubble, civilians screaming in fire and ash. The air stank of charred flesh and oil.
"Practice," he muttered bitterly, watching the flames. "They're practicing for the next war."
And he was right.
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1938 – The Gathering Storm
By 1938, the world trembled again. Germany swallowed Austria. The Sudetenland followed. Leaders signed papers in Munich declaring "peace in our time."
Ivar shook his head when he read the headlines. "Peace signed in ink is not peace. It is only delay."
He walked through Berlin that year, watching parades of soldiers goose-step beneath swastikas. The air crackled with pride, fear, and inevitability. He had felt it before — in Rome before Spartacus, in France before the Revolution, in Germany before Bismarck.
War was coming.
And this time, it would burn brighter, hotter, deadlier than anything the world had ever seen.
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Closing the Interlude
On the eve of 1939, Ivar stood on a hill overlooking Berlin, the city glowing with lights and marching songs. His black hair stirred in the cold wind, sea-colored eyes reflecting fire.
"Another storm," he whispered.
He placed his hands on the hilts of his twin swords — blades that had survived Rome, the Crusades, revolutions, and the Great War. They would survive this too.
He bowed his head in thanks, not begging for safety, but offering gratitude for the battles yet to come.
Because survival was worship.
And the gods had never stopped listening.
The storm was almost here.
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Would you like me to launch directly into Chapter 15 – World War II, Part I (1939–1942) now — the invasion of Poland, Blitzkrieg, the Fall of France, and the early years of fire — at the full 2,100+ word count?