"In the chaos that bleeds from our own decisions,
paths rise that we never wish to follow…
and it is in the dark of these broken destinies
that the new beginning finds the courage to exist."
****
It's been five days since the world collapsed on my head. Five days since the colors disappeared, the sound has faded and nothing else makes sense. Five days I lost the love of my life and the future I saw shine in the eyes of my two children...
Why? Why did the gears of fate choose to grind me right now? I find myself staring into the void, trying to grope in the dark for the wrong choices that spat me out here. Would that have been the day I decided to become an Occultist, delving into secrets no man should touch? Or was it that stupid pride of being first in my class in history school, thinking that knowledge would make me untouchable?
It's pointless. I ask myself these questions just to postpone the inevitable. Deep down, the truth burns like hot coals in my chest: I know exactly where I went wrong. If I had never accepted that damn offer... if my ambition hadn't spoken louder than my common sense, my family would be laughing right now at the kitchen table. I wouldn't be here, feeling cold sweat run down my face as my fingers tremble against the icy metal of the pistol.
I look out the window of this decrepit hut and see the trees bending, groaning under the fury of the wind. The storm seems to have no end. When did the sky start falling? I lost myself in such a way in this pain, in this suffocation that corrodes me, that time became an abstract concept. Hours and days were mixed into a unique gray mass of suffering.
Everything really started to fall apart seven days ago. I remember the exact instant I noticed the change in my SS battalion "partners." What little humanity remained in them had faded, replaced by something hollow, something predatory... something that I, in my cursed naiveté, helped cultivate.
****
For as long as I can remember, the word "occultist" has vibrated in me with a fascination that I couldn't explain. It was a call to the dark, an almost childish desire to possess the keys that opened the forbidden doors of the universe, like the ones I imagined existed in Freemasonry or AMORC.
I remember 1918 well. I was a ten-year-old boy, hiding in the corner of the room, listening to my father comment through whispers and pipe smoke about the founding of the Thule Society. Officially, they talked about studying "Germanic antiquities," but there was a heavy electricity in that name that hooked me immediately. Little did I know that there, in that childlike curiosity, I was planting the seed of my own ruin.
Life took its course, and amidst the shadows of this interest in the esoteric, I found my light: Anna.
Her face is the only memory that still warms me. She had blonde hair, cut to shoulder length, which seemed to hold the shine of the sun even on cloudy days. Their eyes were such a clear blue, so vast, that sometimes I felt an irrational fear of polluting them with my gaze. Her skin was an almost translucent white, a stark contrast to mine, already sun-tanned. With my close-cropped brown hair-a legacy of the military style my father so worshipped— and my greenish eyes, I felt like a raw animal beside her.
We met at fifteen. I came to believe that love for Anna would be my exorcism, that the taste of her kisses would make me forget the rituals and secret orders. But the occult was a silent vice, running through the veins without warning. It was around this time that I crossed paths with Heinrich Himmler. At that time, he was just another common face, but years later he would become the architect of the SS and the Ahnenerbe.
In 1925, the Thule Society "faded", but only because its poison had already been injected into the heart of the nation: Nazism was standing. Hitler, with his masterly hypocrisy, denied any connection with esotericism in public, while behind the scenes he used mysticism to forge a superiority that never existed.
While Germany shed its skin, I finished high school and entered the University of Heidelberg. I chose History. I wanted to understand the past to decipher the future, without realizing that the future was being written in blood right under my nose.
In 1933, when the party took power, my life looked like a perfect picture, but painted on a rotten canvas. I was already married to my Anna and we had our little treasures: Isolte, five years old, and Elian, three. Their laughter overflowed the house, and I, in my academic blindness, swore I could serve the regime without letting darkness cross my door.
How naive I was.
Isolate was my reflection. I had inherited my green eyes and hair a dense brown, almost black. As for Elian... he was his mother's living mirror. It had the same sky blue eyes that seemed to carry all the purity I was already beginning to lose. Looking at him was like looking at a clear morning, while I felt like a cloud-laden evening.
At that time, I thought I had reached the top. He was settled in Heidelberg, respected as a historian and teacher. Honestly? These were happy times. The laughter of the children in the garden, the smell of Anna's coffee, the comforting weight of the history books in my hands... I had everything. And it was exactly by having everything that I became the perfect target.
But the thirst for the hidden never dried up. Instead of erasing, she became pure ambition. I was initiated into Freemasonry, but the royal invitation to the abyss came from an old acquaintance. In 1929 Heinrich Himmler took over the SS, and shortly afterwards founded the Ahnenerbe. When the invitation to join the Order reached me, I didn't see the blood already staining the edges of the paper. I only saw the "top."
I accepted. I thought about the stability, the chair, the comfortable future of Isolde and Elian. The war was still a vague whisper, but the hunt for the Jews... that was already a deafening cry tearing through the streets.
I remember a colleague at the University. He was Jewish. Before my rise in the Ahnenerbe, we were what some would call friends. We discussed theses, shared meals. Today, I try to search for his face in my memory and the name simply escapes me, as if my mind had burned the files of my own decency to protect me. Saying we were friends today seems like a lie I tell myself so I don't feel so monster.
In the Order, my role was "scientific". I should unearth the glory of the Germanic ancestors. He wrote articles, set up museums, gave lectures. I found texts that seemed convincing — or maybe I was just desperate to be convinced. It's easy to believe words that say you're special.
But there was the shadow. The side mission: to fabricate evidence for Hitler's racial theories, to justify the unjustifiable, to seek war secrets in forgotten ruins. By the time I realized the depth of the mud I had stepped into, I was already up to my neck in it.
Rituals in icy castles, experiments that defied any ethics, the search for grimoires that promised ancient powers. We found ruins, yes. We found inscriptions that we shaped at the convenience of the Reich. And as I read those apocryphal texts, Nazi ideology was injected into my mind, drop by drop, like a slow-acting poison.
I didn't consider myself a fanatic. He found extermination an "unnecessary" excess. My pragmatic, cold side said it would be "better" to make them work than to simply kill them. Thinking about it today makes my stomach turn. How could I have been so inhumane as to reduce lives to a simple workforce? But it was the Führer's will. And who was I to question?
Yes, I could have resisted. It could have reported it, run away, or simply said a dry "no." Many did so and paid the price.
I don't. I was weak.
And as I feel the barrel of the pistol against my temple in this cabin, I realize that I continue to be.
On some of those expeditions... well, I had to pull the trigger. Never against a Jew — I repeat this to myself as a mantra, as if it made any difference to the final swing of the soul. But I killed. I killed dozens. Allied soldiers, men who had faces, names and houses. The first death... God, the first one is a black hole. I was in pieces for days. What saved me was coming home, smelling Anna's hair and the weight of my children on my lap. They were my safe haven, the dirty excuse I used to wipe the blood off my hands.
I climbed the hierarchy step by step. I started out as nothing, an academic recruit lost among uniforms. But the rituals and those made-up reports that the dome loved to devour — scientific lies wrapped in pretty paper — secured me the rank of Lieutenant.
And it was there, sitting on top of my little mountain of empty papers and rituals, that the ground simply disappeared.
Germany was bleeding, losing territory by the hour. And when the ship starts to list, the big mice are the first to choose who they're going to push over the edge. I began to feel the weight of their gaze. My superiors, my colleagues... there was something icy about the way they measured me, as if they were calculating my disposal value. I commented to Anna, I remember that. Did she give me a warning... or was it some consolation? "Be careful," she said. Or was it "don't worry"? My memory is now a broken glass; the more I try to pick up the pieces, the more I cut myself.
April 7, 1944. That day is hot ironed in my mind, no matter how much I try to drown in alcohol to forget.
I got home and the silence hit me like a punch in the gut. It was raining. A heavy rain, identical to this one today, hitting the roof with a fury that seemed to want to cross the straw. The rays illuminated the gaping front door, swaying in the wind. The emptiness inside was something physical, a pressure that stole the air.
— Anna?! Isolate?! — I screamed until my throat burned, a raw sound that scratched my chest. I ran through the rooms, tripping over the furniture, my hands groping against walls that looked strange. Nothing. No answer. Just the sound of my own heart pounding against my ribs, faster and faster, more and more painful.
I thought about the Allies. Had they arrived? I pulled out the pistol, the cold metal slipping in my sweaty palm. I ran to the back, to the old junk warehouse. "They are there," I prayed, a desperate prayer from someone who no longer had God. "They're hidden between the boxes, playing whoever makes the least noise."
But the warehouse was dead. Empty. Just the metallic smell of rain and the mold of dust.
Desperation turned me into an animal. I ran to the barracks. I needed help-men, dogs, anything. It needed Major Frederick Von Haizen. He would know what to do. He was the command.
I entered the barracks like a swept madman. I bumped into soldiers, shoulders slapping shoulders, ignoring the curses that lay behind me. I was a trail of mud, sweat and water. My soggy boots left dark marks on the polished hallway floor — a map of my despair that no one bothered to follow. The only thing that mattered was the door to the Major's room. Only she existed in the world.
The door to Haizen's office slammed against the wall with a bang I barely registered. Inside, the scene was an insult to my soul: Haizen held a glass of whiskey, the ice cracking against the glass in an annoyingly clean sound, while laughing at something a man next to him was saying. Don't ask me for this other man's face; to me, he was just a blur of uniform and exposed teeth.
"Major Haizen..." my voice came out torn, a strange, high-pitched sound that didn't even sound like mine. I was breathless, my lungs burning as if I had swallowed embers. "My wife... my children... they were gone!"
I screamed that last sentence with the rest of the oxygen still burning in my lungs. In my despair, I expected anything: a shout back, a voice of arrest for having invaded the room, or even, in a miracle of naivety, a hint of empathy. But Haizen just looked at me. It was a hollow look, without an atom of surprise. It was there that the first real cold —not that of rain, but that of absolute dread— rose up my spine, freezing my blood.
— Didn't you read the papers we left in your kitchen, Lieutenant Conrad? — he asked, so calmly it made me nauseous.
Roles? What damn papers? My mind jerked, the gears skating in the trauma mud. The image of the kitchen table came as a flash blinding: white leaves on the dark wood. I saw them when I walked in, yes, but who the hell would stop to read documents when the house is too quiet? When did the smell of the one you love just evaporate into thin air?
He saw the emptiness in my eyes and allowed a corner-of-mouth smile to appear. He raised the glass to his lips, savoring the alcohol, letting the silence stretch like a hanging rope before dropping the bomb.
— Apparently, he didn't read it. Well then... his wife and children are being accused of treason against the Reich.
Ice. Absolute, cutting ice. For a second, I swear the sound of rain outside is gone. The world went silent, as if gravity had stopped working. Betrayal? Anna? The children? It was such grotesque nonsense that my first reaction was to look for the trace of a joke on his face. But there was no joke. Just that bureaucratic coldness of those who decide who lives and who dies between sips of whisky.
— You've gone mad, Major! — My voice bounced off the office walls, strange to my own ears. I was losing the ground, my hands shaking so much that the metal of the pistol in my holster seemed to rattle against my leg. —My family would never do that! It's a joke, isn't it? It has to be an act!
His smile changed. It became clearer, more... sadistic. The edges of your pleasure in seeing me suffer began to appear.
— And why would I play with something like that, Conrad? Are you calling me a kid? Of a liar?
On any other day of my life, I would have banged my heels, lowered my head, and apologized for breathing the same air as him. But by that moment, Lieutenant Conrad, the dutiful academic, the career historian, had already died. There was only one cornered man left, with nothing to lose.
— Where did this bogus accusation come from? — I growled, stepping forward, feeling the water from my soaked clothes weigh down as if I were carrying the very lead of defeat.
— If you don't know, I'm not the one to explain it to you — he quipped, making the ice jingle against the glass of the whiskey. — She will be investigated. All of them. If I were you, Conrad, I'd keep my mouth shut. You're lucky you're not in the same hole as them. At least for now.
The fury exploded. It was a blind thing, a corrosive heat that rose to my head and incinerated any shred of judgment. My hand went down, by pure instinct, towards the holster. I was going to kill that bastard. I was going to stick the barrel of the pistol in that cynical mouth until he spat where they were. But when my fingers reached for the gun handle...
The vacuum. My palm hit the empty leather. It was in that thousandth of a second that the snap of reality struck me like lightning: the soldier outside... the wretch had disarmed me "by protocol." I should have realized it right then and there. They never took my gun away. Never.
I left that room blinded by hate. My chest bubbled a mixture of acid and ember that made every step a Herculean effort. I knew the script by heart. Treason in the Third Reich had no right to defense, it had only closure: either a rope around the neck, or a bullet in the back of the neck.
Over the next few days, I became a shadow of myself. I dragged myself through offices, begged specters in uniform, humbled myself before men who, days before, had snapped their heels to greet me. The answer was always the same bureaucratic litany: "The evidence is concrete, Conrad. There is nothing to do."
Evidence. I felt like laughing and vomiting at the same time. I've helped fabricate "evidence" my entire career. I knew exactly how the poison was distilled inside the SS to make it look like medicine.
I stopped eating. Sleep has become my greatest enemy. Regret was a bogeyman that devoured me alive, ripping chunks out of me with each passing hour. I wished for the end. I wanted to be with them, but they wanted me alive for the final show.
On the third day, came the condemnation. Shooting.
They forced me to watch. They trapped me like a slaughter animal, their arms tied back so tightly that their shoulders screamed, and a gag that forced me to swallow the taste of their own sweat and dread. "So you don't get in the way of justice," they said. Justice. The word sounded like a mockery coming out of Major Haizen's mouth, who watched me with that sadistic, singing smile, enjoying every second of my ruin.
An officer approached Anna and the children. He held papers and read them with the indifference of someone checking a shopping list at the market.
— His last words? — the executioner's question cut through the icy air like a razor.
My tears were hot, heavy, blurring the view of the courtyard. I struggled against the ropes, feeling the fibers slit my wrists and the skin tearing, but I felt no physical pain. I only felt the abyss. I hated them. I hated every uniform, every medal, every brick in that damn place. If there was a God, I would beg — I demanded — that their hell start right there.
So, Anna's voice.
— I love you, Conrad! — She screamed, and the sound crossed the courtyard like a thunder of light. — I will love you until after death! I love our children! I don't regret anything we experienced!
Her scream completely ripped me apart. I was an SS Lieutenant, an initiate into hidden mysteries, a renowned historian... and in the end, I was nothing more than a tied-up piece of flesh, unable to save a single hair from the woman I loved.
But what killed me, long before the shooting, was my children's eyes. They were also gagged. The sounds that escaped them were not words; they were high-pitched moans, silent pleas that pierced my eardrums like needles. Their eyes... God, their eyes begged Dad to do what he always did: solve the problem. May it protect them.
And I was a nothing. A useless man in uniform.
In a burst of force that sprouted from the bottom of my stomach, I managed to spit out the cloth from my mouth. The air entered tearing the dry throat, burning. I was going to answer. I was going to scream that I loved them, I was going to scream their names until my lungs exploded...
Click. Bum.
Three rifles spat fire at the same time. The world turned red and gray. I saw... I saw what no man should be forced to witness. I saw life fade in scarlet jets over the dirty snow, transforming purity into something unrecognizable.
The air is gone. My lungs locked in a spasm. I was no longer a man; it was a silent, hollow cry. Before I could collapse to the ground, I felt the brutal impact of a gun butt to the back of my neck. The darkness came as a merciful relief, dragging me away from that courtyard.
Now I'm here, huddled in the rubble of what's left of my soul, inside this cabin that smells of rotting wood and defeat. Memories give me no respite. And the good ones are the worst; they cut deeper, because they show me the man I would have been if I had had the courage to say "no." If only I had been content with the smell of old books and the warmth of my home, instead of chasing the false glow of a glory that smelled like a morgue.
— I love you too, Anna... — I stammered. The sound of my own voice sounded like a stranger's, drowned out by a cry I could no longer control. — I love you too, my little ones.
The weight of the pistol in my right hand was the only anchor of reality I had left. The world outside was a gray blur of rain and mud. I lost everything. And the bitterest part — the one that makes me want to vomit my own heart out— is knowing that I was the one who dug every inch of the grave where they fell.
— I'm sorry I can't say the same as you, Anna... — I whispered into the void. — I'm not like you. I carry all the regrets in the world on my back. And they're crushing me.
I looked out the shattered window. The rain was blind, furious. Lightning tore through the black veil of heaven, casting a cruel white light on the trees that writhed like souls in agony. The wind hissed through the cracks, icy, but I received the circle of compressed metal against my temple like the touch of an old friend. The steel was cold, but it was honest.
— Forgive me, Anna! Forgive me, Isolte... Elian! — My breath grew short, gasping between desperate sobs. — Daddy is going. I'll get you guys. I love... I love you guys.
The shot was nothing majestic. It was a dry, brutal crack, almost drowned out by the roar of thunder that came soon after, as if heaven itself were trying to hide my shame from the rest of the world.
For a microsecond, the sound of the storm sounded like an indignant response from nature. But then... nothingness.
Silence swallowed the hut. Outside, the rain continued its mechanical and indifferent work, washing away the soil and blood of a man who tried to decipher the mysteries of the hidden and ended up becoming just another shadow devoured by him.