On The Edge of The Abyss
Prologue, 1944:
Captain Wolfgang von Witzland watches his men execute an SS officer. Three years ago, he believed in honor and justice. Now he only wonders if there's a difference between the two.
ARC I: The Middle Kingdom
The neutral Hanseatic Empire sends two young officers to China on a routine military mission. It fails spectacularly. But for Captain Kylian von Reichsgraf, the mission yields something more dangerous than diplomatic embarrassment: Princess Changning of the crumbling Jin Dynasty. Their attraction violates every protocol. When Japan invades and Changning flees to Hansa as part of a court in exile, the forbidden becomes impossible—a Chinese princess in a Hanseatic empire, a military officer who cannot protect her, and a love that makes them both vulnerable.
ARC II: The Empire of Hansa
War transforms ideals into weapons.
Kylian becomes an interrogator for Imperial Intelligence, trading his conscience for operational necessity. Each confession extracted corrodes another piece of who he was.
Wolfgang, stationed on the Western Front, falls for a French resistance fighter. When she's murdered by on the order of an SS officer, he allows his men to commit an atrocity in revenge—learning that righteous rage and monstrous action wear the same face.
Changning builds a new life in Hansa, but her relationship with Kylian brands her a traitor. Chinese nationalist assassins hunt her while Hanseatic society treats her as a curiosity at best, a threat at worst.
When Wolfgang's unsanctioned revenge sabotages Kylian's crucial intelligence operation, the two collide in a reckoning that forces them to confront the people they've become and the prices they've paid.
ARC III: Aftermath
As the war ends,they stand not as the people they were, but as the architects of what comes next. Kylian, stripped of his career, is free to build a life with Changning on his own terms, no longer bound by blind duty. Wolfgang returns home, his idealism tempered into the shrewd, resilient leadership his Duchy will need in a fractured world. And Changning, though exiled, has forged a new identity and a powerful voice, ready to help shape the future from the ashes of the old.