The sound of boots on cement told him that he hadn't been forgotten: not that this was necessarily a good thing. Since he'd been thrown in this windowless cell – beaten and half-dazed after his government had been summarily dismissed – his only guide to the passage of time had been what sounds drifted to his ears, and the slow shift of the temperature. It had been summer when he'd been taken. He'd shivered and starved through one winter, surviving only because his kind couldn't die of thirst or hunger, and he'd seen not a single person since his guards had locked the door as they left.

Escape had never been an option. The cell was made to hold his kind, a remnant of darker times before the great war had shattered the old ways like so many eggs. Someone remembered, though: the heavy steel shackles around his wrists and ankles were too strong for him to break even before the long starvation had taken its toll, the chains tethering him to the wall just as sturdy. Worse, his captors had used his blood to mark them, preventing him from simply slipping away into the other realm only his kind could walk.

With only his own mind for company, his sanity hung by the thinnest of fraying threads.

The door swung open, flooding the cell with light. After so long in near-complete darkness he had to cover his eyes, unable to endure the brightness. Brightness that grew when, with a click, someone turned on the light whose switch he could not reach.

The door closed, and he heard keys turning, the lock engaging.

Then a shockingly familiar voice, purring, even gloating. "Well, well. How the mighty Prussia has fallen."