The Vosges Mountains were buried in silence.
Snow layered everything — the pines, the stones, even the shattered remnants of villages that had once dotted the ridges. White erased the old roads, obscured the trenches, and covered the bones. In winter, the war paused here, like a beast crouching beneath a blanket, waiting to spring again.
But beneath the frost, something stirred.
Inside a buried research compound deep within Mont Steinberg, Wilhelm Rainer oversaw the final trials of Nachtwind.
The Night Wind.
It did not growl. It did not thunder. It did not breathe smoke.
It whispered.
The machine had no treads. No wheels. No claws or plated fangs.
Instead, Nachtwind hovered on a vibration-based pressure lift — a concave hull held aloft by twin rotary compressors that exhaled controlled shockwaves against the terrain. At full activation, it floated two feet above the ground, leaving only a shallow ripple in snow.
No tracks. No signature.
And no mercy.
The central weapon was embedded in the machine's core: a tri-helix magnetic chamber that spun resonance plates at high speed, then compressed their frequencies into a pulse not unlike an organ note — except this one shattered windows and lungs alike.
Rainer watched the test with an emotion that danced between reverence and terror.
"Playback ready?" he asked.
His aide nodded. "Visual and acoustic sensors engaged. Target: concrete bunker three."
"Fire."
The pulse was inaudible at first — then came the reaction: a heaving of the earth, a wave of frost kicked up from the snow, and a low pressure collapse that folded the entire bunker inward like a tin box struck by a mallet.
No explosion. No shrapnel.
Just implosion by resonance.
Rainer smiled.
"Let the French record their saints. I will compose a requiem."
Meanwhile, nearly 200 kilometers west, Emil Laurant stood before the silent carcass of Mandragore.
The machine had returned from Sainte-Menehould trailing vapor and scarred by its own fury. Its ribs no longer folded fully shut. The dorsal rig had warped from heat strain. One of the twin capacitor coils had fused during the last pulse, nearly cooking the interior shell.
It had done what it was born for.
Now it was dying.
Fournier rubbed his forehead. "We could rebuild."
"No," Emil said. "It's not made for repetition. Like a scream — once it leaves your throat, it's gone."
"So, what then? Another prototype?"
"No," Emil repeated. "A change in shape."
He stepped back and turned to the drafting table. The blueprints were already forming in his mind — not another beast, not another angel of metal.
A serpent.
For the first time in weeks, Emil left Verdun.
He traveled alone, overland, through snow and mud, to a Ministry cold lab near Bar-le-Duc. Inside, he met with a quiet, red-eyed metallurgist named Lisette Arban, who specialized in acoustic-reactive alloys.
She'd read his letter. She already knew.
"You want something that doesn't just resist sound," she said. "You want it to drink it."
Emil nodded. "Not armor. Skin. Something flexible. Layered. It needs to flex under shock and channel vibration back into the core."
Lisette showed him a series of strips — nickel-fiber membranes treated with graphite dust, capable of absorbing and redirecting pressure waves.
He ran his hand along one.
It vibrated under his fingers like the string of a cello.
"Perfect," he murmured.
Back in Verdun, the engineers resumed their frenzy.
The new design was different.
Lighter. Curved like a sleeping dragon. No turrets. No visible barrel. Instead, the weapon would be buried inside — a spinal array along the center that could release pulses upward, downward, forward, or outward in a ring. A weapon with no face.
A machine that moved like an idea.
They called it Charogne.
Carrion.
Emil hated the name. But he didn't correct them.
Maybe it was right.
Maybe it was the leftovers of war.
A shadow machine built to swallow the ghosts left behind by its predecessors.
One evening, Rousseau asked him, "What is it we're fighting now? Guns? Ideologies?"
Emil didn't look up from the schematics.
"We're fighting permanence. Every weapon built in this war wants to stay — to leave its mark. I want to build something that leaves nothing behind. No crater. No flame. Just silence."
Rousseau nodded slowly.
"You want to unmake noise."
"No," Emil said.
"I want to unmake memory."
The Ministry grew nervous.
Lavalle sent a summons.
Amélie intercepted it.
"He won't come," she said calmly over the encrypted line.
Lavalle's voice came back clipped and sharp. "He must. There's to be a demonstration at Reims. The Écraseur Mark II is ready. We want him there. For unity."
"He's already gone."
"Where?"
"East," Amélie said. "Where the silence is loudest."
Far below Mont Steinberg, Nachtwind was being prepped for transport.
Rainer stood at its side, hand resting on the frame.
"What do you think they'll see when this arrives on the front?" Hartwig asked.
Rainer smiled.
"They won't see anything. Not in time. They'll feel it. A tremor in their teeth. A cough that won't stop. A heartbeat they can't hear anymore."
"And when they try to run?"
"They won't."
He stepped back.
"Because by then, they'll already be part of the song."
Three days later, in a burned-out village north of Étain, Emil arrived just before dusk.
The locals were gone. Only broken furniture, cracked doors, and the faint scent of scorched cloth remained.
The battlefield had moved elsewhere.
But the war had stayed.
He unfolded the map. Marked the position of the last known S.D.T. signal. Then looked at the sky.
No snow.
No wind.
Perfect.
He turned back toward the hidden freight cart where Charogne lay in pieces, ready for assembly.
It would take three days to construct. One to calibrate. One to listen.
Then — judgment.