A summons.
One afternoon at First Corps headquarters in Königsberg, a courier arrived with sealed orders—black wax, imperial stamp, a formality heavy enough to make even hardened officers straighten.
Return to Potsdam at once.
No reason given.
Only one additional line, written in a hand too careful to be casual:
Dress as for a ceremony.
Oskar didn't argue.
Drills could continue without him. Hindenburg had the patience to grind men into shape. Ludendorff had the mind to sharpen them into something lethal.
Before leaving Königsberg, Oskar pulled a few quiet strings—quiet enough that the paperwork would look inevitable after the fact.
He summoned Ludendorff, handed him a folded document, and watched the man read it in silence.
Ludendorff's eyes flicked once.
Then again.
For an instant, there was something almost human behind the discipline.
"Major General," Ludendorff said, as if testing the words in his mouth.
"You'll hate the paperwork," Oskar replied.
Ludendorff's mouth twitched—barely.
"I will endure it."
"Good," Oskar said. "Because I need you enduring."
He didn't explain further. He didn't have to. Men like Ludendorff didn't need poetry. They needed purpose.
Oskar left the next morning.
Potsdam greeted him with summer light and the faint scent of lake water—pleasant, almost offensively so, considering the tension he could already feel behind the palace walls.
He expected strategy.
War planning.
Some new scheme from his father that would require steel, money, or both.
Instead, he walked into a different battlefield entirely.
Princess Gunderlinde's eighteenth birthday was approaching.
And Bavaria, it seemed, had decided that hesitation was no longer acceptable.
Oskar had been receiving her letters ever since they first met—long, bright, earnest things full of questions about him… and lately, about Africa. About "the red earth." About whether mosquitoes were truly as terrible as rumor claimed, and whether the jungle sounded like it did in adventure books.
Sometimes he read them with amusement.
Sometimes with dread.
Sometimes with the uneasy sense that she thought of him far more than was safe for a girl raised among crowns.
Her devotion wasn't the danger.
Her birthday was.
Eighteen meant she could no longer be waved away as a child with a crush. Eighteen meant Bavaria could speak plainly. Eighteen meant the nobility could stop pretending and begin demanding.
The court was murmuring again.
Not softly this time.
And the public—oddly enough—had begun muttering too. Not out of piety.
Out of sympathy.
Because Oskar already had two women openly at his side.
Two women who had borne him children. Two women treated as wives in everything but ink and altar. Tanya's sons, by Oskar's own insistence, stood first in his line—no ambiguity, no "perhaps." Anna's children—girls—were politely ignored by old law unless every male heir vanished.
To conservative minds it was a slow-motion scandal.
Not because Oskar was unfaithful—
—but because he was serious.
He had taken commoners and refused to discard them like mistakes… and yet he had not given them the one thing that would silence every whisper: a public, legal commitment.
He had made them permanent members of his household…
…without making them permanent in the eyes of tradition.
And that unsettled everyone.
The aristocracy saw danger—precedent, disorder, the crown bending toward the street.
Foreign courts saw mockery—Germany becoming theatrical, unpredictable, impossible to "marry into" cleanly.
And ordinary Germans saw something else: two women living in the half-light of legitimacy, their children forever discussed like an argument instead of a family.
In taverns and markets, people began asking the question with bluntness disguised as moral concern:
When will the Crown Prince marry them already?
Wilhelm II had measured the mood for years—through reports, through whispers, through men like Arnold who listened not only to sermons but to what people confessed beneath them.
The conclusion was simple.
Germany's nobility wanted Oskar to take a "proper" bride—not to replace Tanya and Anna, but to anchor the crown back into tradition before the Empire's spine snapped.
Bavaria wanted to bind itself to the future Emperor while it still could—before Oskar produced so many heirs that any Bavarian match became irrelevant.
And the people wanted something far less strategic and far more human:
for Oskar to stop hesitating and choose.
So the plan formed—heavy, inevitable.
A wedding.
Not a quiet compromise. Not something hidden behind palace doors.
Something public.
Something that would either become a national myth…
…or a national wound.
Oskar heard the outline and felt, for the first time in months, sweat gather cold behind his ribs.
Because it wasn't one wedding.
It was the only solution that could satisfy everyone at once—
and therefore the most dangerous thing imaginable.
A triple wedding.
One Crown Prince. Three wives. One Empire watching.
Tanya first—because he would not allow her to be treated as a stain to be "corrected."
Anna second—because he would not allow the world to pretend she had not carried his blood into it.
And Princess Gunderlinde last—because Bavaria demanded its chain, and the old aristocracy demanded its symbol.
The consequences would be enormous.
It would inflame Catholic and Protestant factions. It would irritate Rome. It would outrage foreign courts and feed scandal-hungry newspapers for years. It would scandalize the respectable and thrill the common—because even those who disapproved would still watch.
But perhaps most importantly…
it would force the world to accept what Germany was becoming under Oskar:
modern enough to be dangerous—
and stubborn enough to rewrite its own rules.
Oskar had expected war councils.
Instead, he had been summoned for a ceremony.
And deep in his chest, he admitted the truth with a clarity he didn't enjoy:
Steel was simpler than vows.
On 12 August 1909, Munich dressed itself in flags.
The streets near the Residenz glittered with bunting and polished brass. Horses steamed in summer heat. Guards stood in ceremonial helmets that caught the light like coins. Bavarian officers moved with that particular pride—less rigid than Prussian, more theatrical, as if even duty should look beautiful.
Princess Gunderlinde turned eighteen.
The celebration was presented as a birthday.
It felt like a decision.
Oskar traveled there personally—with Tanya and Anna at his side—so the meeting would happen properly, face-to-face, not as a name in letters or a problem passed between ministers.
The Bavarian court received them with smiles that held calculation behind their teeth.
There were toasts. Music. A procession of guests who bowed too deeply or not enough, each one silently measuring what kind of Germany this Crown Prince was building—what kind of future they could still chain to themselves.
Then Gunderlinde entered.
She wasn't a rival in the way court women were trained to be.
She didn't sweep into the room like a blade wrapped in silk. She did not look at Tanya and Anna as if they were stains to be scrubbed from history.
She looked at them like a girl who had been afraid of disappointing them for years.
Shy.
Sincere.
Trying very hard to be brave.
When she curtsied to Tanya and Anna, it wasn't performance. Her hands trembled slightly, then steadied as she forced herself to hold their gaze.
Tanya assessed her like a commander assessing a new officer—eyes sharp, posture relaxed, measuring threat.
She found none.
Gunderlinde's softness wasn't a weapon.
It was simply who she was.
Anna—timid in public but unexpectedly firm in private—spoke to the princess first. Quiet words. A gentle tone that still carried authority. Like an older sister showing a younger one where the cliff edge was.
Gunderlinde listened.
And obeyed.
Oskar watched the three of them in the same room—speaking without tension—and felt something almost unfamiliar rise in his chest:
relief.
For a moment, the impossible seemed… manageable.
Then the court made it official.
The wedding date—one month later—was announced at the party, framed as the Kaiser's blessing after long consideration, granted in recognition of Oskar's "service to the Empire."
In truth it was a message to the world:
This is happening. Accept it.
Abroad, outrage bloomed on schedule—editorials, offended nobles, letters written in indignant ink.
Inside Germany, the reaction was stranger.
Shock. Fascination. Excitement. Unease.
Because this wasn't normal royal behavior—
but then again, nothing about Oskar had been normal for years.
This was simply the next step.
And when the noise reached the Church, the Church did what old institutions always did when forced between doctrine and survival:
it calculated.
There was no thunderous condemnation.
There were meetings.
Behind closed doors, bishops argued until their throats hurt. Pastors wrote drafts that were rewritten by older hands. Theologians tried to build walls out of words.
Because the problem was obvious:
If the Church condemned Oskar outright, it didn't merely risk conflict with the Kaiser.
It risked looking like men of ink trying to chain the man carrying Germany's future.
And Oskar was popular.
So the Church broke the disaster into manageable pieces.
First: reaffirm the ideal loudly.
Every statement began the same way, as if repetition itself could create authority:
"The Christian order remains one man and one woman in faithful marriage."
Printed. Recited. Quoted.
Not because they believed Oskar would obey.
Because they needed the nation to believe the Church still had a spine.
Second: reclassify the matter.
Not as celebration—
as containment.
Careful language followed, legal and bloodless: this was not new doctrine, not a model for the people, not a precedent to be copied.
It was an already-existing household that could not be torn apart without creating injustice.
They spoke of responsibility. Of children born in fact rather than theory. Of scandal reduced by bringing chaos into order instead of leaving it as rot in the shadows.
They did not say, We bless polygamy.
They said:
"Where an irregular household already exists, the Church must prevent greater harm."
Third: scripture became shield and warning.
Old names appeared—Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon—not praised, not held up as ideals…
…referenced.
Precedents for uncomfortable realities.
Then came the New Testament reminder, hard enough to sting:
The ideal remained unchanged.
But the world sometimes forced a choice between two evils—
and the lesser evil was order.
Finally, they engineered support that looked like reluctance.
In practice it meant compromise dressed as principle:
"pastoral blessing," not "sacrament"
"exceptional circumstances," not "precedent"
"for stability," not "for love"
"not for imitation," never "example"
It was the language institutions used when they wanted to do something while insisting they were not doing it.
And beneath every sentence lay the real message, sharp as a hidden blade:
This path is not without consequence.
Sin does not become virtue because it is crowned.
Let no man mistake exception for permission.
They weren't blessing Oskar because they approved.
They were blessing him because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn't.
Because if the Church went to war with the Crown Prince…
…it might be the Church that lost the faithful.
Already, cracks were showing.
Across Germany—and bleeding into Austria-Hungary—both Catholics and Protestants had begun drifting, not toward Rome or Wittenberg, but toward something new.
The Church of the New Dawn.
The Church of the Holy Light.
Different names. The same gravity.
Priest Arnold's sermons spread fast, carried not by doctrine alone, but by results. By Oskar's victories. By his reforms. By feats that no ordinary prince should have been capable of—logistical, military, industrial—stacked so relentlessly that even skeptics had begun to use the word chosen without realizing it.
The New Dawn leaned not toward the gentler verses, but toward the Old Testament—toward judgment, order, covenant, strength. Toward what Arnold called the true scripture of God, the law before mercy.
And people listened.
Workers listened.
Soldiers listened.
Young clergy listened.
Not because they had abandoned Christianity—
…but because they believed they were seeing it made real again.
Slowly, dangerously, Oskar was no longer seen merely as Crown Prince.
He was becoming an icon of power.
And for some, something closer to worship.
The Church saw the numbers. It saw the collections. It saw attendance shift. It saw young men choosing Arnold's words over old sermons that felt thin beside railways built on time and armies that actually worked.
To strike Oskar openly now would not just create conflict.
It would create a schism.
One that could tear Germany loose from Rome entirely—and possibly drag Austria-Hungary with it.
A fracture that would weaken Protestants and Catholics alike, while leaving the New Dawn standing in the wreckage.
Even the Pope understood that.
The Catholic Church in Germany still sent vast sums to Rome every year. Faith was belief—but it was also infrastructure, money, influence. And none of that could be replaced easily.
So Rome hesitated.
The bishops compromised.
And doctrine bent—not because it was convinced…
…but because it was cornered.
They did not bless Oskar because they loved him.
They blessed him because history had taught them a simple lesson:
When a man carries the future,
you do not stand in front of him—
you step aside and pray he does not look back.