May 5, 1821 – St. Helena
The rain did not fall.
It assaulted.
It slammed against the warped wooden walls of Longwood House like a punishment from a forgotten god—relentless, cold, and rhythmic in the way only tropical storms and battlefield drums ever were. To the man lying on the narrow camp bed, drifting in and out of fever, the noise was indistinguishable from artillery rolling over wet earth.
He was drowning.
Not in water—
in memory.
Napoleon exhaled slowly, and the breath trembled as if it had to travel across two centuries to leave his chest. Sweat gathered on his brow, cold despite the oppressive humidity. His fingers curled around the rough wool blanket as though it were the mane of Marengo, as though gripping harder might pull him back into a world where he still commanded fate instead of being consumed by it.
The cancer in his stomach was a hot coal, burning through the last reserves of a conqueror's will.
Voices moved around him—familiar, blurred.
"Majesty..."
He heard Las Cases. But the voice was distant, like a sailor shouting from another deck during a storm. Napoleon tried to answer, but only a wet rasp escaped.
So this is how emperors die, he thought.
Not in triumph.
Not in marble halls.
But on a rock at the end of the earth, watched by gaolers and ghosts.
His vision blurred. For a moment he could no longer distinguish the storm outside from the one behind his eyelids. Waterloo. Arcole. The Pyramids. The smoke that once lifted at the sweep of his hand now seemed to rise only to choke him.
Then—
A flash.
Not lightning.
Memory, sharp enough to cut.
A white banner snapping in a cold wind.
A coronation robe trailing across a cathedral floor.
Golden lilies gleaming beneath torchlight—the ancient line of kings he had torn down once before.
In his delirium, the lilies burned like stars, and somewhere beyond them, a girl's voice echoed:
"France needs you, Sire."
But that voice could not exist in 1821. It belonged to another century. To someone who died long before he was born.
He tried to move. His body refused. The fever clamped down, dragging him under like the surf at Toulon. The room tilted. The rain became a roar. The walls fell away.
For a heartbeat, for a breath, for a flicker of existence so thin even he doubted it—
—there was no St. Helena.
—no exile.
—no English jailers.
Only a corridor of blinding white rushing open in front of him.
Time, that loyal servant he once believed he could command, twisted.
Napoleon Bonaparte fell—not into darkness, but into light.
A voice, impossibly close, whispered again:
"Do not fail us this time."
Then the storm swallowed everything.
February, 1429 – The Royal Castle of Chinon
The cold was different here.
It was not the damp, rotting humidity of the South Atlantic. It was a sharp, iron-hard chill, the kind that lives in stone walls and seeps into the marrow of old bones.
Napoleon opened his eyes.
He expected the peeling wallpaper of his prison. He expected the face of Hudson Lowe, his English tormentor.
Instead, he saw soot-stained timber beams. A narrow slit in the stone wall that passed for a window. A ragged tapestry stirring in a draft.
He tried to sit up.
The movement made him dizzy. The world spun violently, but as the vertigo settled, he realized something terrifying.
The pain was gone.
The furnace in his stomach? Extinguished. The fluid drowning his lungs? Evaporated.
In their place was a new sensation: Weakness. A trembling, pathetic fragility. The body he inhabited felt lighter than air, brittle as a dried leaf.
Suddenly, a sound drifted through the heavy oak door.
Clank. Clank. Scrape.
Footsteps in the corridor. Metal striking stone. Voices raised in argument.
Napoleon's eyes narrowed. Instinct—honed by twenty years of campaigning—kicked in before he even knew his own name.
Too loud, he analyzed instantly. The armor is loose. The stride is uneven. That is not a sentry on patrol; that is a man slouching.
Discipline is zero. Morale is negative.
"Hudson?" he rasped, testing his voice.
It was wrong. It was high, cultured, reedy. A tenor, not a baritone. It lacked the gravel of command.
A figure detached itself from the shadows. Not a Redcoat, but a boy in a greasy wool tunic that smelled of woodsmoke. The boy dropped to his knees as if shot.
"Sire? You called?"
Sire?
The English strictly forbade that title. To them, he was just 'General Bonaparte'.
Napoleon threw off the heavy fur coverlet. He swung his legs over the side of the bed.
He froze.
These were not his legs.
They were slender, pale, fine-boned. The knees were unscarred by the saddle. He stumbled toward a silver basin on the table, gripping the edge to steady himself. His hands were long, elegant, almost feminine—the hands of a pianist, or a monk. Not a soldier.
He stared into the water.
A stranger stared back.
It was not an ugly face. It was a face of breeding. High cheekbones, a prominent Valois nose, a mouth prone to sulking. It was a handsome face, in a tragic, poetic sort of way.
But the eyes...
The eyes were terrified. They were the eyes of a deer that hears the hounds.
"My God," Napoleon whispered, touching the pale, smooth cheek with his own hand. "I thought St. Helena was Hell. Turns out, God has a sense of humor."
He limped to the window. Below, the River Vienne flowed grey and sluggish. Above the keep, a banner snapped in the wind.
Blue field. Gold lilies.
The Valois. The ancient dynasty. The past he thought he had buried.
"What year is it?" he asked, not turning around.
The servant thought the King's madness—the madness of his father—had returned. "It is the year of our Lord 1429, Sire."
1429.
Napoleon closed his eyes. The mathematics of fate clicked into place like the tumblers of a lock.
He was Charles VII. The Dauphin. The "King of Bourges." The man history remembered not for his strength, but for his hesitation. A prince who let a peasant girl fight his battles because he was too afraid to lead.
He let out a short, dry laugh.
"1429," he muttered. "The English are winning, I presume?"
"They are at Orleans, Sire," the boy whispered, tears welling in his eyes. "They have the city surrounded. They say... they say the Kingdom is finished. It is the end of days."
Napoleon listened again to the sounds of the castle. He heard the chaotic clatter of the guards, the distant, drunken shouting from the barracks.
A bankrupt kingdom. A broken army. A body made of glass.
This was, without a doubt,the worst deal in the history of trade deals.
He turned from the window.
The weakness in his legs seemed to vanish, replaced by a cold, hard surge of adrenaline he hadn't felt since the sun rose over Austerlitz.
"Finished?"
He walked toward the servant. He was physically frail, a delicate porcelain vessel, but the spirit inside it was cast iron. The boy shrank back as if a lion had just entered the room.
"That's fake news, son," Napoleon said softly.
His gaze was sharp, dissecting the room, the kingdom, the future.
"The English are a problem, sure. They are plunderers. They are arrogant. Some, I assume, are good people. But they have overstayed their welcome."
He looked at his own pale, aristocratic hands. He made a fist. It was weak, but it would hold a sword.
"Since I'm here," Napoleon murmured, a ghost of a smile touching the Valois King's lips, "I suppose I'll have to fix it."
He straightened his spine.
"We're going to make this place great again."