Even as Dauphin Louis of France took his first true steps toward the throne, Europe remained caught in a violent upheaval. The British Isles, in particular, were the loudest in their suffering. The English were finally drawing their long, agonizing civil war to a close.
“There! Catholics!”
“Seize them!”
Had this been sixty years prior, at the dawn of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the outcome might have been different. But now, it was a battle the Catholics simply could not win. They had been suppressed for too long; too many had already been forced to convert. Yet they rose nonetheless, only to be crushed with ruthless efficiency. For them, a desperate stand was better than waiting in silence for the end.
In the wake of this brutal crackdown, entire villages vanished, their populations evaporating into the mist of history. Fearing the reach of the chaos, the Kingdom of Ireland began patrolling its coasts, hunting for English Catholic refugees. Bounties were placed on their heads. Ireland, with its distinct tongue and culture, became a trap where foreigners were easily spotted. Left with no choice, the Catholic leaders fled toward Spain and other distant shores.
“Hurry! Get on board! Guy, what are you doing?”
“Brother? You can’t stop here! Think of the faithful who cry out your name! If you stay now—!”
But one man remained motionless. Standing on the shore of a small fishing village in Lancashire, he watched the Liverpool soldiers charging from the direction of the city.
Guy Fawkes knew his place in the world.
“Cry out my name…” he murmured, his voice hollow. “I am nothing.”
He meant it. He was truly a man of no consequence. The English Catholics had not risen as a unified force under a single banner; they had merely revolted in pockets, driven by the simple, primal urge to survive. Perhaps only twenty or thirty percent of them even knew the name Guy Fawkes. Among those in his own circle, the number was likely smaller still.
He was an unimportant man. If he fled now, he would be nothing more than an unimportant fugitive.
But things could change.
“I will stay here,” Guy said, his gaze fixed on the approaching line of steel. “The rest of you… go to Spain, or France. It doesn’t matter. Just go.”
“But—!”
“Go.”
If he died here, he could finally become someone important.
The suppression forces surged toward him, their faces twisted with the manic excitement of the hunt. Seeing no other choice, his comrades abandoned him and sprinted for the water. The ship unfurled its sails, catching the wind as it pulled away toward the open sea.
“Take him alive!” some shouted.
“That bounty is mine!” others roared.
To Guy, they were a cacophony of heretics, infidels, and servants of Satan—defilers of this holy land where Joseph of Arimathea had once walked. As they swarmed him, pinning his limbs and raining blows upon his body, he did nothing but laugh. Even as they dragged him away to be bound to the stake, his cackling didn’t cease.
He laughed until his limbs were torn asunder. He laughed through the screams.
“Oh, Lord!”
That was his final breath. And just as he had hoped, he became important.
“The King trembles at the words of Guy Fawkes…”
“If only Guy Fawkes had survived…”
Across the land, as brothers and sisters were put to the flame and their bodies broken, the prayers of the Catholics grew louder. They couldn’t stop—not now. They finally had a martyr. Though they might offer false conversions to survive, they never truly abandoned their faith. They whispered to one another in the shadows, dreaming of the day true religion would return to the land.
But regardless of their dreams, the uprising was over. The embers were stamped out.
Robert Cromwell, the Lord Protector representing the Liverpool faction, and King James, sovereign of the British Isles, found common ground in the need to heal the scars of civil war. They turned their combined might toward a half-abandoned London, taking it with ease, and began the long process of rebuilding the ruins. To solidify their new common front, they resolved to support the Protestants on the continent.
Driven by this momentum, the Continental Protestants made their own sudden, aggressive move.
It was May 1625.
“We have the Letter of Majesty!”
“Freedom of religion for Bohemia!”
The Protestant nobles of Bohemia, incensed by the restrictions of their king, Archduke Ferdinand—a staunch, uncompromising Catholic—seized his regents and hurled them out of a palace window. It was the Second Defenestration of Prague, occurring exactly seven years later than in the original history.
***
The Holy Roman Empire was governed by seven Electors who chose the Emperor: three clerical Electors—the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier—and four secular ones—the Duke of Saxony, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia.
Naturally, the clerical Electors were all Catholic. On the secular side, the Count Palatine was Calvinist, while Saxony and Brandenburg were Lutheran. With the religious balance teetering at a three-to-three split, Emperor Matthias declared that his successor, Archduke Ferdinand, would inherit the Bohemian throne. Given it was the Emperor’s decree, the Bohemian nobles had little choice but to elect Ferdinand.
The friction, however, was inevitable. Bohemia was a Protestant nation rooted in the Hussite faith; Ferdinand was a devout Catholic who viewed Protestants with utter contempt. When his suppression of their faith became unbearable, the nobles finally revolted, casting his regents into the abyss.
Unlike in the original timeline, those regents did not survive the fall. They plummeted twenty-one meters, ending as nothing more than red stains on the pavement below.
“To whom do we offer the crown now?” one noble whispered, his voice trembling.
“Who would dare take it? The moment they do, they’re at war with the Habsburgs!”
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the room.
War was the only path left. The Bohemian throne carried the power to elect the Emperor; if the Habsburgs wished to maintain their imperial grip, they had to hold that seat at any cost. Though terrified of the carnage they had invited, the nobles knew there was no turning back.
Finally, they reached a conclusion.
“King James of England and Scotland… surely he would support his own son-in-law.”
That son-in-law was Frederick V, the Elector Palatine and a fellow Calvinist. If he accepted the crown, the world would tilt on its axis. There would be four Protestant Electors to three Catholics. In an empire birthed when the Pope crowned Charlemagne, the Protestants would finally hold the majority.
The Empire was on the brink of collapse. The Catholic world was beginning to crumble. Infuriated, Emperor Matthias and the displaced Archduke Ferdinand immediately began marshaling their armies.
This was the state of Europe at the end of 1625. And while the smoke of impending war began to drift across the continent, Louis was on his way to see the foreign ‘Crown Prince’.
***
Louis entered the room, his face a carefully crafted mask of bewilderment. He bowed deeply toward the ‘Crown Prince’ and spoke with a practiced tremor.
“Have… have you heard the news? My mother… she was caught conspiring with Spain…”
The moment the door clicked shut behind him, the Crown Prince spoke.
“There is no need to continue the performance.”
Louis straightened, catching Oitotan staring wistfully at a pile of gold coins on the table. The Crown Prince swept the coins into his pouch and cleared his throat. Louis took a quiet, deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment to reset.
He had been born with a frail constitution, plagued by illness since childhood. His mother, Marie de’ Medici, was a harsh woman who had been obsessed with controlling her sickly son. She believed that both beasts and men required the lash and strict discipline to be mastered.
However, there were times when her anger softened. Whenever he succumbed to a fever or a hacking cough, her wrath would dissipate into a begrudging pity. It was then that Louis learned a vital lesson: fragility could be a weapon to elicit sympathy and favor. The Catholic nobles around him preferred this ‘weak’ version of Louis as well; a malleable king was far easier to handle than his father had been.
Thus, he became a master of appearing vulnerable. He learned to lull others into a false sense of security, striking only when their guard was down. It worked on almost everyone—except his father.
And, apparently, it didn’t work on the man standing before him.
For the first time in a long while, Louis shed his pretenses and looked the Crown Prince in the eye. The uncertainty was gone, replaced by a fierce, primal conviction. Despite the intensity of that gaze, the Crown Prince merely met him with his usual, unwavering smile.
“Crown Prince,” Louis began.
“Yes?”
“There is no need for you to use formal honorifics with me. Please, address me as you always have.”
The man had earned that right. He was entitled to use the informal tu rather than the formal vous. He had plucked Louis from the jaws of death and set him on the path to a throne. He had provided both the inspiration and the means.
The Crown Prince, however, shook his head with a modest shrug. “I couldn’t do that. Someone might overhear.”
“But—”
“Besides, you are to be the King of France very soon, are you not?”
The King of France.
Louis lifted his chin at the words. The Crown Prince continued to watch him, his expression as calm and serene as a still lake. Donning his hat once more, Louis managed a smile in return. He decided to cast aside the flowery rhetoric and get straight to the point.
“If you already know that much, then my request should be simple enough to explain.”
“A request?”
“Yes.”
Louis carefully produced a list from his coat, one he had spent the entire night refining. The Crown Prince tilted his head curiously as he took it. Louis pointed to various names on the parchment, beginning his explanation.
“My father granted trade licenses and the right to deal with the Continental Covenant only to his personal favorites. Even my mother couldn’t manage to strip those licenses away from them.”
The Crown Prince’s smile faded, replaced by a quiet, unreadable expression as he scanned the names. “So, you want me to take them back. I assume you have a suitable justification?”
Louis felt a surge of satisfaction. There was no need for tedious explanations with this man; he understood everything instinctively.
“I do. As it happens, one of the Protestants holding a license was found to be an accomplice in the recent assassination attempt.”
The Crown Prince looked at him, his face still a blank slate. But Louis could read the silent question in his eyes: Is that the truth?
In matters of state, the literal truth was often secondary to necessity. Rather than pressing the issue, the Crown Prince copied the list and began drafting a letter in elegant script, ‘politely’ requesting the cancellation of their licenses.
As Louis reached out to take the letter with a word of thanks, the Prince’s quill didn’t stop.
Scratch. Scritch. Scratch.
Louis watched in silence as the Prince added more lines to the bottom. It was an instruction to redistribute those very licenses to those who had assisted the Duke of Richelieu in resolving the recent crisis. The message was clear, requiring no further elaboration.
“Here it is,” the Prince said, handing it over.
Louis took the letter, his mind momentarily blank. In a single stroke, the flow of the very funds that supported the French monarchy had been decided by the will of one man—no, one entity. The Crown Prince had made his point. He had shown exactly who held the upper hand in this alliance, and who truly propped up the French throne.
Dauphin Louis de Bourbon felt a shiver of awe run down his spine.
He knew this was a moment for silence, not protest. He tucked the letter away without a word of complaint. Yet he also knew he couldn’t simply stand there. He stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and the man who was the eternal Crown Prince, the eternal Emperor, and yet neither.
As he drew near, the Prince’s composed facade wavered slightly. Seeing that rare flicker of flustered surprise, Louis smiled. Even angels, it seemed, could be caught off guard.
He dropped to one knee.
“What… what is the meaning of this?” the Prince asked.
Louis kept his head bowed, though he could sense the other man’s growing confusion. “Among the Swiss heretics, there are those who reject infant baptism,” Louis said softly.
“I am aware of the Anabaptists. But what does that have to do with—”
“Whether it is a Catholic becoming a Protestant or the reverse, they receive a new baptism to signify they have been truly reborn as members of the Church. I have met an angel, and with his help, I shall take my throne. I wish to become a member of the church led by this nameless one. Therefore, bless me. Baptize me into your fold.”
A glance toward Oitotan showed the companion frozen in shock, clearly having never imagined such a turn of events. But Louis was resolute. If the Bourbons were to endure, they had to forge a bond with an eternal being and an eternal faith. This was his conclusion—and his gift. He was offering his own conversion to the Prince.
Louis waited. He expected the ‘angel’ to wet his brow, to revel in the monumental achievement of converting the King of France to his own sect.
“Please, stand up,” the Prince said.
“Is… is it finished already?”
“No. You have no need for baptism.”
The smile vanished from Louis’s face. He looked up, only to find his own bewilderment reflected in the Prince’s calm eyes.
“Do you… do you understand what you’re saying?” Louis stammered. “The Continental Covenant is a Protestant power—”
“Does the difference between a Lutheran and a Catholic truly seem so vast in the eyes of the Lord?”
Louis went silent.
“How absurd would it be,” the Prince continued, “if a good Presbyterian went to hell, while only a good Hussite was permitted into heaven?”
The Prince had just declared that a Catholic baptism was perfectly valid in the eyes of the Nameless Church. He had essentially denied the necessity of his own church’s independence and the very core of the Protestant schism. Louis felt his world tilting once more. What… what exactly was this man’s church?
“You may continue to live as a Catholic,” the Prince said, patting Louis’s frozen shoulder. “If you are a good Catholic, you will likely be a good member of the Nameless Church as well.”
Louis was reeling, his thoughts tumbling out before he could filter them. “Then… how am I to be your friend? How can my children, and their children after them, remain your allies?”
The Nameless One smiled. “Do not kill people simply because their religion or sect differs from yours.”
“Is… is that all?”
“Well, there is one more condition. A rather difficult one.”
Louis reflexively swallowed hard. He was prepared to follow any command. Like Abraham offering Isaac, he would endure any trial to secure the glory of the Bourbons.
But the Prince’s words were entirely unexpected.
“Be kind to people.”
The angel smiled. Seeing Louis struggle to grasp the simplicity of it, the Prince leaned in and whispered into his ear once more.
“Be kind to people. That is the most important rule of the Nameless Church.”