Fallen Eagle-Chapter 2: The Hazelnut Tree

The next morning dawned for Nikos Karagiannis, and with it came a clearer sense of purpose. The struggle had raged all night - a frantic, silent debate within the confines of his own mind. Nikos had dissected his predicament from every possible angle. Constructing, then dismantling, every burgeoning hypothesis: an impossibly advanced simulation, a comatose dream, a psychotic break. He had pinched his arm, held his breath until his lungs burned, tried to will the world away with the focus that had once allowed him to spend twelve hours straight deciphering a single Portuguese horsemanship treatise. Nothing. The world did not waver. The scent of woodsmoke, damp stone, and increasingly suffocating dread remained stubbornly, primordially real.
With the first rays of grey light filtering in through the narrow hole that passed for a window, the debate ended. Not in a flash of insight, but with the quiet, leaden certainty of a historian accepting an impossible fact. He was here. Whether this was the late 1400s, a construct, or hell itself was a philosophical indulgence he could no longer afford. Its brutal, barbaric violence, rampant discrimination, and medieval prejudice were now the only rules that mattered. Survival was the only thesis left to defend. He could hope to snap out of this nightmare eventually, but he couldn’t count on it.
A strange calm settled in his chest, the hollow peace of a man with nothing left to lose. His life in the 21st Century had been a slow retreat into irrelevance. He was a history professor shuffled towards a graceless retirement, his magnum opus on the macroeconomics of the German city states dismissed as niche and overwrought by younger, sleeker academics, barely gathering double-digit citations or any sort of recognition. His wife had left him years ago, taking the dogs, and with them, his last friends that hadn’t died or moved away. No one would miss him but his cats… a sharp, sudden pang of loss, more acute than any he’d felt for his own vanished life, seized him. He had to trust Mrs. Hawking from downstairs, a woman of formidable kindness and a volunteer at the local shelter, to notice his absence. She would find them a home. She had to. He walled off the thought, a familiar act of mental triage perfected over a lifetime of professional and personal disappointments. Now was the time for action.
The body he now commanded - Theodorus’s, he reminded himself, the name a bitter irony - was younger, slimmer, the muscles coiled in a way his own academic’s frame had never known. He swung his legs off the cot, the rough wool of the tunic scratching against the unfamiliar skin. His faded brown trousers were held up by a simple leather belt. He dressed with grim deliberation, each movement uncomfortable and new, a confirmation of his new reality.
In the corner, a ceramic basin held stale, cold water. He plunged his face into it, the shock a brutal baptism. It cut through the lingering fog of sleeplessness, leaving only a crystalline, cold focus. Lord Konstantinos was dead. His sons, whose bitter rivalry had been held in check until now, would act. And Theodorus was caught right in the crossfire. To survive the day, let alone the year, he needed to know the terrain of this new battlefield. And for that, he needed a guide.
He moved through the aging wooden hall, his boots echoing in the tense silence. He saw a maid sweeping near the main entrance, her movements slow and perfunctory, merely pushing dust from one stone to the next. She kept her head down, trying to make herself small as he approached. He stopped.
"You work as if the day is already over," he said. His voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the air.
The girl started, looking up at him with wide, fearful eyes. "My lord?"
"What day is it today?”
“T-the t-twenty-second, my lord.”
“Of what month and year?” Theodorus’s tone was laced with impatience.
“A-april, o-of 1459, my Lord.”
“It is a holy day that I am unaware of?" he asked, his tone laced with a dangerous calm.
The maid’s hands tightened on the broom handle. "N-no, my lord."
"No?" Theodoro took a step closer. "Then why do you work with such idleness? My father lies dead and you treat your duties as if they are a mild inconvenience."
Utterly terrified, she bowed low. "Forgive me, Young Master! I... I will clean it again. I swear it."
"See that you do," he said, turning his back on her before she had even risen. He walked on, his purpose clear, leaving her to her frantic, renewed sweeping.
The interaction had been cruel, and though Nikos did not cherish it, he now had a vital piece of information.
1459.
The date settled in his mind, cold and hard. He was not sure of the exact date of the Ottoman invasion of Crimea, but Nikos knew it would be years before the great cataclysm he knew was coming for this land. It was a small relief amidst the terrible situation he found himself in.
He found Demetrios’s room and knocked softly, a light rap of knuckle on old wood. A moment passed, then the sound of slow, pained shuffling. The door creaked open to reveal a man hollowed out by grief. Demetrios’s eyes, red-rimmed and swollen, widened slightly in surprise. The white peppered hair on his head seemed to have lost its moorings overnight. He looked as if he hadn’t expected Theodorus to ever appear at his door, despite Nikos’s promise the night before.
This was a data point, one of several that Nikos had managed to glean from Demetrios’s half-coherent sobs the day before. He’d spent the night connecting them to form the baseline for the real Theodorus: a gentle, soft boy, bullied by his peers and lost in the brutal calculus of a 15th-century noble house. To survive, Nikos couldn’t be Theodorus. He had to reframe and evolve the boy’s personality in a way that aroused no suspicion. And that work began now.
He let his shoulders slump, mimicking the posture of a lost teenager. “Demetrios,” he began, his voice a carefully pitched mumble. “I’m sorry. I know it’s early. I just… I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about…everything.” He looked down, letting the silence stretch, a lure cast into the depths of the old man’s pity. He cracked his voice just so. “I’m sorry, this was a mistake. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
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It was a hook the old servant was biologically incapable of refusing. “ No, no, Young Master. It is no bother.” Demetrios’s hand, thin and trembling, landed on his sleeve. “Come. Talk. This old heart would welcome the company. It is a hard morning for us all.” A weak watery smile did little to hide the tremor in his own voice.
“Thank you,” Nikos said, flashing an awkward, grateful look. “Could we…perhaps find some breakfast?”
“Of course, Young Master.” Demetrios bowed slightly.
“Please, lead the way.”
As they moved through the heart of the estate, Nikos trailed a half-step behind, using the old servant as a guide and shield. He feigned a downcast gaze, but his eyes were alive, scanning, analyzing, absorbing. The corridors were of old seasoned timber, faint cracks crisscrossing the wood. Nikos spotted a small courtyard with various straw dummies and wooden weapon racks, and, through an open window, a small garden with a mix of native trees interspersed by a smattering of berry bushes.
Servants flattened themselves against the walls as they passed, their eyes flicking towards him with a mixture of pity and something else - a nervous apprehension. They weren’t just mourning a lord; they were anticipating the reign of his successors, and the brutal succession dispute that might ensue. They knew a storm was brewing, but had no idea when it would hit, who it would strike, or what it would look like.
The kitchens were a hive of subdued activity. The air here, thick with the smell of baking bread and woodsmoke, was similarly charged with unspoken anxieties. Maids and cooks moved with a grim purpose, their whispers ceasing the moment Nikos entered. He was an anomaly, a ghost at the feast of his family’s implosion.
He took a plate of bread, olives, and cheese, ignoring the offered meats. He insisted they eat outside, in the small, walled garden, citing the need for fresh air and privacy. He’d rather not risk stray ears catching wind of their conversation.
They sat on a cold stone bench, the morning air crisp against his skin. Demetrios waited, his posture one of weary patience.
“What troubles you so, Young Master?” the old man finally asked. “You seem a world away.”
Nikos set down his plate, untouched. This was the moment. “I was thinking about last night,” he said, his voice low. He first needed to set the stage. “My brothers…they were right, Demetrios. I should have been there. Fighting. Maybe if I had…” he let the sentence hang, then clenched his fist, a tremor of manufactured anguish running down his arm.
“Young master!” Demetrios looked aghast. “Never think such a thing!”
“Why not?” Nikos snapped, injecting a note of self-loathing into his voice. “They fought beside our father. They bled with him in the mud while I… I was safe. Un-bloodied. Clean.”
“The Lord, may God rest his soul,” Demetrios crossed himself, “he only wanted to protect you. Guarding the manor was an important task.” The protest was rote, a line learned and repeated. Nikos watched him intently, a hawk tracking its prey. He saw the flicker in the old man’s eyes, the way his gaze darted to the side before returning. Demetrios was lying, building a castle of sand, trying to protect young Theodorus. It was time to break apart its foundations.
“Say it,” Nikos commanded, his voice suddenly stripped of its boyish tremor.
“Pardon, Young Master?”
“The truth, Demetrios. No more pretty lies. Tell me the real reason he left me behind. I need to hear it.”
The old man flinched as if struck. His hands, resting on his knees, clenched into knotted fists of bone and sinew. For a moment, a silent war was waged on his face: the sworn loyalty to a dead master’s command fought a desperate battle against the pity he felt for the son who now demanded a truth sharp enough to break him.
His gaze fled from Nikos’s unyielding stare, seeking refuge in the great hazelnut tree that dominated the garden. He and the late Lord had planted it together as a sapling when they’d arrived from the capital, disgraced and exiled to this no man’s land. Two younger men tentatively laying down roots for a future that had, overnight, turned to ash. The branches swayed in the morning breeze, a living monument to a dead promise.
“My Lord…” The words were gravel in his throat. “He… he only sought to protect you.” His whisper was for the tree, for the memory, not for the boy beside him. “You have a scholar’s heart, Young Master. Not a killer’s. You were never… gifted in the martial ways.”
His gaze lingered on the strong, swaying branches, as if drawing a final, bitter strength from the memory of the man who planted it. The fight went out of him, replaced by a terrible resolve. He turned from the tree, and the pity in his eyes had hardened into the grim finality of a physician delivering a fatal diagnosis.
“To bring you to the fight,” he said, his voice now steady and devoid of warmth, “would have been a liability.”
The old man braced himself for the expected storm of tears or a shattered cry of denial. He received neither.
Nikos let the confession hang in the air, a silence charged with a potent, transformative poison.
This is it
, a cold, clinical part of his mind observed.
If I play my cards right
I can reframe the weak Theodorus and stop playing pretend.
He rose from the bench in a single fluid motion, a predator sensing its moment. The movement forced Demetrios to look up, his posture that of a petitioner.
“No more.”
The words were quiet, but they landed with the finality of a gavel striking stone. Demetrios’s eyes widened at the unfamiliar steel in the boy’s voice.
“I was a boy,” Nikos continued, his voice steady and clear, a finely calibrated performance of dawning maturity. “A boy hiding behind my father’s strength. That ended yesterday with his death.” He paused, turning his gaze to the hazelnut tree. “Thank you, Demetrios. You have given me a truth I needed to hear.”
He walked to the tree, intending to touch its trunk as a final, dramatic flourish for his audience of one. But as his palm flattened against the rough, living bark, the performance ended. A jolt, raw and electric, shot up his arm. It was not his own grief that struck him, but another’s - Theodorus’s.
He felt the phantom weight of a book in his lap, the summer sun filtering through these very leaves as he read for the hundredth time a small, two-page poem, a treasure finagled from a passing merchant. He felt the frantic scramble of a boy climbing higher, the rough bark scraping his knees, desperate to escape the taunts of his brothers below. And then, the quiet safety of his father’s presence at the base of the trunk, looking up not with disappointment, but with a gentle smile, asking to hear the childish, amateurish verse that Theodoro had believed was the greatest work this side of the Black Sea. He’d cherished this tree, just as he’d cherished his father.
A tsunami of a dead boy’s agony crashed over the walls of his carefully constructed persona: the helpless rage at being left behind, the bottomless sorrow of a son for his father, and beneath it all, a white-hot, desperate need to have been worthy. Tears, hot and unbidden, streamed down Nikos’s face, a shocking, genuine expression of an emotion he had been only borrowing.
Demetrios watched, his breath caught in his chest. He could not comprehend the psychic collision he was witnessing - the merging of a gentle, medieval boy’s soul with that of a jaded 21st-century historian - but he knew he was seeing a boy die and a man being forged in the fire of his grief.
“I will change.” Nikos, no, Theodorus - for these words were not his, but a final, blazing echo of the body’s original owner - turned from the tree to face the old servant. Tears still marked his cheeks, but a fire now blazed in his eyes. “I will honor his sacrifice by becoming the son he needed me to be.”
The garden was still, the vow hanging in the air between them. Nikos finally understood what had guided him here, snatching him from the afterlife through sheer force of will. The path forward was no longer a matter of choice; it was a charge he was bound to keep. This was not his story anymore, not truly. It belonged to a boy who loved his father so much that he would give up his own soul to fulfill a promise he could not keep.
Nikos Karagiannis, the failed historian, the man with nothing left to lose, was nothing more than the instrument of that will. The carrier of this flickering, tiny torch, fighting against a colossal darkness. He would see the mission through.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, the last of Nikos was gone from his gaze, burned away by a new, terrible purpose. He was Theodorus Sideris, and his battle against History had just begun.