The carriage rolled through the iron gates of the Bavarian Herzog's primary estate just as the late afternoon sun began to bleed into twilight. Faust peered through the window, his mind instantly dissecting the scenery.
The architecture of the ducal mansion was a dizzying contradiction. It possessed the same sharp, imposing Gothic bones as Isbert's Munich estate, yet it was layered with sweeping, ostentatious Baroque facades that felt completely alien—yet intimately familiar. It was as distant and grand as Faust's own stolen childhood home in Saxe-Weimar. Remarkably, the estate looked exactly as it had eighty years ago when Faust first walked these grounds, entirely untouched by the rapid tides of the modern century. Surrounding the stone structures, the ancient oak trees stood clad in brilliant, fiery canopies of yellow and orange, shedding a carpet of dying leaves onto the damp earth.
The carriage had barely ground to a halt before Isfrid burst through the door. The young swordsman waved his hand enthusiastically, his youthful composure completely vanishing as he shouted toward the grand stone steps:
"Father!"
The reigning Herzog of Bavaria descended the stairs, flanked by a rigid retinue of stone-faced servants. He was a man of stern, unyielding posture, his dark velvet coat trimmed with silver. He stepped forward, offering a stiff, respectful inclination of his head toward Isbert.
"Welcome, Father," he said, his voice flat and formal.
Then, the Herzog's gaze shifted. His eyes narrowed into sharp, icy slits as they landed squarely on Faust's dark skin, lingering on the stark white bandage covering the left side of his face.
Faust didn't need his 360-degree vision to read the room. He recognized that look instantly. It was the exact same systemic, aristocratic racism that had poisoned his interactions with Ludwich a lifetime ago. It was evidently a trait inherited directly through the ducal bloodline. Fortunately, the high nobility of the Holy Roman Empire prided itself on public etiquette above all else; the bigotry remained a silent, simmering undercurrent, masked by a veneer of polite indifference.
Isbert stepped into the space between them smoothly, his voice carrying a subtle, warning chill. "This is my exceptionally old friend and a master of the healing arts, Doctor Faust. He will be inspecting Rita."
"Faust..?"
The Herzog offered a curt, unsmiling nod.
"A sumptuous dinner has been prepared in the grand hall to celebrate your arrival. Please, let us dine."
Faust quietly stepped back, turning to Isbert with a calm, expressionless face.
"Go, enjoy the feast, old friend. I have no appetite for heavy tables tonight. I will go straight to Rita's chambers and begin my evaluation."
Faust was led up a winding, drafty staircase and into the maternal wing of the mansion. The Duchess's bedchamber was cavernous, heavily curtained, and thick with the suffocating scent of vinegar, boiled herbs, and impending death.
Two anxious, exhausted maids stood by the massive four-poster bed, wringing their hands.
Faust approached the bedside, his gravelly voice dropping into a quiet, professional register as he looked down at the pale, hollow shell of his goddaughter.
"I'm the doctor that came with Patriarch of Frost. Tell me everything," he commanded the servants. "Start from the very first symptom."
"It... it began slowly, Doctor," the elder maid whispered, her voice trembling. "Nearly ten years ago. It was just a slight numbness in her fingers, a momentary stumbling in her stride. The local physicians dismissed it as simple melancholia or a passing vapors. But the sickness was a silent thief. It took deep, unbreakable root throughout her entire body."
The younger maid wiped a tear from her cheek.
"A year ago, her legs gave up completely. She could no longer stand. We thought... we thought we had a chance if Patriarch Frost could come and perform the family's secret techniques. But he was entirely unreachable."
"He was away on the grand mobilization," Faust muttered, his mind connecting the pieces.
"Yes, sir," the maid nodded. "Like every other Patriarch of the Adeptus Families of Europe, he was deployed. And when the mission finally concluded, the Patriarch returned to Munich in a wretched state himself. He was locked away, desperately recovering from his own wounds. The very morning we received word that Lord Isbert had finally awakened from his comatose rest, young Master Isfrid was dispatched to fetch him. But by that time... it was too late. Duchess Rita collapsed into a deep, unresponsive unconsciousness three days ago."
Faust rubbed his chin, his mind working with mechanical, ruthless precision as he peeled back the heavy linen sheets to inspect Rita's limbs.
He checked the rigid, unresponsive reflexes of her knees, the distinctive purplish mottling beneath her pale skin, and the terrifyingly faint, erratic rhythm of her pulse. His medical training and his century of hidden anatomical research coalesced into a single, devastating diagnosis.
It was Tabes Dorsalis Spinalis—the creeping, incurable wasting of the spinal marrow. It was a notoriously brutal affliction, virtually unknown to common town doctors, famous for its decades-long silent incubation period before violently paralyzing the victim and subjecting them to a rapid, agonizing death within a single year of its discovery.
Suddenly, a violent, malicious surge slammed against the back of Faust's mind, the foreign voice cackling with absolute glee.
"Let her wither! Smash her spine and feed the marrow to the rats! Why save the spawn of Ludwich?"
Faust ground his teeth so hard his jaw ached, violently slamming his psychological barriers shut and forcing the demonic voice back into the pitch-black silence of his mentality.
He exhaled a long, steady breath, clearing his mind.
"There is no mortal cure for this affliction at this stage," Faust pronounced quietly to the terrified servants. "The marrow has already begun to liquefy. I cannot reverse the damage; I can only weaponize my craft to aggressively slow the spreading sickness down."
He snapped open his heavy traveler's suitcase. Instead of primitive bone-saws or bloodletting bowls, he pulled out a sophisticated, gleaming set of silver intravenous injection pumps—a marvel of his own forbidden, alchemical-mechanical design.
He grabbed a quill, rapidly scratching a frantic, precise list of chemical reagents and rare alchemical roots onto a scrap of parchment. He thrust it into the elder maid's hands.
"Bring me these ingredients from the estate's apothecary vaults immediately. Boil them to a translucent fluid. No, just bring them here, I'll do it myself."
"But, Sir, what if..."
"By dawn. We must flush her veins before her lungs paralyze."
The servants scurried away in a panic, leaving Faust alone with the dying Duchess. He looked down at her pale face, his visible eye dark with an ancient, heavy sorrow.
"I can buy you a few days, Rita," Faust whispered into the freezing quiet of the room. "But in all my decades of dealing with this wretched plague, only one out of a hundred has ever survived the needle. Your only true salvation rests on the hidden, ancestral techniques of your father's bloodline... and I pray to God the old man has enough strength left to draw his steel."