The Eternal Coin, Part 5: – The Partisan (WWII Romania)

Baseline theme to the story

It appears ordinary. But in its metal pulse lies a power that defies time. Those who touch it vanish from their world, thrown into lives they never lived, eras they never knew, and fates they cannot escape.

Through blood and fire, love and betrayal, the coin watches, judges, and moves on—unceasing, eternal, unstoppable.

Who will hold it next… and what will they become?

Romania, 1944. The air was thick with the acrid stench of gunpowder, and the streets were littered with the by-products of war. Young men and women joined partisan units, risking everything to resist the encroaching chaos. Among them was Andrei, a wiry, determined fighter who had learned early that survival required cunning, courage, and sometimes, ruthless decisiveness.

He had scavenged a captured German supply crate that morning, rifle in hand, and amidst the rations, bullets, and scraps of enemy papers, he noticed something unusual: a small coin, glinting faintly under the grey light of the forest edge. It felt strangely heavy in his palm. He put it into his pocket without thinking, unaware that it had already claimed a life before his.

That night, after tending to the wounds of his comrades, Andrei drifted into sleep under the canopy of pine trees. When he awoke, he was no longer in Romania, no longer in 1944. The world around him had shifted: he stood in a frozen, foreign landscape, somewhere in occupied Poland, amidst the quiet hush of a resistance cell plotting against the Nazis.

He was no longer himself. He was another partisan, another body, another life in a war not his own—but the courage, the instincts, the urgency were all unmistakably his. Andrei threw himself into the struggle with reckless determination, rescuing Jewish children from deportation trains, sabotaging enemy supplies, and running through snow-laden forests where death could strike at any moment.

The battles were fierce, the nights long, and the losses unbearable. Yet he persisted, driven on by a sense of purpose - perhaps the coin’s influence, perhaps fate itself. In an ambush along a frozen river, Andrei’s luck finally ran out. Bullets tore through the trees and the ground, and he fell among the fallen, blood mixing with the snow.

The coin tumbled from his coat and lay among the bodies, unnoticed except by a fellow fighter who retrieved it. He held it in his hand, its surface cold, unyielding, strangely alive. To him, it was just another trinket, a small treasure in a world otherwise consumed by suffering. Yet it carried the weight of centuries, the echoes of lives it had touched, and the unending journey ahead.

And so the coin moved on, as it always did, ready for the next hand to hold it, and the next life to be rewritten across the tapestry of time.