Atrocity.

  The Aerostatics hung in the air above Kotimaa like a great guillotine blade above the head of the Axial Powers. The Imperium had brought the seven to bear as the spearhead, all seven monstrosities above the capital city for this finale to a war fought over six bloody years.

  All seven dropped the message, from the hulls of battleships Wrath, Lust, and Envy; the cargo bays of retrofitted logistics barges Sloth and Gluttony, the empty troop stores of assault carrier Greed, and even the skeletal body of the partially-completed Pride came down the strips of paper barely the size of one’s palm. Written in the language of the Axials, Ensolian, and four other tongues laid the simple request, threat, and finale.

  MAKE PEACE.

  As the city hung in silence—soldiers, civilians, presidents, and children alike looked to the sky, helpless to do anything but observe. They saw the black shapes, like alien sailing ships, thundering overhead. Thousands of garrison troops scrambling among the brilliant skyscrapers and ancient church-fortresses, struggling to angle their heavy artillery nearly vertical—yet still incapable of reaching these flying monstrosities. And how as they did so, more and more came from the west.

  From huge bombardment cruisers, their complements of escort destroyers, to even the nimble reconnaissance frigates. A hundred and four had crossed the Stygian Sea, easily cutting through the miles upon miles of defense lines of the Axial Powers and sat there, twenty thousand feet above the city at the heart of a superpower.

  The War Council held the vote up to the last possible moment. How the nine that sat within the Empress’ Court on that rainy summer day pleaded, begged, screamed at each other as they went through the cold calculus of war and weighed it against the decency of their human hearts again, and again, and again, and again until the final aerostatic arrived above the city.

  And then they voted.

  They voted, five to four.

  They almost stopped it.

  It was sworn by all that for a hundred years, nobody outside the chamber could ever know who voted for what decision; that the choice of each handpicked general, parliamentary assembly member, merchant or even the Empress herself would remain buried under threat of a blade of error. But it didn’t matter, for they had voted and the orders for those one hundred and four ships were clear cut to the millimeter.

  And over the course of a single night, Kotimaa, the City of Glass, was erased with incendiary bombs.

  Perhaps this was justice. Perhaps the spirits of that dead city of ash and ruin had cursed Sophia Elise the Eighth to this moment of catastrophe. Or maybe even an ancestral curse was placed upon her by some ancient evil predecessor, to forever force her deft hands to fail in this specific activity.

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  But any explanation she could come up with, any reasoning that came to her lips could not absolve her of this.

  How as both the heir to the entire Tianci Dominion and his Royal Guardswoman just stand in silence within the kitchen space, she could see how they were attempting to even comprehend the level of disaster that had transpired in their short absence.

  The cast iron of the oven, with still smoldering ashes, told as much a tale as the black pieces of matter that were haphazardly thrown onto a ceramic plate. As the acrid scent of smoke wafts forth from this kitchen and out through the opened windows, as the final, still burning red embers of what was supposedly onions, salted pork, and small individual grains of… corn(?) begin to burn out does someone finally speak up.

  The Impericutta Legionary of all people, a simple order given towards its charge. “Do not attempt to eat that.”

  It didn’t have to say it out loud… Sophia’s internal monologue cries.

  The Guardswoman at least puts some humor into her assessment of the damage. Carefully strolling over with her hands behind her back, leaning onto the counter towards the ash and still smouldering embers. “Yeah, I’d say that’s toxic. Probably for the best, none of us guards give it a try…”

  They all slowly turn towards the perpetrator, at the Imperial Heir that stands in the middle of the kitchen smelling of rancid smoke and burnt oil.

  Stand like you mean it girl. The thought processes all snap at once. Straighten your back, lower your expression. You are an imperial heir, look like it.

  And they all look at the young woman who gives a cold glare onto each and every one of those beneath her. A responsibility both accepted and denied in the same breath, a contradiction of national absurdity but completely internalized within the young noble.

  Yes of course it was her fault, but how could you assume someone of such standing, of such import like this could make a mistake of this sort?

  That’s right.

  Because Sophia Elise the Eighth could never in her life fail in such a simple task.

  How when she poured accelerant onto smoldering charcoal (she had tried with almost twelve matches to ignite a flame at that point), the resultant fireball nearly seared her eyebrows off. How when the dried kernels of corn refused to cook she simply just added more water to the pot—steam was always a good sign that something was cooking. How when she brought the cut salted pork to the pan it crackled and popped with a sound far too aggressive, and like some animal it jumped and spit in the pot and to silence such insolence she had poured a small layer of oil to quell that rebellion. And in the final shallow pot, when the haphazardly chopped onions she had tossed in began to turn dark, she just brushed it off as a natural sort of caramelization.

  Because Sophia Elise the Eighth could never fail in such a simple task.

  Even when the juices from the rendering pork began crackle and snap at the oil and the steam suddenly ignited from the flaming charcoal below; and in the commotion how the water steaming the still very dry kernels of corn boiled off; and how the chopped onions ran out of moisture and began to char…

  When the smoke began to fill the huge living room and the Impericutta legionary was forced to intervene with a bucket of water onto the stove, there was still no doubt.

  That despite this overwhelming evidence against her:

  Because Sophia Elise the Eighth could never fail in such a simple task.

  A suffocating level of pride and arrogance (and smoke too) washes over her court in silence, before Zai himself utterly annihilates his wife with just a single request:

  “I will cook from now on.”