A girl's day in Kingsdale as the Continuation War rages.

  Kingsdale South, Kingsdale, Kingdom of Kannd

  5 Mithalgull 1915, 3 MM (CUT+0)

  I tried to ignore the stab of frustration fring in my chest as my fingers hit the wrong key – again. For the third time.

  I pressed my palms on the cool surface. I took a deep breath, curled my fingers into fists, and then exhaled sharply. I slumped into the velvet seat, then straightened, repositioning my hands over the keys.

  But it was useless. My fingers betrayed me once more, and I winced at the sour note.

  There was only one reason as to why I couldn't focus: that accursed dirigible.

  It circled the city like a vulture. Its looming shadow would pass over the window every hour or so, casting a brief darkness over the parlour, and my attention would inevitably snap towards it. And there was its sound. It wasn't loud, but that just made it even worse; if one were to listen carefully enough, it became this constant, low humming insect that seemed to burrow and fester under your skin.

  This was ridiculous. I had faced much worse distractions before. Noise, stress, even more pressing matters than this, but this – this hum – it was maddening. I had never felt such a profound incapacity to ignore something in my life.

  For a moment, I considered just leaving. But that thought sted only a moment. Mother would never let me hear the end of it.

  "Patience, my daughter," a voice admonishes from the open parlour door behind the piano. Speak of the anti-kyrie.

  Mother stood in the doorway, gliding in as if she hadn't just spent the better part of the afternoon critiquing my every attempt at the ivories.

  She was impeccably dressed, of course, her silk gown rustling lightly as she moved, and there was an air about her, always, that suggested a person who had never been burdened by mundane matters.

  Her heels tapped lightly on the hardwood floor as she approached, and I could see the glint of her diamond earrings catching the soft light from the window.

  "Mother, please," I mumbled. "I apologise, I just cannot focus today. The dirigible has been flying overhead for hours. It is driving me mad."

  Her expression didn’t change. She let out a soft, dismissive ugh, the sound light and airy. "Ah, the airships. They have been a nuisance to us all, I suppose." She gnced towards the window. "But it’s hardly something to disturb your practice over. You must keep your mind sharp, my daughter."

  "I apologise, Mother," I repeat stiffly. I forced myself to straighten, but my fingers still felt like jelly over the piano keys.

  An uncomfortable silence followed.

  "Is Father co—"

  "I must attend the charity function at the Women's Guild this evening," Mother interjected smoothly. Her voice was as cool as ever. "I expect you to finish your practice before you do anything else. No more excuses."

  I felt the frustration bubble up again, both at her interruption and her words, but I quelled it. There was no sense in arguing. "Yes, Mother."

  She turned, her heels clicking sharply on the floor, and was gone as quickly as she had appeared.

  I sat there, staring at the empty doorway for a moment longer than necessary, and looked back down at my hands on the piano.

  I pressed down once more and willed myself to continue.

  Wrong note.

  Retry. I forced my hands to move.

  Another wrong note.

  I sighed.

  Retry. And it went on for a few more cycles.

  Then the parlour dimmed as a shadow on the window swallowed the light. The dirigible had returned.

  I clenched my jaw, willing myself not to look. It was nothing. Just another pass.

  This war was getting on my nerves, and it still had not really affected me in any tangible sense. Some days I could see bck smoke rising from the direction of the northern suburbs of the city, but it always felt so far away.

  The city was still standing, wasn’t it? The Twadamians were being halted at Martonshire, were they not?

  There were the deaths, the rationing, father's absence for most of the daylight, Alistair in the Commons, and Edmund off at the trenches in Vosennac with the Southern Expeditionary Army. But all of those were so, so distant.

  Then, it washed over me like dragonfire.

  I hadn't heard from Edmund in three weeks.

  I swallowed something hard in my throat. Three weeks. How had I not noticed? Edmund had always written every week. Even when he was deep in the trenches, even when the skies had cried for days and the mud stained the paper like blood. He should not be silent for this long.

  My fingers fluttered over the keys again, but I couldn’t bring myself to try pying.

  It was uncharacteristic for Edmund to go dark. And if he was gone—no, I couldn’t let myself think that. It was irrational, terrifying. It was an unreasoned fear that had no pce in a rational mind.

  He was fine.

  The War Ministry would have sent word if something had happened. They would have notified Father, or even Mother, though I wasn't sure she would have told me anything.

  I stood up from the piano, ignoring the soft creak of the seat beneath me, and walked to the window. The garden on the lower level stretched out before me, bathed in the warm light of the te afternoon sun. The flowers were in full bloom, and the greens were vibrant and lush. If it had been a few years back, before the war had taken root, I might have found peace looking at the view. But now, I felt none.

  I thought of the st letter my brother sent. I had read it over and over again, folded and unfolded it until the edges began to fray and holes formed in the delicate paper.

  "Keep pying, Cordy. Make sure Kingsdale still has music," it had signed off with.

  I shook away the thoughts as I stared at the clear sky. The dirigible was visible in the distance. Its grey bulbous shape moved zily above the city, three words stamped in bold across its hull: Royal Air Force. The stripes of white, yellow, and bck dashed on its fins.

  A maid called my name from the hallway, pulling me from my thoughts.

  "Ma’am, a telegram from your father's office."

  I could see the edges of the telegram from where I stood, a sharp crease in the paper that ironically mirrored the knot I could feel squeezed at my heart. I crossed the room and took the telegram from her hands.

  I nodded to her. "Thank you, Olivia."

  She performed a small curtsy and left me alone once again.

  I unfolded the telegram with a shaky hand. The faint, bitter scent of freshly printed ink lingered on my nose as I read the contents quickly.

  My Daughter,

  Due to unforeseen developments at the Ministry, I will not be able to return home tonight. Stay safe.

  Your father,

  Sir Percival Caithrill

  I sighed. He wouldn’t be home tonight. Of course, he wouldn’t. I barely even see him at all these days. Always home right after midnight and gone by the crack of dawn. Permanent Secretary of the Magical Affairs Ministry was a job that demanded his constant attention, especially when Kannd was at war again.

  I folded the telegram with care and pced it on the small side table by the window. There was no sense in dwelling on things I couldn’t control. My fingers itched to return to the piano, but there was no possible way I could concentrate on the music now.

  Mother wasn't here; she wouldn't know I had abandoned my practice. I forced my legs to move towards the parlour door. The house was empty save for the servants, and they kept to their own affairs unless called upon. If I couldn’t focus on the piano, I would at least try to lose myself in a book.

  I walked briskly through the hallway, and the library door appeared as I passed the staircase. Twisting open the wooden doorknob, I entered the dark room and flicked the switch, bathing the space in a soft, warm glow. A dozen rows of shelves greeted me, and I made my way to the armchair by one of the closed windows.

  It was my favourite armchair, plush, with a crimson Conabois velvet cushion that embraced you the moment you sat down. I had sat there to read for as long as I could remember.

  Pulling open the drapes, I allowed the st remnants of the afternoon sun to spill into the room, observing as dust motes danced zily in the light.

  I let out a slow breath and turned to the nearest bookshelf, the one filled with the books I wanted to read again, wished to read, or my father or mother believed I ought to read. My fingers traced along the spines of the neatly arranged volumes: Haldren, Sandow, Voseni histories, Guthrie. What should I choose? I hesitated briefly before settling on a white-and-blue-spined book on the lowest shelf titled the Foundations of Ethical Governance in Multi-Species Societies by Andossus Haritzaga.

  I had attempted to read it in the past, but found Haritzaga's positive views on Gatafolks a bit sickening. For Kyrie sake, the Creator modelled them after cats, and yet he insisted on them as our equals? That was absurd. How could they ever be entrusted with the same responsibilities as Andrans?

  Yet I settled into the armchair and opened the book anyway. Alistair had gifted it to me on my seventeenth birthday st month. "You should, at least, consider the perspectives of your opponents," he had told me with that infuriatingly patient tone of his. "Understanding their arguments and knowing how to counter them is just as important as knowing your own.”

  It had been an informal tradition between my brother's and I to gift the most insulting birthday present one could think of. Alistair, of course, always knew how to pick at my nerves. Last year, it had been an Angese poetry collection. I might have even liked it if I had known how to speak the nguage at all, but sadly I did not.

  "Consider it a favour to your future self," he had quipped when I unwrapped.

  Edmund, on the other hand, had sent a pocketknife with a note that read: "For when you tire of Alistair’s lectures."

  I sighed and flipped through the pages, skipping the preface and pausing at a chapter titled: Part I: The Nature of Sapience and Cognitive Capacity. The temptation to toss the book across the room was strong, but nonetheless I kept skimming the book. Section one, Defining Sapience; two, Cognitive Thresholds; three, Consciousness and Agency in Non-Andran Species; four, The Role of Intelligence in Moral Consideration; five, The Ethics of Informed Consent. And on and on the garbage went, until the words blurred together like meaningless doodles.

  I wonder what Haritzaga was feeling now. Weren't the Gatafolks in Penia butchering his own kind by the hundreds, in fear of another Avisian uprising?

  I gnced towards the window again, afternoon had yielded to dusk, and dark clouds moved cautiously across the sky, thick with the promise of rain.

  Then, a wail. I froze, and my heart leapt.

  It was the air raid siren.

  I smmed the book shut and stood up quickly.

  "If you are ever to hear those sirens again, run to the celr and stay there until the all-clear horn is sounded," my father's voice echoed sternly.

  The book fell from my hands and nded with a soft thud on the armchair, and I moved towards the hallway.

  The roar of engines repced the faint airship hum. Loud, importunate. The sky itself was being torn apart.

  There was a rumble as I reached the library door, and the entire house shuddered. The chandelier at the staircase swayed as if a powerful gust of wind had burst through the house.

  The sound of boots thudded on the lower floor, voices overpping and panicked.

  The wards should hold. I tried to reassure myself. Sure, they weren't as powerful as the ones over the Ministries or the Pace, but Father had recharged them just this summer after the bombardment of North Waterden. The celr was just a precaution. Just in case the wards fail.

  But as I arrived at the staircase, another boom reverberated through the house. My heart skipped a beat. The floorboard creaked beneath my feet, and I instinctively gripped the banister.

  On shaky legs, I felt my way down the staircase.

  "Miss!" a servant called. "The celr, quickly!"

  I barely registered his words, my body was moving on its own, propelled by instinct and the threat outside.

  Suddenly, a sharp hiss filled the air, followed by a sickeningly loud bang, like the sound of something tearing open or being shattered. The wards had colpsed.

  The floor beneath me buckled as the house trembled with the impact of whatever had just hit. The sharp, nauseating sound of cracking wood echoed through the hall.

  "Miss!" The servant was frantic now. He grabbed my arm with a surprising amount of strength as I reached the bottom of the stairs and pulled me towards the hallway that led to the celr.

  I allowed him to guide me down the corridor. I heard something shatter behind me, either a window or one of those decorative vases Mother had got from Akasora.

  We entered the drawing room where the butler, Mr. Williams stood by the door, his face pinched in worry.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but he never did, as the wall exploded.

  I don't remember screaming, but I’m sure I did. The force of the explosion sent me sprawling across the floor.

  The wind was knocked from my lungs, and I could hear ringing in my ears.

  I vaguely realised the ceiling was colpsing, chunks of pster and wood crashed down around me.

  There was so much smoke. My eyes stung.

  I couldn't see anyone else.

  I tried to move my legs, but all I felt was pain. They were pinned.

  Whether it was by furniture or the falling parts of the house, I couldn’t tell, but I couldn’t feel anything beneath my waist.

  I inhaled painfully, but got a lungful of dust for my trouble. The coughs racked my chest, tearing at my insides.

  My throat felt raw; the pungent taste of soot and dust coated my tongue.

  This should not be how I die, not like this: trapped under the ruins of my own home.

  I gasped again, but the air seemed thicker, heavier with each breath I took. My limbs were unresponsive, as if they had turned into the same stone that made up the broken walls.

  I couldn’t even feel the sensation of my hands any more.

  I should have moved faster.

  I should not have frozen.

  I could hear the roar of the engines again as the ringing died away.

  Another explosion.

  What would Father think?

  Was Edmund dead?

  The thought wasn't as unappealing now. At least I would have someone familiar with me in the afterlife, if there were such a thing.

  "Miss!"

  Did someone shout that?

  Or have I gone delirious in my final moments?

  No, not like this.

  No, no, no, no.

  "Cordelia!"

  The name felt distant.

  It was my name.

  Another rumble.

  I tried to focus. But it was like sand.

  “Cordelia!”

  Is this how…

  Something shrieked in the distance.

  Another explosion.

  Is Alistair still in the Commons?

  He would be safe there.

  Mother?

  "Cordy!"

  No.

  This will not be how I go.

  What a wretched way to die.