Story of an Hour
by Mia Sundby
Commander Cassandra Winters was a tall, athletic, imposing figure with wild hair
combed into strict submission, the bushy ponytail framing her swarthy skin. A
striking figure with a lacking personality, one that could be easily filled.
The eighth hour of the day had begun as it usually did for the commander: Winters
left her house, tricorn hat secured firmly on her head, its white-with-gold trimmings
theme reflected in her jacket and trousers, over-the-knee boots strutting determinedly
down the cobbled streets into the reluctantly-waking day.
Winters had made it no further in her routine before her mouth and nose were
smothered and chemicals overpowered her. The last thing she thought, as she
struggled against the iron grip of her assailant, was that twenty years of service in the
name of the Empire had left her with nothing but an impeccable uniform.
By twenty-past the eighth hour, Winters was dead, the inside of her arm slit with a
poison dagger. Five minutes after Winters' body lay on a cold basement floor, empty
of life, foam coating her unsmiling lips, the commander's attacker was calmly
summoning a demon of chaos.
The commander's attacker had an air of entitlement, as though she knew how to get
what she wanted, and was used to finding a means. But under that simmered a sort of
quiet rage --the kind of rage that burns down empires.
And as the demon in the summoning circle hissed and howled into being, and Karla
Grant rose to meet it, it would have been clear to anyone there, in the set of her square
jaw and the way she held herself, that burning empires was on the agenda.
Half-way through the eighth hour of Monday morning, the black blood of demon had
been mixed with the red of human, and a deal had been struck.
Ten minutes later, the body of Cassandra Winters made its way to the Imperial
Army's headquarters. Winters had always been an austere woman, but now, as the
commander made her way down the cobbled streets, leaping smoothly onto a tram,
something inhuman glinted in her dark eyes, and an amused smile twitched at the
corner of the dead woman's mouth.
Anar'chi, demon of chaos and destruction, stretched out her new limbs, adjusting the
tricorn hat on her head of curls, and checked her gleaming pocket watch.
As the hands ticked their way to the ninth hour of the day, the demon wearing the
commander's body leapt fluently off of the tram, and turned her gaze to the bustling,
pulsating heart of the Empire, smiling in a way that the commander never had.
Today, a new hour of destruction began. The clocks were ticking, and the Empire's
time was running out.