The cobblestones were slick with the day's grime as I made my way home through Vienna, past the long rows of factory buildings that squatted along the river like brooding giants. Steam curled from their stacks even at this hour, bleeding into a sky the color of old brass. Twenty-eight years old, and already my hands looked like my father's — cracked at the knuckles, stained dark with oil that never quite washed out. I'd spent the better part of a decade bolting together the steam engines that kept the Empire's machines breathing: the tanks, the freight haulers, the lumbering steel behemoths that groaned across Europa's rail lines. Honest work. Not glamorous, but it was mine.
I shouldered open the door to my flat and was met by the familiar smell of stale air and the ghost of last night's stew. The place was small — a table, a chair, a cot wedged beneath the window — but I'd never needed much. No wife. No children. My parents were long in the ground. It was just me and the routine, and that had always been enough.
I dropped my lunch pail on the table and sank into the armchair, reaching for the radio out of habit. It was a bulky thing, taken up half the windowsill — I'd saved three months of overtime to afford it, which told you something about my life. The static hissed and popped, and then the announcer's voice cut through, clipped and grave in a way that made me sit up before I'd even processed the words.
"...breaking news from Sarajevo. Great Duke Francis, heir to the throne of our Middle Nations and steadfast ally of the Great Empire, has been assassinated. The perpetrator, a radical from Sarbiane, struck down our beloved Duke in a cowardly act of terror—"
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees.
The Duke. Dead.
I'd heard the border tensions talked about in the factory canteen — men with strong opinions and stronger coffee, arguing over maps they'd never read. But this was different. This was the kind of news that changed the shape of things.
The announcer's voice shifted, taking on the cadence of a proclamation.
"In response to this heinous crime, a national emergency has been declared. The Emperor calls upon every healthy man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to report to their nearest recruitment center. Our alliances demand swift justice. The Sarbs must be held accountable. Join now — defend Germano-Hungry and the Great Empire!"
Patriotic music swelled out of the speaker. I switched it off.
The room felt very quiet. I stared at the wall for a long time, at the faded patch above the table where a painting had once hung — my mother's, sold years ago to cover rent. Join the army. Me. A man whose greatest daily danger was catching a finger in a gear press.
I pushed the thought aside. Tomorrow was a shift. Life had to go on.
---
Except it didn't, not quite. Not the way it had before.
The factory changed overnight. Posters appeared on every surface — bold red letters, eagles with spread wings, the Duke's face rendered noble in death. *Avenge him. Crush the Sarbs. For the Empire.* The men who'd spent years complaining about management and pay and the canteen's watery soup were suddenly experts on military strategy. Rumors spread like lubricant across a hot engine — Sarb spies poisoning reservoirs, saboteurs on the rail lines, assassins already in Vienna.
I watched it all with a kind of numb distance. It didn't feel real.
Then Karl caught me after a shift, still reeking of machine oil, and clapped me so hard on the back I nearly dropped my jacket.
"I'm signing up tomorrow," he said, eyes bright with something I hadn't seen in him before. "You heard what they did to the Duke, Franz. You can't just sit on your hands."
"What do we know about fighting?" I said.
"Enough." He shrugged like it was simple. Maybe for him it was.
Josef chimed in from across the locker room, already half-dressed. "My brother's in the reserves. Says the magic divisions are mobilizing — the whole lot of them." He lowered his voice with the reverence men reserve for things they don't fully understand. "Enchanted rounds, Franz. Bullets that track a man. Follow him round corners. Mages riding those great flying constructs — not aeroplanes, mind you, nothing so crude — proper arcane machines. They say a single division of them can turn a battle before the infantry's even fixed bayonets."
I'd heard the stories. Everyone had. The magic divisions were the Empire's pride and terror both — gifted men and women who'd spent years learning to weave spells into steel and smoke, who commanded ethereal craft that rode currents of pure energy above the clouds. It was a different world from mine. A world I had no part in.
I said goodnight and walked home in the dark.
---
The days that followed had a strange, accelerating quality, like a machine building pressure toward a release valve. More men vanished from the factory floor — veterans of the canteen debates, young apprentices barely old enough to shave — and came back briefly in uniform, faces flushed with purpose. "Come on, Franz. Don't be the last one left behind."
I don't know what finally moved me. Maybe it was the quiet — the factory getting emptier, my flat getting quieter, the particular loneliness of a man with no one waiting for him and nothing much to wait for. Maybe it was the posters. Maybe it was something smaller than any of that; some stubborn, foolish thing in my chest that didn't want to be the man who sat it out.
The recruitment office smelled of nervous sweat and fresh ink. The line stretched around the block. Farmers, clerks, dock workers, men twice my age and boys who looked half it. I signed the papers without letting myself think too hard about it. The sergeant who stamped my form had the weathered face of a man who'd seen too much to bother with speeches.
"Welcome to the Imperial Army," he said, and handed me a bundle of rough olive cloth. "Change in there. Training at dawn."
---
The barracks were loud and close and smelled of wet wool. I dressed alongside a dozen strangers, nobody bothering with modesty — there wasn't room for it. The uniform fit badly, bunching at the shoulders, but when I looked down at the Emperor's eagle stitched onto the sleeve, something shifted in me. Not pride exactly. Something quieter. Like a door closing.
Training came fast and relentless. They crammed weeks of knowledge into days: marching formations, rifle maintenance, the wet thud of bayonet drills against straw dummies that left my arms trembling. One sergeant walked us through the standard kit — gas masks with their rubber smell and fogged lenses, entrenching tools, field rations that tasted of tin and nothing else.
"You want to live?" he told us one evening, when the light was going and every man was too tired to stand straight. "Forget what you've heard about the mages. Enchanted rounds, flying constructs, all of it — that's their war. Yours is dirt and wire and your trigger finger. That's what keeps you breathing."
I lay awake that night listening to the man in the next bunk snore, and tried to remember what my life had felt like a week ago.
---
The declaration came over the loudspeakers on a grey morning: war on Sarbiane. The Great Empire and its allies mobilized as one. Around me, men cheered — some genuinely, some because it seemed expected. I stood with my rifle slung over my shoulder and felt the knot in my stomach pull tighter.
We boarded trains heading south. The cars were packed with bodies and equipment and the thick, anxious energy of men trying to convince themselves they weren't afraid. Someone near the front was singing. Others were talking about being home by autumn, about the Sarbs folding at the first sight of Imperial steel, about parading through Belgrady inside a fortnight.
I didn't join in. I found a window seat and watched Vienna fall away behind us — the factories, the river, the rooftops I'd walked beneath for years — until the city gave way to farmland, and the farmland gave way to hills, and the hills swallowed the horizon whole.
The war had started. I was in it now.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and closed my eyes.