"The innocent always pay for decisions they themselves didn't make." The dragon purrs to me in the dark...

…when the bomb crashed through the vaulted ceiling of the Von Bek family armory, the cigarette along with the trickle of gasoline no longer mattered.

…nor did the three failed architects of Paradise's sudden dispute over who was in charge – Trotsky grabbing Stalin by the mustache, Stalin's stubby fingers deep in Trotsky's bushy white hair.

…nose bloody, Lenin ordering the guards to discipline the little blacksmith for refusing to punish the last Lord of Mirenberg for being what he could never be…

…the bomb with its Union Jack, landed fins down, shattering the green and black diamond tiles of the armory in a cascade of broken roof slates, the Multiverse shuddering, birthing a new story…

…bouncing end over end towards them all, a slow, agonizing blur…

…the little blacksmith, face twisted with grief, kneeling beside his dead, pregnant wife, urging her to get up…

…Stalin tossing the limp Trotsky aside, dragging the little blacksmith upright by his red hair, snarling, "Filthy German cripple! Do as I say—"

… the failed idealist Klosterheim whispering unseen in the bound albino's ear, "Blind, you and your father's sword Ravenbrand will not escape me…"

… glasses pushed aside, a sharp stabbing pain in the last lord of Mirenberg's right eye, the entire Multiverse shooting past him in the sudden dark…

…bomb thudding end over end…

…squealing, Stalin clutching his leg in a spurt of red, the blacksmith's wife rising, staggering beneath her husband's weight towards Zenith in a trail of uterine blood, defiled kitchen knife cast aside, hand out held out, sweet peasant face compassionate, "Oh, Od. Oh, oh Od. What have they done to you?"

… the bomb landing trigger down against splintering tiles, the single toll of a cathedral bell, a brilliant burst of fire sending Zenith screaming, blind, back onto the Moonbeam Roads, the glasses his cousin Una had given him with their single remaining lens askew on one delicately pointed ear… father's ebon sword cane confidently shooting past his fingertips into the story it had just created, as lens in apron pocket…

…my ancestors landed bloody in the deep snow just outside Bremen exactly fourteen years before someone else's World War I.

Overhead at 20,000 feet, as a very old dragon told stories in the dark and the man who bleeds endured, Lord High Air Admiral Seaton Begg pocketed his golden stopwatch on the bridge of the HMAS Sadric's Pleasure, briskly ordering the bomb bay doors of the huge airship shut, inferno scrolling below.

Kaiser Willhelm II of Prussia, Emperor of Germany's armory, its priceless libraries, its unique Baroque cathedral and fairytale hilltop schloss, munitions and rifle assembly lines, was no more…

"As for Od's wife, who cares?" the dragon chuckles in afterthought, "Who cares indeed?"