The air along the Boulevard de Strasbourg tasted of champagne and roasted chestnuts. For the first time in seven long years, the heavy wool of Lieutenant Jean-Luc’s uniform felt lighter, not because the steel Brodie helmet on his head had changed weight, but because the war was over.

All across Paris, the cathedral bells rang in an chaotic, joyful chorus. Confetti and gold foil fluttered from the balconies like sunlit snow, dusting the cobblestones where soldiers and citizens walked arm-in-arm. In Geneva, the pen strokes were dry; the Kings and Queens War had ended.

Jean-Luc unslung the brass folding camera from his shoulder. His leather bellows were already worn, but the roll of celluloid film inside was fresh. Beside him, his comrade squinted through a pocket telescope toward the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, pointing out a speckling of motion along the horizon.

"Look there," a young child called out, "The Royal Nation’s flying past!"

Cheers erupted down the avenue. People crowded the streets, waving handkerchiefs upward as a vast shadows began to creep over the city.

Jean-Luc stepped into the middle of the street, aiming his camera past the shoulders of the infantrymen toward the sunlit spire. But as he framed the shot, the cheering began to falter. The soft hum of engines had deepened into an earth-shaking, metallic roar that vibrated through the soles of his boots.

Through the viewfinder, the horizon wasn't clear. It was choked with a suffocating wall of coal soot and chemical ash. Rising out of the dark haze came no ceremonial escort, but an entire sky-armada, scores of dreadnought airships lined in endless V-formations of biplane bombers, blotting out the sun completely.

The treaty was a trap. The peace was a ruse to draw the garrisons into the open streets.

The crowd's laughter turned to a collective, sharp intake of breath as the bomb bay doors opened above. Jean-Luc’s finger pressed the shutter. Click.

Seconds later, the sky fell.

"Their chocking the sky out of spite."

Source Item: Roll-film spool recovered from a Portable Folding Camera (Manufacturer Model c. 1922).

Recovery Site: Subterranean bunker complex beneath the ruins of Golden Empire Outpost Alpha.

Classification: Historical Record — The Betrayal over Paris

TRANSCRIPT OF FINDINGS

Written by an unknown Archivist of the Royal Expeditionary Force upon excavation.

It was inside a rusted iron box, nestled within the pocket of a long-decayed officer of the Golden Empire, that we discovered the brass camera. Its leather bellows had rotted into dust, yet the celluloid roll within remained preserved from the damp earth. When brought to the darkroom and developed, the faded, sepia-toned film yielded a single, terrible exposure, a moment history had buried beneath ash.

On that fateful afternoon, the church bells across Europe rang with a joyous fervor. The long, bloody chapters of the Kings and Queens War had at last reached their conclusion. In Geneva, the ink was scarcely dry upon the armistice, and in the grand boulevards of Paris, the populace flooded the cobblestones to cast streamers, uncork champagne, and celebrate a peace they believed hard-won.

This photograph, however, records the exact second their jubilee was turned into a grave. The photographer turned their lens not toward the merrymakers in the street, but upward into the heavens.

Surging out of the heavy horizon came no mere patrol, but the full, terrible might of the Royal Nation’s airborne fleet. Looming low over the Eiffel Tower were scores of massive, rigid zeppelins and heavy airship dreadnoughts, their dark, metallic hulls casting an artificial night over the city. Escorting these leviathans were endless V-formations of heavy biplane bombers, their engines roaring in a low, rhythmic thunder that shook the glass from every window casing before a single payload was dropped.

The sky in the print is choked, not by the approach of dusk, but by a thick, oppressive haze of coal soot and chemical smoke drifting beneath the gasbags. The Royal Nation had signed the treaty not in good faith, but as a cruel ruse to draw the imperial garrisons into the open streets.

Minutes after this photograph was taken, the biplane bombers armed their fuses and zeppelins opened their bays, releasing a rain of toxic gas and high explosives across the length of mainland Europe. From the coast of France, U.K, and Spain to the city of Moscow. What followed was not combat, but the silent, systematic erasure of an era.

Archival Note: This roll-film negative remains one of the few surviving visual accounts of the air raid prior to the total collapse of the region. By order of the High Command, the photograph is to be cataloged and locked within the vault as a testament to the hour we drowned the sky out of spite.

Thanks to u/Adventurous-Stage605 who originally posted the cannon, i also found out it can shoot pumpkins but it will jam sometimes.

("A weathered page containing an old photograph recovered from the journal of an unknown Rook.")

They say snow was once soft.

I only know ash.

It falls the same way, they tell me.

Silent, patient, covering every scar until the world forgets what lies beneath.

My father spoke of winters where children laughed instead of counting bullets. Where white fields stretched farther than the eye could see, and every footprint was a promise that someone would return home.

Now the only white is the dust of burned cities.

The mountains became smoke. The forests became charcoal. The clouds learned to carry our mistakes.

Sometimes, when the ventilation fans grow quiet, I close my eyes and pretend the ash is snow.

That every gray flake is cold enough to sting my cheeks, not warm from the dying embers of another forgotten battlefield.

I imagine holding out my hand and catching winter, instead of yesterday.

But ash does not melt.

It clings.

To uniforms. To rifles. To names carved into helmets. To the lungs of children who have never known what seasons are.

We did not lose the snow because winter abandoned us.

We burned it.

We fed the heavens our cities, our forests, our pride,
until the sky forgot how to be white.
If there is a day when the guns fall silent, when the tunnels open, and the earth breathes again.

I pray the first thing to fall from the heavens
is not ash.

But snow.

So the children may finally learn the difference.

You left without the thunder,
without shattered glass or screaming skies.
Just quiet,
the kind that settles into furniture
and lingers in unopened messages.

I still reach for your name
like muscle memory,
like a song my hands remember
even when the radio has gone silent.

We built a future out of fragile things,
late-night promises,
shared playlists,
the dangerous belief
that love alone could hold the weight
of two unfinished people.

But love is not always a fortress.
Sometimes it is a doorway
one person closes
while the other still stands inside.

I hated you for leaving.
Then hated myself
for missing someone
who had already learned
how to live without me.

Days passed.
The ache changed shape.
Not gone,
just softer around the edges,
like sea glass
carved smooth by surviving storms.

Now when I think of you,
I do not ask why we ended.

I ask how something so beautiful
could teach me
that letting go
is also a form of love,
the kind that finally says:

I wanted us to be forever,
but I want me to heal more.