The War To End All Wars

Chapter 1

A Madman's Mother

The January evening in Vienna should have been a picturesque scene, a crisp winter sky transitioning to the deep purples of twilight, with a thin layer of snow shimmering on the ground. To anyone else, it might have been breathtaking. The majestic spires of St. Stephen's Cathedral stood proudly in the distance, and the Danube's quiet flow reflected the pale moonlight. The city hummed with life, but to Austria, the beauty of the evening was utterly maddening.

From her office window, she could see the streetlamps flickering into life, the soft glow illuminating cobblestone streets. She sighed, closing her eyes, allowing herself a momentary reprieve. The faint sounds of the city, the clatter of hooves, the murmurs of people shuffling home for warmth, the distant chime of bells-everything echoed a life she once knew intimately, but one that had slipped through her fingers.

Once, not so long ago, she had been an empire. Majestic. Feared. Respected. The Habsburg name had commanded reverence across Europe. Her lands had stretched wide, her coffers filled with gold, her rule unchallenged. The memory of it gnawed at her soul. She had stood tall, the matriarch of an empire, proud and indomitable. But now, as she stared into the shadowed streets of Vienna, all she could feel was the weight of defeat.

She opened her eyes and looked around her so-called office, the grandiosity of its title belied by its shabby state. Stacks of paperwork reached almost to the ceiling, a visual testament to the chaos that had swallowed her life whole. Papers about riots, infrastructure degradation, missing people, late debt payments to the Entente-specifically to that nagging, bitch France-and power outages lay scattered across her desk, some torn, others untouched for weeks. Her head ached from it all. Her once-gilded empire reduced to this disarray, to a fractured shadow of what it had been.

Her lips curled into a bitter smile as her thoughts turned to France. Oh, France... The woman was insufferable. A nagging, smug thorn in her side who never let her forget the debts she owed, both financially and emotionally. Ever since the Treaty of Saint-Germain, France had become a constant reminder of her downfall, her failure. The once-flamboyant, foppish nobleman who pranced about in the salons of Europe had become a relentless debt collector, a vulture waiting to pick at her bones.

She imagined France in her ridiculous attire, flamboyant as ever but always with that smug grin when the subject of debt came up. The humiliation, the endless payments that felt like they would never end-it was a noose around her neck. Even as Austria sat in her worn leather chair, surrounded by the wreckage of her country, she could feel the invisible ropes tightening.

France hadn't suffered as she had. Not really. Austria's defeat had split her in two. The pain of it was immeasurable. Her heart had shattered with the loss of Hungary-her twin soul, her equal. No longer the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire, now just a broken country with a broken heart. Her people were scattered, her lands partitioned, and her economy in tatters. And Hungary, oh Hungary...

A noise snapped her out of her reverie-a creak, subtle but enough to pull her from the fog of memory. The door to her office shifted slightly. She glanced toward it and felt a shiver run down her spine. The light outside the door cast an elongated shadow, a familiar one.

A voice in the back of her mind whispered, He's here.

For a moment, she was tempted to ignore it. To continue staring at the piles of reports and figures she could no longer make sense of. But the shadow grew longer, and the oppressive presence behind the door became unbearable.