Victoria is a great power built of steam and steel. Flying Steam Knights were the nation's pride, and it was a land of ingenuity that fled even catastrophe aboard nomadic cities.

But now its capital, Londinium, is in the grip of Sarkaz mercenaries. On the throne sits neither a Draco nor an Aslan, but the Sarkaz regent-king, Theresis.

Rhodes Island returns to this ashen city. The Doctor and Amiya carry a single question: everyone shouts 'for Victoria' — but what, exactly, is Victoria?

1. Twenty-six years ago, the child in the attic

The story begins twenty-six years ago, at the Cumberland ducal estate. Aledale, a young girl who idolized the Steam Knights, slips away from her father into the attic.

There, Aledale overhears a conspiracy by chance — whispers of those plotting to bring down the old lion, the king.

The plot's core was simple: transfer every Steam Knight to the border, then strike the king. Once the old lion was gone, they reasoned, the cub's crown wouldn't last long either.

Trying to flee out the window before she's caught, Aledale falls from the second floor. But something soft catches and lifts the girl up.

A heavy voice echoes through Aledale's mind. "One day, you will meet Vina again." That very day, the king vanishes, and a 'miracle' occurs — the young princess Alexandrina appears, cradling the national sword that had gone missing.

Over the twenty-some years since, Aledale often glimpses those golden beings and that girl again in her dreams. Waiting for the day, foretold, when she meets 'Vina' once more.

2. The teacher who believed in the light

Four years ago, a small school in Osterig. The teacher Golding takes in poor children and teaches them letters and theater, believing that civilization can stand against violence.

But that night, a coup by the Grand Dukes sets Londinium ablaze. And the next morning, the streets are filled not with the Home Guard or Steam Knights, but with black-horned Sarkaz mercenaries.

From that day on, the Sarkaz never left Londinium, and Steam Knights were never seen on its streets again.

Golding spends over a year with the children preparing a play about a knight standing against a tyrant. As the clouds of war grow thicker, she insists — believing in beauty is what keeps you a person, not a beast.

As long as there's light, we'll keep moving toward it.

— Golding

3. The day the flag changed

The munitions plant at Highbury. Veteran representative Catherine submits to the Sarkaz, striving to keep even one more worker alive. To her, the plant is the pride her family built up over generations, shaping Londinium.

Strike it once, you get nothing but a lump of metal... strike it again and again, and you can forge steam armor. That's how we built Londinium.

— Catherine

But her grandson Fist can't bear the submission. He leaves the plant to join the vigilantes and stand against the Sarkaz. Catherine drives him out coldly — but really, she was afraid of losing another grandson, like Harvey, who marched out in a protest twenty-six years ago and never came back.

That day, Victoria's flag comes down off the plant roof, and the Sarkaz banner goes up. As if nothing had changed at all.

4. When the fog clears, war

In the present, Rhodes Island joins hands with the vigilantes. The black clouds covering Londinium's sky are no ordinary storm — they're an artificial catastrophe stirred up by the Shard.

Theresis means to use this weapon to aim war and storm at his enemies together — to borrow Victoria's own strength to destroy Victoria. Stopping this is Rhodes Island's first goal in coming to Londinium.

Theresis dreams of a future where the Sarkaz are no longer hunted, where they can finally put down roots. The future his dead sister Theresia envisioned — he means to seize it not through peace, but through struggle. Refusing to give up any possibility at all.

The operation splits in two. The Doctor, Fist, and Ascalon head to find the Sarkaz's hidden supply route, toward Highbury and the Home Guard command tower. And Siege sets out to recover the national sword, King's Breath, from the King's Rest.

Siege leads the Glasgow gang that heads the vigilante group Osterig. And she is also the princess who vanished twenty-six years ago — Alexandrina Vina Victoria herself.

Amiya reads a familiar grief in Aledale — the face of someone who's carried far too much alone. Even so, Amiya never forgets why they came here.

We came to help 'people.' Living people — and people who have the right to live.

— Amiya

5. Selling the armor

Bringing weapons into the city means paying a smuggler's steep price. What Aledale offers up is the last symbol of House Cumberland — the armor of the very first Steam Knight.

"House Cumberland is you, and me." Aledale tells the old butler Elshie flatly. Words like glory or honor mean nothing anymore, she says.

Siege blocks the deal — threatening the trader to keep the armor safe. She didn't want to watch Aledale lose anything more.

As she tends to the wound, the two imagine a life that could have been — tea in the garden, hunting, a tedious ball. When Siege, for the first time, puts into words a future that had always felt like fog, Aledale tells her that's exactly her greatest strength.

Only someone who knows how precious this moment is can speak of a future, she says. "Like right now."

6. A life for a life

Around then, at Highbury, plant representatives who know too much are being secretly executed. Catherine, too, is quietly hauled away — resigned that if her own life can save the others, that's enough.

But the workers, whom Catherine thought knew nothing, rise up. Those with nothing left to fear come forward on their own to rescue their representative.

Fist joins that line too — not as a vigilante, but as this plant's own grandson. Under cover from the Doctor and Ascalon, years of pent-up anger snap the thin violence like rotten wood.

At the execution ground was a young mercenary, Paprika, who had never killed anyone. Catherine hands her the yarn a dead comrade had left as a gift for the girl, and asks just what she's swinging that weapon for. Paprika, in the end, can't pull the trigger.

Once the rescue is done, Fist returns his badge to his grandmother and leaves — he's not a plant worker anymore. Catherine throws the badge right back at her grandson.

To me, my grandmother is the real hero. She was then, she is now, and she always will be.

— Fist

7. Different paths

Not even all Sarkaz think alike. Shining, a confessor who turned her back on her clan, is invited to an old family dinner.

The clan leader and her sister Salus urge her to come back. Liz, the Infected girl Shining risks her life to protect, was once their test subject, they say — and only the clan can hold her.

But Shining says Liz alone is her true family, and leaves the table, sword in her arms. Next time they meet, she says, it'll be on a battlefield.

You are not my family. Do I need to say it more plainly than that?

— Shining

8. Night at the command tower

The raid on the Home Guard command tower begins. Commander Leto is a Gaul refugee who surrendered to the Sarkaz on the single hope of rebuilding his homeland, Gaul. But that hope was a weakness deceiving himself, and it drove his own soldiers into a death trap.

The vampire Sanguinaire treats Leto like a pet in a cage — telling him not to mistake it for the bird having tamed its master, choking him under the pretense of mercy. Leto has no choice but to swallow the humiliation.

At the same moment, the Cumberland estate burns in Sanguinaire's flames. Elshie, the butler who's been Aledale's only family since birth, dies in that fire.

Atop the command tower, Amiya breaks down. Through the ring Theresia left behind, the full weight of the Sarkaz's ancient sorrow and grudge pours into her at once.

Amiya sees the night, two hundred years ago, when Kazdel burned. Sarkaz slaughtered simply for being born of a different origin — and that Kal'tsit was present at that massacre, too. However well she thinks she knows Kal'tsit, faced with that memory, Amiya can't help but feel anger and grief.

Six heroes rising from the ruins charge the great army, bearing the burning banner of Kazdel. Answer, our enemy. Who are you, to declare that Kazdel deserves to fall? That cry seizes Amiya's heart.

As Amiya loses consciousness, the regent-king Theresis levels his blade at her. His goal is one thing only: killing the 'Devil' cradled in the Doctor's arms.

Bloodied, Kal'tsit tells the Doctor to take Amiya and retreat, and stands alone against Theresis. "I will kill you once more, Kal'tsit."

Amid that chaos, the Banshee king Logos cuts through the vampire's veil of blood. What he follows, he says, is not the Devil's crown but the ideal Theresia laid out. The roots of the old monarchy have already rotted, he declares — the Sarkaz must change.

9. Where kings sleep

Meanwhile, Siege's party reaches deep underground, at the King's Rest. Behind the door opened by the Draco's key stand statues of every Victorian king who ever reigned.

But the passage held long-dried blood, and the corpses of over a hundred elite Sarkaz. And, having fallen while holding them back, dozens of shattered suits of steam armor.

Siege realizes why she never once heard steam vent through Londinium in these four years. Every Steam Knight had been here.

What happened here was no heroic legend. It was a trap — every Steam Knight lured into the King's Rest and sealed inside a Sarkaz encirclement — and the key that let them in wasn't handed over by one or two Grand Dukes, but by Victoria itself.

Dagda, too, was once a knight of the tower. After the king left, she guarded an empty palace with nothing left to protect, and was the child her mentor forced to survive before the final charge. She's never properly mourned those deaths.

Even knowing they'd been betrayed, that Dagda salutes each and every warrior who never took off their armor, tears streaming. Siege quietly wraps her arms around Dagda, trembling.

"Victoria isn't just the Parliament and the nobility — it's you, too. It's me, too. And there are still people who'll weep for them."

King's Breath carries a legend of its own. The Aslan Padishah once nearly cut down the Draco king with this blade — and after the two bloodlines sealed their pact, it was reforged into the very symbol of Victoria's glory. It's said the kings once even cleaved catastrophe itself with this sword.

10. Don't look back

The moment Siege takes King's Breath in hand, a familiar voice calls out behind her. Asking for the sword. It was Aledale's voice.

Aledale had carried a 'mission' for some Grand Duke to take the national sword, from the very start. She'd wanted to protect the vigilantes and her friendship with Siege too, she says — but fate pushed her all the way here.

Siege rejects the word 'mission.' If the vigilantes believe in her, she's their leader; if she calls herself a friend, then that's what she is. Just then, something stirs among the wreckage.

It was the last Steam Knight — someone who watched his comrades slaughtered, and held on alone in the dark for four years, telling himself the armor filled the wound where his flesh and blood used to be. What he'd guarded was the national sword, the one single thing he called 'Victoria.'

He'd already forgotten his own name. No medicine, no light, no food — surviving on nothing but the light the sword gave him, pushing even death away, never knowing what it was he'd been loyal to.

The king was executed, and Parliament, the nobles, the people — all of them betrayed him. So he chose to believe the sword itself was Victoria, and charges at Siege for daring to take it from him.

What this sword can drive off isn't the storm — it's fear. Knight, this sword is not your Victoria.

— Siege

Worn down, Aledale finally sets her mission aside. No Cumberland, no Grand Duke — just Aledale. And, true to the promise she made Elshie as a child, she chooses to face the Steam Knight herself.

I'll be the one to face you, my nightmare... my hope.

— Aledale

Just before the door shuts, Aledale's lips form one last word. Whether it was Vina, or Your Highness, that word was buried in the wreckage forever.

Epilogue — A storm rises

In the ashes of the ruined Cumberland estate, the warriors find House Cumberland's steam armor — the one said to have been lost to the fire, whole and intact.

Siege wishes Aledale could have seen it — that not every path was set in stone from the start. And she hopes that last Steam Knight will someday leave the darkness, and find something new worth protecting.

But the sky won't wait. The black clouds over Londinium tear apart, and it becomes clear this was no ordinary cloud at all.

The Shard has activated. Under its gaze, every enemy of the Sarkaz has nowhere left to run. Theresis begins to move, beyond the wall, toward the true battlefield.

Even so, the vigilantes don't scatter. The mercenary Totter, and Home Guard soldiers rescued from the execution ground, choose to stay with Rhodes Island. They took heavy losses, but they gained one thing — intelligence on the Sarkaz supply route.

At Golding's school, the play a year in the making draws its curtain. But the children play as Steam Knights, shouting to "squeeze the Sarkaz dry." The teacher who believed civilization could win against violence breaks down, watching the age stain even the children with war.

In a distant city, Ch'en, Bagpipe, and Harmonie recognize familiar faces, and Reed leaves Rhodes Island for someone she needs to meet. And at the Duke of Wellington's estate, someone calling herself 'Her Highness of Eblana' comes calling.

Those who gave their lives for Victoria were betrayed by Victoria and buried in the dark. And even so, there were those who never took off their armor of glory. If Victoria is neither king, nor Parliament, nor nobility, then in the end it's you, and me, and those who will still weep for them. When the fog clears, war will come.