Commander Giel Strut stood near the tall window in his office, his hands clasped behind his back, watching the sickly light of the late afternoon bleed through the panes, casting fractured shadows across the worn wooden floor.
The glass itself was old, warped slightly at the edges where the lead framing had begun to sag with age, distorting the view of the courtyard below into something wavering and uncertain. Outside, the wind stirred the bare branches of the sentinel trees that lined the stone walls, their skeletal forms swaying like the fingers of drowning men reaching toward an indifferent sky.
