She stood shivering at the window, staring blankly at the winter landscape and it's black skies, reflected so clearly in her black hair, in the pale fingers that clutched the thick black shawl around her white shoulders.

It was always cold in this city. The factories and rooftops that she knew so well looked back at the girl framed in the window, as blank and solid as the buildings themselves.

All over Europe, cities just like this one were being destroyed by war, their skylines and streets and people left in ruins. But the view from Catheira's window never changed. The only war she knew was that inside her head – the desire to be good, and the natural instinct to be bad. Most of her thoughts were bad, but that was just the way they came to her, and that was natural.

This morning, the city was silent. It was Sunday morning, too early for the birds, the church bells, the joggers. All there was to disturb the peace was the occasional burst of rain or a rush of wind across the chimney tops. Then came the clatter of dishes from the kitchen beneath her window, and she broke her reverie and broke away from the window.

The kitchen was dingy in the light from a single yellow lamp, and shadows moved and flickered across the walls. Cat sat at the wooden table, watching Carlotta busy herself with breakfast. The woman gave her odd furtive glances as she moved pans around the stove.

Outside the window, in the brightening grey of morning, soft white snowflakes began to drift down. Cat watched them dreamily. Everything about the morning was slow and languid. Everything about life was that way too, Catheira thought.

'Good morning,' said Carlotta, harshly, giving the girl a long, calculating look.

'Good morning,' said Cat, with a sweet smile. Carlotta Skaskia was her paternal grandmother and was the most terrifying person Cat had ever known. Carlotta's power came off her in waves, suffocating or intoxicating, depending on her intentions. It was in her eyes, her breath, her fingertips. Catheira feared her grandmother, who had only ever shown her affection, but who was merciless and hellish in her rages. It was Cat's single fear to ever have that rage directed at her.

Catheira sat huddled against the cold, sipping coffee from an aluminium cup. She longed for a cigarette.

'You want breakfast?' asked Carlotta.

Cat shook her head no.

'Of course you want breakfast. You, who never eats. You're wasting away.'

'Please,' said Cat. 'It's too early to eat.'

'Nonsense. I haven't seen you go near food in weeks. See, I have eggs cooking.'

'No eggs. Please.'

Catheira glanced down the hall to the front room.

'Do not worry,' said Carlotta. 'She is still with us. And after today, she will be with you always. It is the way of our world, Cathi, and nothing to waste tears over. When there is no magic left in the world, that is when you can cry.'

Carlotta leaned across the table to touch her grand-daughter's hand.

'Your mother is clinging to life so you will continue the chain of history. You, Catheira, are our most powerful daughter yet. Through you, the whole world will be at our mercy.'

Cat drank her coffee and stared at the snowflakes outside the window, stared at the sky until it turned silver.

A plate banged down in front of her.

'Eat,' said her grandmother. 'We got a long day.'

Cat picked obediently at the cheese and bread in front of her, then finding she was hungry after all, asked for eggs, too.

Malicia lay in her silk-lined casket, as beautiful as ever.

The coffin was part of tradition, but she would not be buried in it. It was simply a nod to Western culture. The colour of the dress was of as little importance in the big scheme of things. Malicia was dressed in white according to Catheira's wishes – alongside her raven hair and the red silk of the casket, Malicia looked like Snow White in her glass coffin. Only there would be no handsome prince to wake her. The cogs of destiny were turning, and there was no making them stop.

Carlotta knelt beside her daughter-in-law's coffin and took the woman's pale hand in hers. Malicia's dark lashes fluttered and her lips moved, forming silent words.

'It is Sunday,' said Carlotta, soothingly, stroking the hand. 'Soon it will be over, and we can say goodbye to this tired body and bless the new flesh.'

Malicia's lips continued to move, as if in prayer. Carlotta lit a black candle for her patient, dipped her fingertips in a bowl of bitter-smelling fluid and annointed the dying woman's forehead, muttering words of her own.

Malicia's lips became still. Her eyes opened. Carlotta quietly admired the clear, liquid green. In them, she saw the fields and mountains of her childhood.

'Sleep while you can,' advised Carlotta. 'There is much life still to be lived.'

The dress was a silver-grey silk with black trim, long and flowing. It slipped like water through her fingers and onto he bed, where it lay, hiding the shadows of her entire future in its folds. Catheira smoothed out the silk with the reverence of a bride on her wedding day.

She whispered to the dress, to the beauty of the dress, just a piece of fabric, but older than she could ever imagine. It looked brand new, but with secrets stitched into it. Her entire family history was in this dark material, her whole life. To remove it from its wooden box, its black wrappings, was to unwrap her destiny from the furthest stars. This had been her mother's dress, and her grandmother's. Who knew how many generations of Skaskia women, women with the same eyes and the same blood and the same secrets, had touched its soft power? Catheira felt her own mortality brush by her like a ghost.

The dress was only ever to be worn once in each lifetime, on the day when its power would be strongest, when a mother left the mortal world and passed on her magic to her daughter.

Today is my day, thought Catheira. As she ran her hand lovingly over its silver skirt, she had a great sense of maternity, of blood.

She remembered the stories she had heard her whole life, the dreams that recurred so often as a child. She was part of the chain of devastation that had destroyed countries, religions, her own father.

Suddenly, it all came back to her, and a bright star rose inside her. It lit her entire being and made the whole world clearer.

When Cat, dressed in the silks of time, stepped before the mirror that Sunday morning, there had been no violence in what she had felt, no thunderbolts from the sky. All she felt was a calm, a silence like that found at the bottom of the sea or while floating in space. The only change was in her eyes, which blazed with the forces behind them. Her mother's eyes, her grandmother's eyes, these were the eyes that had witnessed the world from the beginning of time itself. But blue. She held onto this fact in the secret recesses of her mind. She had her father's eyes.

Marching through the rain-washed streets with Carlotta holding her arm, the hem of her dress dragging in puddles, Catheira saw everyone she looked at recoil from her glance. She was aware of her eyes burning into everything around her, changing things, making them waver, making their very molecules doubt themselves. She felt she could turn the world to liquid.

Catheira had the power of the universe at her fingertips, and she could keep it all for herself. Her mother was dying. Carlotta's power, she could now see, was no match for her own. She could have a whole world at her command. All it took was one generation to break the chain of power.

The city they walked through was born of the Skaskia's blood. Once a gypsy settlement, then a village, for a while a thriving town, now a dying city. But the city could be great again. Streets named by her great, great grandfather gave clues to their origins, and the family name was everywhere. The city in all it's fallen glory was beautiful to Catheira.

This was her city.

This was her dress.

And she would keep it.