Two whispered words and the last line are indeed intriguing, but I'm not sure this has quite enough content to call it a short story. I'd say it's more of a prologue.

I find block paragraph formatting strange in fiction (as opposed to first line indents), and the author overuses ellipses, en dashes, and semicolons a bit, with some of the semicolons used incorrectly.

While this teaser hasn't won me over to get the next book in the series just now, it has put this author on my radar for steampunk, a genre I'm still fairly new to. ( )