5 ♢ - The Reflecting Pool
The rails stretched the length of the jetty in both directions, and vanished across the lake.
She looked down, and there was the world again. Aspens grew inverted, peeling white trunks and brilliant yellow-green leaves reaching down to a cloudless blue summer sky. She stood upside-down among them on the red brick of the jetty. Same as when we parted, she thought. Same weight, carried everywhere it wasn't fashionable. Same blotchy grey complexion. Same long and pointed ears. Same glossy obsidian braid worn down past her left shoulder… stop moping, Slate, there's nothing wrong with your hair, at least.
Her reflection rippled. A mere hitch, at first. Then a constant train of pulses. Not wind. Train's coming. She was miffed that she saw it before she felt it, but the lake didn't do her any favors, nor the soft sand of the station island beneath the jetty. For the fifteenth time, she reached into her skirt pocket, felt the stiff, slick material of the ticket. No excuse to get back in the rowboat and return to shore. She was here. She was doing this.
The verdigris leviathan began to brake, screeching, and her reflection vanished along with the inverted sky.
7 ♢ - The Monolith Sky
Slate felt them before she saw them. Honest rock beneath her, and oddly, above her. Basalt rose from the once-volcanic landscape in a trio of spires, black needles piercing the low clouds. She couldn't read the workings in any detail, not at this speed and distance, but they felt right. Watchful, but comfortable. Probably someone like her had made them.
She turned to the window as the spires passed it, watched them appear and then disappear from her view with a smile. Good job, lads. Keep it up.
7 ♡ - The town you changed at on the way to Pride
Slate jolted out of sleep. Colored lights in the twilit distance, closing slowly. I know this place. Why?
"Boschen," the conductor's voice purred through the train, low, teasing, sweet like thick honey and rich with metallic reverberations. Slate had only seen her briefly when she got her ticket punched, and she'd never have guessed that the slight woman in the black and green train-official's cloak possessed such a voice. It was almost enough to sneak around Slate's usual tendency to be intimidated by the same people she was attracted to, for her to track down the conductor, and ask her what she was doing later, except that the answer was almost guaranteed to be a forced-polite "Working." and then where would that put Slate? Nowhere comfortable. Better not.
"Boschen," the voice repeated, "City of Lanterns. We will be holding in Boschen for two hours to take on a full load of fuel and coolant before crossing the badlands. If you have not chosen to take advantage of the train's dining car, or have taken advantage of it sufficiently that its delights now pall, Boschen's night market is an excellent opportunity to get something for dinner, perhaps something fried, and on a stick. Please do not linger past nineteen-thirty, however, or you will need to continue your journey on the next train… three days from now."
Dinner sounded good. Slate had a meal in her rucksack, maybe two if she stretched it. Nuts. Jerky. Dried fruit. Hard candy. Crackers, and a small pot of sweet pepper jelly. Nothing that wouldn't keep. Nothing fried on a stick, certainly.
Slate descended from the shadowy bulk of the train into the myriad hues of the City of Lanterns, the station itself lit in greens and purples and cheery pinks. She stopped at the ticket office to ask directions, found it empty, then caught the scent of hot fat and grilled chilis and green onions on the night breeze, and it all snapped back.
She'd been here before. After the Academy, a post-graduation trip, with Lem and Tomas and Zara and Blue and a few others. Some festival, an excuse to get far away from school and do… nothing any of them had been willing to voice. But once under the colored lights, they'd barely needed words. She'd hesitated, but then she'd found herself in a corner with tall, willowy, bespectacled Blue, and Blue had smiled at her, and somehow she'd pushed Blue up against the wall. "Do you want this," she'd whispered, and Blue had nodded so hard that it made her hair-buns wobble.
They'd paused only when clothes started coming off; on the way back to the apartment someone had rented, they'd passed Lem and Tomas doing much the same thing. They'd spent two awkward but inventive hours in bed. They'd come up for air and food and wandered to the night market. She'd found something warm and spicy and wonderfully cheesy in egg batter, and turned to share it with Blue, and found Blue's lips otherwise occupied. By Zara.
They were friends. They were all friends, dammit. But that was a hell of a time to find out that, when it came to sex instead of food, she really didn't like to share. She'd sulked for the rest of the week, been utterly miserable to be around, and she'd never come back to that stall.
The night market of Boschen had its own opinions, however, and she found herself lured to a stall casting yellow light into the night and wafting of the same smell of spices and cheese as all those years ago. She slid coin over the counter. She received a paper basket of fried cheese cubes. She took a bite. It was good, dammit. She took another. Fuck Blue anyway. Fuck Zara. Hope you're fucking happy together, or separately, or however that ended, because I thought you were both great, and you deserve to be happy, but also fuck you very much. She took another bite, with the sweet red dipping sauce. It was so good.
"Oh, hello," a familiar voice purred next to her. "You have good taste. I often come here during fueling stopovers."
"I haven't been here for years," Slate said, turning. "Too long, it seems." She eyed the conductor, who'd apparently left her official cloak on the train, and was wearing pinstriped trousers and a neat blouse splotched in oranges and yellows by Boschen's lanterns.
The conductor met her gaze, mouth neutral but eyes glittering in the lantern-light.
Slate considered making better memories of this place. "What are you doing after this?" she asked.
"Working," the conductor said, dimpling slightly. "But so kind of you to inquire."
7 ♠ - Floating
Slate felt queasy. The view out the window wasn't helping. Granite shouldn't have been doing that. Granite belonged on or under the ground, not floating free in boulder-sized chunks as if it were badlands dust.
"The train will be stopping temporarily due to adverse weather conditions," the conductor announced. "This is not a station stop. Please do not attempt to disembark."
Adverse weather conditions. Right. She supposed you could call it that. She could feel the floating rock that had snapped the track fencing and strayed into the train's path. Out here in the badlands, a spot in the world worn thin by some ancient catastrophe, the usual rules about gravity and solidity and (allegedly) time didn't always apply, and the unpredictability of weather was as good an analogy as any.
You could fix this easily, a tiny metaphorical voice whispered. Slam that unruly stone back into its natural place for decades. But that would leave you low for an emergency, so you hoard your power tight to yourself, so you won't. A pity. If only there was a way to source more…
"Shut up," she told herself. There absolutely was a way to source more, or there could be, but she didn't want to think about it. And anyway, it wasn't happening on this train. That possibility wouldn't open up until she disembarked at the end of her journey.
She rummaged in her rucksack for a piece of candied ginger, shoved it in her mouth, and closed her eyes, hoping that the nausea would go away.
3 ♣ - Vibrant Graffiti
Slate woke to an untimely darkness. Surely it was't night yet; she couldn't have been out that long. She took out her watch, opened the cover with a practiced flick of her wrist, pushed a fraction of a fraction of her will into it, watched the dim uniform red glow of the circular face resolve into bright orange spiderwebs of meaning: about 1135. Almost as far from solar night as it was possible to be.
She supposed that on some level she should be tantalized by the possibilities of the badlands. A monumental insult to physics, and isn't that what magecraft was meant for? But it was all so… undirected. Whatever had happened here wasn't running according to any plan, as far as Slate could tell, and she deeply wanted to be through it and done with it and back out where things like day and night worked properly.
The train's internal and running lights came on, illuminating the skeleton of a town outside the windows: low brick structures, mostly, the same tawny color as the dust. She hadn't thought there were any towns out here. Maybe she'd missed them on previous trips. Maybe the boundary had shifted.
The train passed a wall angled more or less the same as the track. There was a message on it, in hungry letters of green fire — she could feel their pull on everyone in the train, something along the lines of her watch, certainly constructed, certainly intentional — WE LOVED HER.
We loved her?
Slate blinked. The train rolled on. She looked back, but the letters were already fading behind her.
Maybe WE LIVED HERE. Someone with a little power, defying the badlands long enough to score an epitaph in magical fire over the darkness-blighted ruins of the town where they came from. That would make more sense. Had to be that.
5 ♣ - Scrap Yard
Sparks and smoke in the distance. A noise audible over the ever-present thrum of the locomotive, a boom, repeated, with steady cadence. And suddenly, visible from the track, wooden stakes, linked next to next to next by faded yellow cord. A border of the badlands. This one wasn't meant to keep anything in or out, least of all noise. Just a marker of where not to step past if you weren't warded and prepared.
Slate raised her eyes from the border fencing to see a train, not dissimilar to the one she was on, disappearing into the maw of some giant machine in steady bites. Boom, boom, boom.
K ♡ - The place you said goodbye
"Verbena Riverport. Verbena Riverport. Welcome, gentlepersons, to the domed jewel of the Upper Red River. Those of you who will be leaving us at this juncture to continue your journey aboard a river steamer may consult with the station information desk for docking schedules. For everyone else, we will be holding for ninety minutes to refresh wards depleted in the badlands and load some local treats for the dining car. Once again, Verbena Riverport."
Slate stared into a wall of water. Verbena from the outside resembled nothing less than an onrushing wave, so high that she couldn't see the top from the train window, and it didn't stop feeling like it was going to crush her and suck her under just because she knew the trick. She winced, but with an almighty splash, they were through, water running down the sides of the train in great sheets, already slowing down for the station stop.
The tremendous dome of magically suspended water that enclosed the city of Verbena took the brunt of the pitiless noon sunlight, converting it into the equivalent of a pleasant slightly overcast afternoon in the capital. The sky shimmered as if seen from below the surface of a calm lake. Slate thought it funny how the weight of so many tons of water overhead felt like nothing once you were inside it, especially next to the pressure of the desert sun outside the dome. Better living through large-scale magecraft.
She found a diner not far from the station. Only once the waiter took her order did she realize, memory seizing on the black and white floor tiles and the cherry-red walls, that she'd been here before. (There was no ceiling. Why bother, in Verbena?)
"What are we even doing?" Slate groaned. "This is so fucked up, Daf. We might as well not have graduated. In an hour I'm gonna haul my stuff onto a steamboat and chug down the river to the canal to the Chain of Lakes to home, and after a week of stewing in my tiny cabin, I'll tell my parents I failed to make a pact, take a familiar, or land the kind of research job where they don't care how much power you have, and can I work in the quarry again, please, Dad, I'll enjoy it ever so much now that I'm sure it's forever."
"Well," Daphne said, "not forever. Eventually you'll run out of rocks, right?"
"Fuck you, Daf. No, I don't mean that, I'm sorry, you're in the same hole."
"Not going to enjoy it any more than you," the redhead said, toying unhappily with the remains of her sandwich and fries. "I almost… and then…" She cleared her throat. "Who would have thought that the cocky little shit who was supposed to challenge me would lose her nerve? So much for the fine old institution of rivalry."
"You didn't see her face after some of those practice duels," Slate said. "I did. She was rattled. Sweating."
"Why didn't you say something?"
Slate dipped a piece of fruit in the dregs of her shake. "I did. You said 'good' and yelled for someone else to spar with who could, I'm quoting you here, Daf, 'still keep it up'."
"I may have done that," Daphne admitted. "Sounds like me."
"So then I stopped trying. Next thing I know, it's finals week and she's challenging Lynne and by the time I came to get you, they'd both already agreed to the ritual."
"Gods. That girl. If I hadn't got there for the second half of their duel, I wouldn't have believed it. What was that? I still think Lynne was sandbagging."
"Did you ever talk to Lynne? She was like a frightened bunny for three years straight. She didn't strategize. That was her having actually done her homework, combined with the sheer terror of what was going to happen to her if she failed. Because it was textbook, Daf, completely textbook, just very fast and very clean. And now the frightened bunny is an archmage and she's got your old rival as a battery. What a waste."
"Speaking of waste," Daphne said, resting her chin on interlaced fingers, "why did you never take a familiar, Slate? I'm sure you could have folded Lynne like a deckchair. Or Ariana. Or half the other people in our class, honestly."
"Because I didn't want to risk becoming Lynne's familiar if I fucked up! Or Ariana's. Or any of the other petty little weirdos we went to school with."
"But, Slate… you wouldn't have fucked up."
"Yeah, well, I didn't have your confidence," she said, heavily.
"I wish I could share it." A moment of silence from Daphne, and then her eyes went wide, in that horrible beautiful I've-got-a-really-good idea expression of Daf's that Slate knew so well. "Hey. Hey hey hey. Hey maybe I could. Gods. I mean, maybe, something will come up, maybe, but what if…"
"What if what, Daf."
"A year. Okay? If neither of us have taken a familiar or made a pact in a year… we duel each other. In the ritual."
Slate raised an eyebrow. "You're full of it."
"That's not a no."
"It doesn't bear thinking about enough to even say no to! Either way it could go, at the end of it, one of us is done," she told the other woman.
"Better one than both, the way things are going from here," Daphne said. "Your dad's quarry, Slate? Really? What great works of magic are you gonna accomplish from there?"
"More than I'd accomplish as your familiar!"
"You think? We work together. Weirdly well. Always have, right? Who's to say that stops when… and it's not necessarily gonna be me, right?"
"Daphne," Slate said, "just give it a rest. I don't want to end on an argument. Let's pay the bill and then walk around a bit, shall we?"
"Well, at least I can tell myself I tried."
So. Yeah. That hadn't been great. She'd told herself: Daf's just being weird, because we're not likely to see each other again any time soon. Cut her a break. You're probably being weird too, and you just don't see it. You'll miss her soon enough. And maybe those things were true.
But Slate hadn't forgotten.
When she got the letter, it was clear that Daphne hadn't either.
6 ♠ - Flood
The river widened past Verbena. And widened. And widened some more. Slate watched out of the window as the train sliced across the surface of the rain-swollen Lower Red River. She could barely see the silt of the current shoreline. An occasional dead tree poked out of the water, roots drowned by too much of a good thing.
Flow fields sparked to life on the outside of the train, bleeding cerulean light, shoving back the encroaching river. Not particularly frugal, those fields; she could practically taste the wasted power. Keeping the rails dry for the entire train would be near the edge of her own capabilities even with more efficiently crafted works.
"Hope they don't ask for volunteers," she muttered to herself.
A line of old standing stones whipped by her side of the train, half underwater. They'd be fine. The flood would come, and go, as most floods did. And even if the soil washed away from beneath them, and they toppled, they'd still be stones. If the flood came for Slate, she wasn't sure she'd be able to say the same.
3 ♢ - The River of Light
a partial game of Last Stop. the file ends here, for now, awaiting the next long train ride.