"The train is dead."
Marshal Dain delivered the verdict twenty minutes later, standing in the gutted dining carriage that now served as their command center. The carriage rested on its side, its forr wall serving as an uneven floor. Frost was already creeping across the exposed surfaces.
"Rails ahead destroyed for a hundred ters minimum. Coupling between locomotive and surviving carriages — sheared. Even with full equipnt and a repair crew, we’d need two days of work. We have neither."
He let that sink in.
Mirael sat against the overturned bar, her splinted arm resting on her lap, her good hand clutching a leather field journal she’d rescued from her destroyed carriage. She was writing in it, one-handed, with a focus that bordered on obsessive. Her spectacles were cracked down the middle, held together with a strip of dical tape.
Cassian stood near the broken window—what used to be a wall—his posture sohow still elegant despite the ruins around him. His expensive suit was torn and mud-caked, but he wore the damage like a fashion statent. He hadn’t spoken since the battle ended.
Lyra had positioned herself near the only exit, her back against the iron fra, her short swords laid across her thighs. The cheerful maid persona had flickered back into place like a mask being hastily re-tied, but the fit was wrong now. Everyone had seen her move during the crash. Everyone had noted how few scratches she bore.
Breaking the heavy silence.
Mirael looked up from her field journal.
"What about a distress signal? The ergency flare kit in the—"
"Magic-based," Dain cut her off.
"Dead Zone killed them before we crossed the periter."
"Mundane flares?"
"Smoke in this wind disperses within fifty ters. Nobody would see it past the first ridge."
Silence settled like snowfall. The kind of silence that preceded either a plan or a prayer.
Cassian closed his book. "How far to the edge of the suppression zone?"
"Thirty kiloters. Give or take." Dain’s jaw was tight. "Two days of marching through freezing temperatures with wounded who can barely stand, no shelter, and rations for maybe one day."
"So we walk," Revan said.
Everyone turned. Even Cassian lifted an eyebrow — the most emotion the Lord of House Voss had shown since the derailnt.
"Staying here is suicide," Revan continued, keeping his voice flat.
"We’re exposed, immobile, and running out of warmth. The Dead Zone temperature drops another ten degrees after dark. The wounded won’t survive two nights without shelter."
He paused. Made sure they were listening.
"But before we discuss routes or tilines, we need to solve the problem that nobody in this carriage wants to talk about."
"Which is?" Dain asked, though his eyes said he already knew.
Revan tilted his head toward the far end of the wreckage — where the cargo wagon sat, half-crushed, half-buried. Where the dormant monster waited.
"That thing is sitting on a battery that recharges from ambient mana. The mont we leave the Dead Zone, it wakes up. We’ll be two days’ march into exhaustion, and our reward for reaching civilization will be a nine-foot killing machine at our backs with a full charge."
Nobody spoke for a long mont.
Dain’s hand tightened on the hilt of his broadsword. "My orders are to secure the asset."
"Your orders were written by soone sitting in a warm office who assud the train would arrive intact." Revan t the Marshal’s gaze without flinching. "We’re a little past the original mission paraters, wouldn’t you say?"
The tension between them could have frozen the air further.
Cassian cleared his throat. "Perhaps we could—"
"There’s another problem," Lyra said quietly.
She hadn’t moved from her spot by the exit. Her short swords rested across her thighs, but her eyes were fixed on sothing outside — sothing Revan couldn’t see from his position.
"What?" Dain barked.
Lyra tilted her chin toward the northern ridge. The sa ridge the rcenaries had descended from during the attack. The sa ridge two survivors had fled toward when Revan let them go.
"We’re being watched."
***
Revan moved to the gap in the carriage wall and looked.
At first, he saw nothing. The ridge was a low, barren mound of frozen earth roughly three hundred ters north — featureless gray against a featureless gray sky. The kind of terrain that swallowed silhouettes whole.
Then: movent. Brief. A head ducking behind the crest.
Gone.
’Two rcenaries fled during the battle. I let them go because I didn’t have the stamina to chase. That was practical at the ti. Now it’s a liability.’
"How many?" Dain asked, already repositioning to observe.
"At least two confird runners from the initial assault," Revan said. "Could be more. They had a staging area behind that ridge — supply caches, communication equipnt. If any of it survived, they could have already sent word back."
"Sent word to whom?" Mirael asked.
The question hung in the air like a blade.
Revan didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Everyone in the carriage was thinking the sa thing — that the people who had hired the rcenaries would want a status report. And if that report said target alive, escort weakened, train disabled — then what ca next wouldn’t be a cleanup crew.
It would be a second wave.
Dain processed this with the efficient pragmatism of a career soldier. "Can they reach us?"
"They’re scouts now, not fighters," Revan said. "Two n, lightly ard, no reason to attack a group that just killed thirty of their comrades. They’re observing. Counting heads. Cataloguing our condition."
"Then we need to move before their report reaches anyone who can act on it."
"Agreed. But—"
"But we can’t move in the dark," Dain finished.
Revan nodded. "We have until dawn. After that, the clock starts."
"Alright. Dawn departure. That gives us—" he glanced at the darkening sky, "—roughly six hours. Inventory everything. Strip the dead — I don’t care about dignity, the living need their coats. Ration the water. Build a fire inside the carriage, not outside — I don’t want those scouts seeing how many of us can still move."
The group dispersed without ceremony.
Mirael retreated into her shattered research wagon, muttering chemical formulas under her breath. Lyra took position near the southern exit, her blades resting across her thighs, her eyes already locked on the northern ridge.
***
He stepped out into the killing cold and began the grim work that nobody else would do.
Stripping the dead.
The rcenary corpses were already stiffening. Rigor mortis set in faster in these temperatures — the cold accelerated the chemical processes, locking joints and freezing expressions into permanent masks of surprise and agony. Revan worked through them systematically, his hands numb, his mind cataloguing.
Coats — twelve usable. Underlayer padding — quilted, insulated, military-grade. Whoever equipped these n had spent real money.
Ration packs — six days’ worth across all the bodies. Sealed, compact, designed for extended field operations.
Canteens — four, frozen solid.
dical supplies — one field kit with alcohol, bandages, suturing thread.
Weapons — three functional carbines with limited ammunition. Various swords and halberds, most too heavy to carry on a march.
He worked in silence, his hands chanically unbuckling, searching, and stacking. His mind, however, was a violent storm of racing thoughts. The numbness of the freezing cold was slowly being replaced by a burning, bitter anger.
It started when he stripped the third body and found it: a small tattoo hidden beneath a leather bracer. An orchid with roots twisting into thorns. The Garden of Eternal Bloom. Then, in another pocket, he pulled out a decommissioned military dog tag. A ghost unit.
Revan stared at the cold, blood-stained tal in his numb fingers. Suddenly, all the scattered pieces of the night’s chaos clicked together into a perfectly ugly picture.
’Am I the only idiot here?’’ Revan realized, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth ached.
’Everyone else on this damn train knows exactly what they are doing. Everyone but .’
He shoved the tags into his pocket and moved to the next frozen corpse, yanking roughly at a clasped coat.
The evidence of their complicity was glaring now.
Dain barking protocol orders to "secure the asset" instead of showing a shred of surprise. Mirael obsessing over her "primary containers." Cassian analyzing the bloodbath like a bored theater critic.
And Sylvia. She had known the exact gap in that creature’s bone armor—the fourth and fifth vertebrae. That wasn’t a lucky guess in the heat of battle. That was intimate, precise knowledge.
’The obedient dog who got a ticket and an invitation to bleed. No briefing. No context. Just a blind at shield for whatever the hell they’re actually transporting.’
He dumped the heavy gear onto the frozen mud and looked up at the dark ridge. The unseen scouts were still out there, waiting for dawn.
Then he turned toward the shattered hull of the VIP carriage. Through the jagged gap in the tal, he saw Sylvia’s silhouette.
The anger finally boiled over. Revan took a heavy step forward, his hand slipping back into his pocket to grip the cold Garden tags. He was going to march in there, throw the tal tags at her feet, and demand the truth. He was done playing in the dark.
But as he closed the distance, the faint gray light shifted, revealing her face.
Revan stopped dead in his tracks.
Sylvia wasn’t just sitting in silence. Her expression was utterly terrifying—a mask of pure, glacial hostility. Her eyes were dark and hollow, radiating a silent, suffocating pressure that seed to warp the very air around her. It wasn’t the look of soone guarding a secret; it was the look of a predator one minor annoyance away from slaughtering the next thing that breathed in her direction.
The survival instinct that had kept him alive this long flared violently in his chest.
Revan stood motionless in the freezing wind. He slowly released his grip on the dog tags in his pocket, feeling the dangerous weight of the silence stretching between them.
’Right. Not today.’
He exhaled, watching his breath turn to white vapor, and quietly turned on his heel. Swallowing
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