Excerpt from BL fantasy novel in progress:

Chapter 1

Perched on a moonlit crag, Akul inhaled air laced with pine resin and damp earth. His breath misted in the predawn chill as he flexed his gloved hands. Below, the Ipai valley stretched before him, studded with stumps. Along the lakeshore where torchlight flickered, the villagers gathered, their murmurs drifting up to him like woodsmoke. 

Akul knew that beyond the clearing—beneath the frog croaks and insect chirps—steel tracks trembled. The plan was simple, yet the margins were thin: everyone off before the train reaches the river curve. The danger lay not only in the planned sabotage, but in ensuring the villagers safely escaped afterward.

A blue glimmer darted through the underbrush: an yvishda, no larger than a field mouse. In the Owikci northern peaks and tundras, the spirits manifested as towering bears or broad-shouldered yaks; but here in Ipai, they were brittle things. Akul remembered the one he’d seen a few days ago, a skeletal stag so frail it looked held together by grief. It was indicative of an interwoven affliction: when a land is flayed, the spirits wither. When the spirits die, often the soil forgets how to live.

His gaze swept the valley, every stump a shattered bone protruding from the earth, a testament to the Chain’s gluttony. For the past moon he’d seen the Chain’s hunger etched into the gaunt cheeks of the villagers. Their neighbors had already fled to labor in the very cities that’d consumed their former lives.

Akul looked toward the north where his own people, the Owikci, sat secure in their mountainous stronghold, wrapped in a shroud of their own perceived unassailability. Many times over the past ten years Akul had wondered, though: How long before the Chain’s iron veins creep into our territory, too? On his journey southward, he’d seen an omen of that future: an ore mine gnawing at the border of the Owikci Domain. He suspected the mine was the rotten fruit of his uncle’s complacency, or worse, complicity.

Kieran Lirran. The honored Owikci ambassador to Cascade City. Akul pushed the image of his uncle aside. They’d not spoken in a decade, not since Akul was under the ambassador’s begrudging charge during his year as a student in the Chain’s coastal capital. I’m sure we will meet again soon, Uncle.

Akul re-anchored himself to his Anakawa instead. The yearlong rite of passage traditionally consisted of a wandering through the clans of the Domain, communing with nature and the yvishda. Akul’s path had diverged from tradition. Spurning the powerlessness of his youth, he found agency not in meditation, but resistance—which he’d unexpectedly discovered here in Ipai.

Because he planned to leave the valley tomorrow, he let his mind drift to his arrival. He’d been bound for Cascade City, stowing away on a series of freights, when an impulse pulled him off in this ruined vale. The village headman, Ghorst, met him with a frozen wall of suspicion that thawed when Akul sat and listened to the history of Ipai’s slow strangulation. The village wasn’t just a logging camp; it was a centuries-old home turned to dirt as its harvests failed. The remaining villagers were bitter and ready; they’d merely lacked a catalyst to act.

Akul rose to his feet now with a wry smirk, the thrum of the locomotive from afar reverberating through the valley. I guess my mission extends beyond yours, Uncle. These people, they are not even our people. I’m about to engage in my first act as the Owikci “anti-ambassador.”

Confident of the train’s approach, he slid down a series of slopes and waded through a field of tall, dewy grass. Moisture seeped into his leather breeches as grasshoppers burst from the blades, their wings winking in the moonlight. A few clung to his thick hair. He batted them away before stepping into the torchlight where Ghorst stood addressing the villagers.

“The train comes,” Akul told the headman.

Ghorst’s knuckles blanched around his walking stick. With a voice like gravel and grit, he cut through the murmurs: “Douse the flames! To the tracks!” Catching Akul’s eye, he offered a single, grateful nod.

The villagers dispersed while Akul scanned the darkness for his borrowed family. He found them beneath the weeping fronds of a willow tree. Borum leaned heavily against its trunk, a bottle dangling from his grip. Prosha watched her father with quiet resignation. Her younger brother Yip clutched a torch like a weapon. 

For the the past moon, Akul had toiled beside them in their fields, his efforts barely dulling the edge of their hardship. For the village’s last stand, Borum had sworn sobriety, but—

“Papa won’t be joining us.” Prosha smoothed damp hair from her father’s brow.

“Yeah….” Yip scuffed the dirt. “He can’t even stand now.”

“Stay with the tree, Papa.” Prosha pressed a kiss to his forehead. “And don’t drown yourself.”

Yip hurled the torch into the lake where it sputtered out with a hiss.

Akul held aside the willow’s tendrils for the siblings to pass. Moonlight gilded their faces as they joined the others—thirty-odd shadows hunched along the railside. Axes passed from hand to hand, their edges glinting in the gloom. They were followed by blankets for hiding under when the train drew near.

Ghorst stood on the tracks, his white hair a pale banner. “I’m too old to swing steel and…jettison logs from a moving train. But I will surely bear witness. The magnates of Cascade City may have destroyed our precious valley, but we’ll at least force them to remember we exist!”

“For Ipai!” a voice shouted, as Ghorst stepped aside. 

Warmth surged in Akul’s chest. It was great honor to help write the village’s epitaph, rather than letting it die forgotten. The derailment was designed to hurt no one but the Chain’s coffers. It was to be Ipai’s final, defiant act for reclaiming dignity before its inhabitants said goodbye to their home.

The earth trembled with the locomotive’s approach, the vibrations climbing Akul’s legs. Its mechanical thunder swallowed the valley’s night chorus, drowning out the frogs and insects. From the undergrowth, a covey of quail burst into the air, their wings beating panic into the dark. Among them, two yvishda flickered like embers, fleeing the iron beast.

When Akul snugged wax plugs into his ears, Yip tugged his sleeve. “You’re the only Owikci here!” the boy cried. “We need your heightened senses! Though we should probably hide your glow-in-the-dark eyes.”

“I can still hear everything.” Akul tapped one plugged ear. “I just can’t let the train ruin my ears.” He drew a blanket over himself and the boy, and they both peeked out.

The locomotive was slowed by the incline, but exploded into view. Smoke vomited from its stack in greasy waves, veiling shadowed figures in the dimly-lit cab. Liovana, no doubt. The Chain always assigns them such roles, Akul thought. Twenty or so cars back, a brakeman would likely be nursing a flask in the caboose.

As ore cars rattled past, their clickety-clack punched through Akul’s earplugs. He reviewed the operation in his mind: the villagers split evenly between two log cars, and his own treacherous task between the cars.

“Now!” he called out, the blanket flying off as he lunged forward, Yip and the other villagers quick at his heels.

The last of the ore cars clattered beside them, followed by low-sided flatcars with loads secured by hinged metal stanchions. On each car, two great stacks of logs were separated by wooden posts, the logs further secured in place with chains. 

Akul’s and the villagers’ thrown axes arced through the air, thudding onto the top of the timber of the first two log cars.

On the car’s side, Akul seized the short ladder; the cold iron bit through his gloves. He hauled himself up, boots scrambling for purchase on the rough bark until he could hook an arm around a stanchion; he climbed onto the summit of the pile. From the opposite side, the lumberjack named Thom appeared, his face hewn between anger and absolution.

The car wobbled and rocked, while more villagers clambered aboard, their expressions taut with apprehension and resolve. Akul looked to the second car. Prosha and Yip clung to a stanchion, the wind whipping at their clothes. He watched until they safely gained the top of their log stack, bracing themselves against gusts.

Thom was already at work, swinging an axe. Sparks danced as sharp steel bit into dull iron links. 

“Feels good,” he grunted to Akul between blows, “to cut the Chain’s bonds for once.” He and other villagers snapped the chains securing their stack of logs, jangling the chains aside.

Meanwhile, Akul edged toward the shuddering divide between the two cars. He dropped to his haunches, and peered into the shadows beneath the log piles where a dizzying strip of moonlight flickered over the moving tracks. There, on the bulkhead, were spaced-apart iron turn-releases for the stanchions. Across the coupling, on the car Prosha and Yip were on, were two more.

“I see them!" Akul called. “Are the chains loose?” 

Thom and Prosha confirmed from their respective cars. 

“Okay, I am heading down. Everyone, move to your secure stack!” 

Akul found a foothold and climbed carefully down the sides of logs and rounded the edge of the deck. On a narrow nook, he steadied himself on three limbs and perilously kicked at the greased release. With a shriek of protesting metal, the release eventually turned, and the unlocked stanchions on the right side of the car swung down, the stack of logs shifting. They began tumbling off the train with a series of heavy thuds.

“Careful now!” Thom shouted to the villagers. From his dangerous nook, Akul imagined them climbing down from the still-secure stack to unload any residual logs.

 He gingerly crawled across the coupling to turn the release on the second car. The other load of logs crashed onto the gravel. He pictured Prosha and Yip also climbing down from their stack.

By the time he made his way back to the deck of the first car, Thom and the other villagers had nearly finished rolling off the remaining logs. He assisted with the final, monstrous one, everyone straining against it until it tipped over the edge. When the weight released, the car lurched upward and villagers stumbled, grabbing for each other as the deck tilted.

Across the gap, Prosha’s group was still struggling with their logs.

“I’ve got them!” Thom hollered, already leaping across the divide.

Akul wiped sweat from his brow as he took in the fretful expressions of those around him. 

“We leave now,” he reminded, “before this car jumps the tracks!” At that, the villagers anxiously queued at the ladders. Some found sure footing on the iron rungs, jumping onto the passing ground, while others simply leapt from the edge into swaying tall grasses.

Akul remained and scanned the surroundings. The train was now traversing a vast, dark and angled plain. The locomotive, its smoke staining a star-flecked break in the clouds, would soon regain speed before the bend at the Liovana River. Somewhere on that curve lay their goal: the sharper turn alongside the river where an unbalanced car would ideally derail and even plunge the rest of the train into the ravine.

A triumphant shout from Yip drew Akul’s attention. The boy waved from the neighboring car as their final log tumbled into the night. His brilliant grin vanished when the car angled ominously from the shifted weight. He regained his balance and grinned again.

Akul snorted in faint amusement. But then he spotted a figure in the distance—The brakeman!—sprinting along the log stacks with a lantern swinging wildly.

“The brakeman is coming!” Akul yelled over the din. Despite everything else going to plan, the predawn darkness had apparently not concealed the dispatched logs as had been hoped.

Something else moved alongside the train. A lone wolf yvishda running in tandem with the brakeman—scrawny with hunger, but resolute. 

Befuddled, Akul stared at it. I thought yvishda stay far from trains.

An orderly panic rippled through the remaining villagers on the second car who’d only just begun to abscond. They funneled toward the ladders like rats from a flooding hold—all but Thom. He climbed atop the still-secure pile of logs, raising an axe.

“Thom!” Akul stepped toward the edge of his car. “Our goal is closure for Ipai! Not implicating ourselves. We are not here to hurt anyone!”

Thom watched the others leaving, including Prosha and Yip. He laughed and shouted back, “They took everything from Ipai! Let’s see them take me!” 

Akul sighed, his cheeks puffing out. He doubted Thom intended to hurt the brakeman, but only, as Ghorst put it, show him he “exists.” The last of the villagers disappeared into the dark and Akul’s choice crystallized. Flee with them to preserve his Anakawa’s purpose, or stay for one irresponsible lumberjack. For a moment, he delayed, his eyes darting toward where the wolf yvishda had been—but it’d vanished. 

Akul turned to leave too late. The brakeman sprang onto Thom’s car. 

He was dark-skinned, a Liovana a few years younger than Akul, his chest heaving as he took in the lowered stanchions and the gutted car, his face cycling through shock and confusion. From his haste across the cars, his uniform cap sat askew on his head.

“Wha—?” His voice cracked as he lifted his lantern toward Thom and the brandished axe. “Do you know how dangerous this is?”

Not anger, accusation or even fright. Just raw concern and bewilderment. Akul felt something tighten in his chest.

The brakeman’s eyes—light brown, Akul noted absurdly—snapped down at Akul and squinted. “Are you Owikci? What are you—?” The brakeman gasped as the cars rounded the curve and a terrible screech came from their wheels. 

Instinctively, Akul covered his ears with his hands.

The brakeman’s expression shifted to dawning horror as he surveyed the distance. “We’re only a couple minutes from the sharp bend of the river!” He moved with sudden determination, disregarding Thom’s empty bluster, vaulting down from the log stack and fumbling with his lantern, twisting its base to reveal a ruby-red lens.

The brakeman leapt onto Akul’s car, ran past him, and scrambled up the ladder of the adjoining ore car. His silhouette was backlit by the red lantern attached to his belt hook as he climbed. On the edge of the higher car—a better vantage point—he lifted the lantern, waving it vigorously as a signal to the far-off engineer to stop the train.

He turned back and looked down at Akul whose heart skipped a beat. 

“Please!” He pointed to an iron-spoked wheel brake at the front of the log car. “Turn that!”

Akul gaped at it, flummoxed. Is he serious? “But we’re the ones sabotaging your train!” 

The hurt that flashed across the young man’s face struck Akul.

Thom put a hand on Akul’s shoulder. “Let’s move.”

With annoyance at Thom for getting them into this situation, Akul hesitated, worried for the brakeman’s well-being. He gripped the ladder, watching the brakeman rush down to turn the wheel brake himself. A grinding metallic wail joined an already deafening clangor as sparks erupted from the train’s locking wheels. 

Akul hit the gravel, his boots barely cushioning the impact. He and Thom dashed from the train to distance themselves as the two unbalanced cars careened off the tracks. Their massive frames angled at a deadly slant. A few of the following cars jackknifed, also derailing.

A wave of worry sent Akul jogging alongside the slowing train, searching for the brakeman. 

He spotted him, thankfully, turning brakes on the many still-railed cars, bringing the train to a gradual halt.

Akul breathed a sigh of relief, his chest loosening. He looked to the calm flow of the wide Liovana River, and wondered, oddly hoped his and the brakeman’s paths would cross again. 

Then he considered, having been seen, how his Owikci status could pose a problem. 

He rejoined the villagers who were waiting jubilantly in a nearby wood, some of them, including Prosha and Yip, dancing in celebration. With them, he disappeared into the dawn.