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. 

He sensed, beyond the clearing—beneath the croaks of frogs and chirr of insects—the tremor of steel tracks. The village’s plan was simple, yet the margins were thin. Everyone off before it reaches the river curve. The danger lay not only in the sabotage of the train, but in ensuring the villagers could safely escape afterward.

Just then, a blue glimmer darted through the underbrush: an yvishda, no larger than a field mouse. Though in the northern peaks and tundras the spirits manifested as towering bears or broad-shouldered yaks, here in Ipai they were brittle things. A few days ago, one spirit in the shape of a skeletal stag had been so frail it seemed held together by grief. Such apparitions signaled an interwoven affliction: when a land is flayed, the spirits wither; when the spirits die, the soil often forgets how to live.

Akul’s 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 witnessed the Chain’s hunger etched into the gaunt cheeks of the villagers. Their neighbors had already fled to labor in the very cities that had consumed their former lives. 

In the north, his own people, the Owikci, believed themselves secure in their mountainous stronghold, wrapped in a shroud of their own perceived unassailability. Many times, over the past decade, Akul had wondered: How long before the Chain’s iron veins creep into our territory, too? On his journey southward came an omen of that future. An ore mine gnawing at the border of the Owikci Domain.

Akul suspected it was the rotten fruit of his uncle’s complacency, or worse, complicity. He shook his head. Kieran Lirran, the honored Owikci ambassador to Cascade City. He pushed the image of his uncle aside. They’d not spoken in a decade, not since Akul spent a year as a visiting student in the Chain’s coastal capital under the ambassador’s begrudging charge. 

I am sure we will meet again soon, Uncle.

Instead, he re-anchored himself to his anakawa, the yearlong rite of passage traditionally spent wandering among 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’d found agency not in meditation within his deceptively safe homeland, but in resistance beyond it, which he’d unexpectedly discovered here in Ipai.

Since 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 the Chain’s freighters, when an impulse pulled him off in this ruined vale. The village headman, Ghorst, met him with a frozen wall of suspicion, which thawed when Akul sat and listened to the history of Ipai’s slow strangulation. The village was no logging camp; it was a centuries-old home turned to dust by deforestation as its harvests failed. The remaining villagers were bitter and ready; they’d only lacked a catalyst to act.

Akul rose to his feet with a wry smirk, the thrum of the coming locomotive now 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.

Akul walked up beside Ghorst and whispered, “The train comes.”

The headman’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 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 Borum’s 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 blades glinting in the gloom. This was 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 today we force them to remember we exist!”

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

Warmth surged in Akul’s chest. It was a 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. Ipai’s final, defiant act would reclaim 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. A covey of quail burst from a nearby undergrowth 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 probably should 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 Yip, and they both peeked out.

The locomotive, slowed by the incline, exploded into view. Smoke vomited from its stack in greasy waves, veiling shadowed figures in the dimly-lit cab. 

Liovana, no doubt, Akul thought. The Chain always puts them in such roles. 

Twenty or so cars back, the 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: the villagers would split evenly between two log cars, as he engaged 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 of logs secured by hinged metal stanchions. On each car, two great stacks of logs were separated by wooden posts. The dead trees were additionally secured with chains. 

Akul’s and some villagers’ thrown axes arced through the air, then thudded onto the top of the timber stack on the first log car. A second batch of axes hit the stack on the second car.

Akul seized the short ladder on the first car’s side, cold iron biting 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 of the car, 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. 

On the second car, Prosha and Yip clung to a stanchion, the wind whipping at their clothes. Akul 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 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.

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, spaced-apart, turn-releases for the stanchions jutted from the steel. Across the coupling, on the car Prosha and Yip were on, two more were visable.

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

Thom and Prosha confirmed from their respective cars. 

“Okay, I’m 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 release, which was thankfully greased. With a shriek of protesting metal, the release 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. Akul then pictured Prosha and Yip also climbing down from their stack.

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

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

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

Akul wiped sweat from his brow as he took in the fretful faces 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 traversed 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. The boy waved from the neighboring car as their final log tumbled into the night. His brilliant grin vanished when their car angled ominously from the shifted weight. He regained his balance and grinned again.

Akul snorted in faint amusement. Then his stomach dropped as he spotted a figure in the distance.

The brakeman! 

He sprinted 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. 

Akul stared at it befuddled. 

I thought yvishda stay far from trains. 

An orderly panic rippled through the remaining villagers on the second car who had 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 leave, 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.”

As the last of the villagers disappeared into the dark, 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—

It’s gone. 

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 heaved 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 his 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. “You’re Owikci? What are you—?” The brakeman gasped as the cars rounded the curve and a terrible screech came from their wheels.

Akul covered his ears with his hands.

As he surveyed the distance, the brakeman’s expression shifted to dawning horror. “We’re only a couple minutes from the sharp bend of the river!” Disregarding Thom’s empty bluster, he moved with sudden determination, 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. Akul 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 turning brakes on the many still-railed cars, bringing the train to a gradual halt.

Akul breathed a sigh of relief, his chest loosening. When his own legs came to a standstill, he lost himself in the calm flow of the wide Liovana River, seeing the brakeman’s face in his mind.

Then he realized, having been seen by him, his Owikci status could pose a problem. 

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