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 misting in the predawn chill as he flexed his gloved hands. Below, the Ipai Valley stretched before him, studded with stumps. Where torchlight flickered along the lakeshore, the villagers gathered, their murmurs drifting up to him like woodsmoke. 

Beyond the clearing—beneath the croaks of frogs and chirr of insects—Akul sensed the tremor of steel tracks. The plan was simple, yet the margins were thin: everyone off before the train reaches the river curve. The danger lay not only in sabotaging it, but in ensuring the villagers could safely escape before the derailment.

Just then, a blue glimmer darted through the underbrush: an yvishda, no larger than a field mouse.

In the peaks and tundras of Akul’s homeland the spirits manifested as towering bears or broad-shouldered yaks, but here in Ipai they were brittle things. A few days ago, one yvishda in the shape of a skeletal stag had been so frail that Akul thought it was held together by grief. Such apparitions signaled an interwoven affliction: when a land is flayed, the spirits wither; when the spirits die, the soil sometimes 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 whose 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 unassailable in their mountainous stronghold, the Owikci Domain. Yet 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 possible future: an ore mine gnawing on the Domain’s border.

Akul suspected the mine was the rotten fruit of his uncle’s complacency, or worse, complicity. He pressed his lips thin. Kieran Lirran, the honored Owikci ambassador to Cascade City.

He immediately pushed the image of his uncle aside. They’d not spoken in a decade, not since he’d 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, Akul 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 unexpectedly found here in this small valley village of 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 by the Chain. The village was no logging camp; it was a centuries-old home turned to dust in less than decade by deforestation as its harvests failed. The remaining villagers were bitter and ready. They had only lacked a catalyst to act.

With a wry smirk, Akul rose to his feet, the thrum of the locomotive now reverberating through the valley. My mission extends beyond yours, Uncle. 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. Grasshoppers burst from the blades, their wings winking in the moonlight, as moisture seeped into Akul’s leather breeches. A few of the bugs clung to his thick black hair. He batted them away before stepping into the torchlight where Ghorst stood addressing the villagers.

“The train comes,” Akul whispered into the headman’s ear. 

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 against the tree’s trunk, a bottle dangling from his grip. Prosha watched her father with quiet resignation, as 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. Borum had sworn sobriety for the village’s last stand, but—

“Papa won’t be joining us.” Prosha smoothed damp hair from his 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 young 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. He felt 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. This would be Ipai’s final, defiant act to reclaim dignity before everyone 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 nearby undergrowth into the air, their wings beating panic into the dark. Among them, two yvishda flickered like embers, fleeing the iron beast.

Akul snugged his wax plugs into his ears, but 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.”

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

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

The engineer and the stoker. Liovana, no doubt. 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 in his mind: the villagers would split evenly between the first two log cars, while he engaged own treacherous task between the two cars.

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

As the last of the ore cars clattered beside them, low-sided flatcars followed with loads of logs secured by hinged metal stanchions. Each car had two great stacks of logs separated by wooden posts. The dead trees were secured additionally with chains. 

Akul and some villagers threw their axes, which thudded onto the top of the timber stack on the first log car, while a second batch of axes landed on the stack of the second car.

Akul seized the short ladder on the 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 log pile. From the opposite side of the car, Thom the lumberjack appeared with a face hewn between anger and absolution.

The car wobbled and rocked, as 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 to Akul between blows, “to cut the Chain’s bonds for once.” He and other villagers eventually snapped the chains securing their stack of logs, jangling them aside.

Akul meanwhile 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 jutting from the steel were two turn-wheels for the stanchions. Across the coupling on the car that 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’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. 

He steadied himself on a narrow nook on three limbs and perilously kicked at the turn-wheel, which was thankfully greased. With a shriek of protesting metal, it turned, unlocking the stanchions on the right side of the car; they swung down, the stack of logs shifting. The logs began tumbling off the train with a series of heavy thuds.

“Careful now!” Thom shouted to the villagers. Akul imagined them climbing down as planned from the still-secure stack to unload any residual logs. He himself gingerly crawled across the coupling to turn the release on the second car. Its load of logs also crashed onto the gravel.

By the time Akul made his way back to the deck, Thom and the other villagers had nearly finished rolling off all 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 stumbled, grabbing for each other as the deck tilted.

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

“I’ve got them!” Thom hollered, and leapt across the divide.

Akul wiped sweat from his brow, noticing fretful faces on those around him. “We leave now,” he reminded everyone, “before this car jumps the tracks!” 

The villagers anxiously queued at the ladders. While some found sure footing on the iron rungs, jumping onto the passing ground, others simply thew themselves from the edge into swaying tall grasses.

Akul remained, scanning 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 ultimate goal: the sharper turn alongside the river where the now unbalanced cars 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 as their car angled ominously from the shifted weight. When he regained his balance, he grinned again.

Akul snorted in faint amusement. 

Then his stomach dropped as 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. The predawn darkness had apparently not concealed the dispatched logs as had been hoped.

Something else moved alongside the train in tandem with the brakeman. A lone wolf yvishda keeping pace. Scrawny with hunger, but resolute.

Akul stared at the wolf spirit 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 who climbed atop the still-secure pile of logs, brandishing an axe.

“Thom!” Akul stepped toward the edge of his car. “Our aim is closure…for Ipai! Not implicating everyone. 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 could only hope Thom did not intend to actually hurt the brakeman, but just, as Ghorst put it, show him he “exists.”

As the last of the villagers disappeared into the dark, Akul’s choice for himself crystallized. Flee to preserve his anakawa’s purpose, or stay for one irresponsible lumberjack. For a moment, he delayed, as his eyes darted toward where the wolf yvishda had been—

Gone.

Too late, as the brakeman sprang onto Thom’s car. 

Dark-skinned—he was 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. His haste across the cars had made his uniform cap sit askew on his head.

“Wha—?” The brakeman’s 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. “An Owikci? What are you—?” The brakeman gasped as the cars rounded the curve and a terrible screech came from the wheels.

Akul covered his ears with his hands.

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

The brakeman leapt onto Akul’s car, and Akul took a step back. He ran past him, and scrambled up the ladder of the adjoining ore car. The brakeman’s 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 to look 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 this 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. As he gripped the ladder, he watched 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 hard, tucking his shoulder into a roll to dissipate the momentum. As he barreled, Thom crashed down just behind him. On their feet, they dashed from the train as the two unbalanced cars careened off the tracks, their massive frames angling at a deadly slant. The following cars—a few of them, 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 still-railed cars, bringing the train to a gradual halt.

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

Then Akul realized, having been seen by the young Liovana man, his own Owikci status could pose a problem. 

Akul rejoined the villagers waiting jubilantly in a nearby wood. Some of them, including Prosha and Yip, danced in celebration. He disappeared with them into the dawn.