Chapter 1

Perched on a moonlit crag, Akul inhaled crisp air laced with the scents of pine resin and damp earth. His breath misted in the predawn chill as he flexed his gloved hands. The Ipai valley spread before him, studded with stumps.

Torchlight flickered along the lakeshore below where the villagers gathered, their murmurs drifting up to him. Beyond the stumps, Akul knew steel tracks trembled with the rumble of an approaching freight train. Beneath the croaks of frogs and chirps of insects, he heard the still-distant groan of the locomotive.

Our plan is simple enough, but still rather dangerous, he thought. His concern extended beyond the operation itself, but to the escape, when everyone needed to be clear from the train before it curved along the river.

A blue glimmer darted through underbrush: an yvishda, small as a field mouse. In the forests of his homeland, the spirits sometimes took the form of towering bears or yaks, but here in Ipai, they were a pale echo, diminished in both size and character. Yesterday, he’d seen one shaped as a skeletal stag, a mirror of the village’s despair.

Like shattered bones protruding from the earth, each stump testified to Ipai’s fate: a land gutted by the Chain’s hunger for timber. He’d seen that hunger etched into calloused hands and gaunt cheeks, and passed homes abandoned by those now laboring in the Chain’s cities, feeding the very machine that had consumed their former lives. The Chain’s mills, mines, and rail lines spread like a blight, leaving remnants like Ipai in their wake.

Akul’s own people, the Owikci, secure in their northern mountain stronghold, believed themselves untouchable. But since leaving the Owikci Domain a moonspan ago, he had wondered more than once: How long before the Chain’s iron veins creep into our territory, too? He’d already encountered an ore mine gnawing at their southern border—its existence, he suspected, the rotten fruit of his uncle’s complacency, or worse, complicity.

Kieran Lirran, the honored Owikci ambassador to Cascade City. Akul took a sharp breath and pushed the stubborn man from his mind. They’d not seen one another since Akul’s time as a student under his uncle’s charge in the Chain’s coastal capital ten years ago.

Now, in the cold clarity of this early morning, purpose steadied him, as the powerlessness of his youth had given way to agency, granted by his Anakawa, the yearlong Owikci rite of passage. Traditionally, one’s Anakawa meant wandering among the clans of the Domain, communing with nature and the yvishda. But Akul had chosen a different path: clandestine resistance against the Chain’s encroachment, far beyond his homeland’s borders.

After leaving the Domain, he’d slipped onto a series of freight trains bound for Cascade City; on impulse, he’d disembarked here, in Ipai. The village headman, an elder named Ghorst, had first greeted him with wary suspicion, then the distrust thawed as the old man recounted Ipai’s slow death. Generations of tranquility undone by deforestation, the land flayed, its soil eroded. Harvests failed; the population dwindled. Unlike other logging villages born and buried by the Chain’s hunger, Ipai had endured for centuries before its imminent collapse.

With the thrum of the freight train now reverberating through the valley, Akul rose to his feet, a wry smirk touching his lips. This morning marks my first act as an “anti-ambassador.” It seems my mission extends beyond yours, Uncle. These people—they aren’t even our people.

Confident of the train’s approach, Akul 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 hair and he batted them away before stepping into the torchlight where Ghorst stood addressing the villagers.

“It comes,” Akul told him.

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

As the villagers dispersed, Akul scanned the darkness for his borrowed family. He found them beneath the weeping fronds of a willow. Borum leaned heavily against its trunk, a bottle dangling from his grip, while Prosha watched her father with quiet resignation; Yip clutched a torch like a weapon. In his short time in Ipai, Akul had toiled beside them in their fields, his efforts barely dulling the edge of their hardship. For Ipai’s last stand, Borum had sworn sobriety, 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 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, 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.” Sorrow roughened his voice. “But I will bear witness. The magnates of Cascade City may ignore us, 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 planned to depart Ipai tomorrow—onward with his Anakawa—but the village’s tenacious heart had forever etched itself into his own. Even as Ipai’s first and likely last act of resistance proved ephemeral, participating in it felt like a privilege.

The earth trembled as the locomotive approached, its 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 the undergrowth, their wings beating panic into the dark. Two yvishda flickered among them like embers, fleeing the iron beast.

When Akul snugged wax plugs into his ears, Yip tugged his sleeve. “You’re the only Owikci here! We need your heightened senses!”

“I can still hear everything,” Akul assured him, tapping one plugged ear. “I just can’t let the train ruin my ears.” He drew a blanket over himself and the boy.

The locomotive, slowed by an incline, exploded into view. Smoke vomited from its stack in greasy waves, veiling shadowed figures in the dimly-lit cab—Liovana, no doubt, as the Chain always assigned them such roles. 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. The noise spurred a buried memory: Cascade City, a sneering classmate snatching the plugs from his hand and grinding them underfoot on the cobblestones. Akul shook his head, scattering the recollection. 

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

As the last of the ore cars clattered beside them, axes arced through the air, thudding onto the stacked timber of the first two log cars. These were low-sided flatcars, their loads secured by hinged metal stanchions, and on each car, two great stacks of logs were separated by wooden posts and secured with chains.

Akul seized the short ladder on the car’s side, the 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 and climb onto the summit of the pile. From the opposite side, the lumberjack Thom appeared, his face hewn between anger and absolution.

The car wobbled and rocked, as more villagers clambered aboard, their expressions taut with apprehension and resolve. Akul’s gaze swept to the second car, where 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 steel struck iron links. “Feels good,” he grunted to Akul between blows, “to cut the Chain’s bonds for once.” He and the others snapped the chains securing one stack of logs.

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

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

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 side 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, it eventually turned, and the locked stanchions on one 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 as the villagers climbed down from the still-secure stack.

Treacherously, Akul crossed the coupling and turned the release on the second car, the other load of logs crashing onto the gravel. When he returned to the deck of the first car, the 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. As 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, leaping across the divide.

Akul wiped sweat from his brow, taking in the fretful, excited expressions of those around him. “We leave now,” he reminded, “before this car jumps the tracks!” At that, the villagers queued anxiously at the ladders. One by one, they jumped onto the passing ground.

Akul scanned the surroundings. The train was traversing a vast, dark and angled plain, and 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: a sharp 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 his attention. The boy waved from the neighboring car as their final log tumbled into the night, his brilliant grin vanishing when their car angled ominously from the shifted weight.

Akul snorted in faint amusement. Then he spotted a figure in the distance sprinting along the log stacks with a lantern swinging wildly.

“The brakeman’s coming!” Akul yelled over the din. Evidently, despite everything else going to plan, their hope that the predawn darkness would conceal the dispatched logs had been misplaced.

Something else moved alongside the train: a lone wolf yvishda running in tandem with the brakeman. Akul stared at it, befuddled. But I thought yvishda stay far from trains…. 

Orderly panic rippled through the remaining villagers. They funneled toward the ladders like rats from a flooding hold—all but Thom. The lumberjack climbed atop the remaining pile of logs and raised an axe, not in threat, but invitation.

“Thom!” Akul stepped toward the edge of his car. “We cannot risk implicating ourselves. And we’re not here to hurt anyone!”

Thom watched the others absconding, 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. I should have anticipated this from someone with so little left to lose.

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 reckless lumberjack. For a moment, he delayed, his eyes darting toward where the wolf yvishda had been—but it’d vanished. He turned to leave too late, as the brakeman sprang onto Thom’s car. 

He was dark-skinned, a Liovana man 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. His uniform cap sat askew on his head from his haste.

“Wha—?” His voice cracked as he lifted his lantern, his attention shifting to Thom and his raised 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 him and squinted. “Are you Owikci? What are you—?” He gasped as the cars rounded the sharper curve and a terrible screech came from their wheels.

Instinctively, Akul covered his ears with his hands as he grimaced.

The brakeman’s expression shifted to dawning horror. Ignoring Thom, he moved with sudden determination, vaulting down from the log stack and wrenching open a steel compartment at the end of the car. He dropped his lantern for a red-tinted one. Flint sparked, flame bloomed. 

He leapt onto Akul’s car, ran past him, and scrambled up the ladder of the adjoining ore car. As he climbed, his silhouette was backlit by the red lantern attached to his belt hook. 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.

When he turned back and looked down at Akul, Akul’s heart skipped a beat. “Please!” he urged, pointing 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.”

Akul hesitated. 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. When Akul hit the gravel, his boots barely cushioned the impact. Almost immediately after he and Thom distanced themselves, the two unbalanced cars careened off the tracks, their massive frames angling at a deadly slant. The following car jackknifed, also derailing.

A wave of worry sent Akul jogging alongside the slowing train. Thankfully, the brakeman had already leapt onto the next car, turning its brake with swift precision—and then the next, working to bring 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, wondering, oddly hoping his and the brakeman’s paths would cross again someday. Then he realized having been seen, his Owikci status could pose a problem. He rejoined the villagers who were waiting jubilantly in a nearby wood. With them, he disappeared into the dawn.