A railway station is something that can generate a city.

Pre-Fall saying

The aftermath of the battle took a long time to unwind. While half of the levies had basically frozen in place, many had run, including a few in the northern forest, which was as perilous as the southern wood from which the beast had come. The horse-riding advance scouts rejoined the main group after over an hour and were quickly put to the task of roping in as many stragglers they could find. Thankfully – for the soldiers – most people were fearful of running alone into the Narrows.

Laura had little difficulty helping the coughing and sickened soldiers and a couple of Valettans that had breathed the noxious cloud. However, she hit her limits on damage inflicted on the soldiers. She couldn’t fix the two who had torn their hands from the shocks transmitted along the spear shafts by the mass of the beast. Rather than drop them, they had kept a death grip on the spear shafts and ended with partially disabled hands. One of the soldiers, who served as a company medic, said the wounds looked more like torn ligaments than broken bones or wrists. The surface wounds, she cleaned easily, but the deeper damage was unfixable by her abilities, and the soldiers would have to wait until the hands healed naturally.

“I think I need to heal it immediately. If I wait, it’s too late,” she said after she joined the other three.

Despite the problem, the looks, both from the levies and the soldiers, had changed though. The demonstration of their abilities had suddenly raised their status to quasi-legendary, the kind of people who are featured in epic novels. Even Peter, despite the fact that his actions hadn’t been visibly Heroic, got some recognition, as well as Franz Nader.

“You got guts. And good grip, too,” Sergeant Mord told the two of them, slapping them on their shoulders.

Johanna came to ask the adjutant about the fighting. Captain Devereaux had been warning them prior to the Narrows, but that beast seemed pretty horrifying.

“No, usually, the road is safe. As safe as it can be, I mean. I hear about a caravan running into trouble or, worse, going missing maybe once a year, in bad years,” the adjutant said.

“Deep Changed don’t come out, usually,” the captain confirmed.

“You’ve seen those beasts?”

“Not that particular variant, no. But I’ve been leading an expedition in the deep mana zones a couple of years ago. We were trying to find a safe passage across it, to potentially get behind enemy lines.”

“And what happened?” she asked.

“Nine set out. Only two of us came back. We got waylaid and stumbled on a lair of one of those monsters. We actually managed to kill it… but not before it did most of us in,” he answered, his gaze taking a distant far-away look.

“Oh.”

“That happens. We were all volunteers, anyway. Going in the mana zones isn’t for anyone. But that was the end of that particular idea.”

He looked at Johanna from head to toe, before adding, “Although with the right team…”

“Won’t happen,” the adjutant immediately said. “Not worth the risk.”

“Who knows, yea. Anyway, I’d better get this clusterfuck sorted.”

The captain saluted and turned back toward the gathering of people.

Sleep was hard to come that night for Johanna. The delay meant they had to make camp in the Narrows after all, and despite the fact that the safe zone had widened, and the trees around seemed all perfectly normal, she found herself looking for traces of mana.

She found none, of course. She could spot very heavy concentrations, pooled mana, and magical items, but no beasts nor even that monstrous “hedgehog” registered. And if she spotted a skill being used, it meant that she’d spotted the skill too late and the beast was already there. The fact that soldiers had gone to heightened guard and even allowed volunteers to stand guard as well did little to calm her nerves.

She’d also discussed the various bits of the attack with the rest of the team at dinner time.

“So, you saw me fix that fallen soldier,” Laura had said.

“Yes. Exactly as I saw the beast activating its own abilities. Or that merchant back in Valetta. I have no idea what he was actually doing, but I’m sure he was using some form of magical ability.”

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“Does that mean I’m a sorceress, not a saint?”

“I have no idea whatsoever. I don’t see anything special when you fix minor wounds. Or when you use your gaze against enemies. There’s obviously something different between the two, but what is it, I have no idea.”

“Maybe you can’t see less powerful magic?” Tom mused.

Laura thought about it.

“The bone or trauma fixing is potent, but needs to be done quickly or it fails, while the surface wounds, I can do at any time. It looks different, not just more or less powerful.”

“So, it’s a kind of mystery,” Peter said.

“All of that is a mystery. It’s always easy in novels. They always know exactly how magic works,” Johanna grumbled before looking at Tom.

“Although I’m now wondering if you don’t have magic too?”

“What? Me?”

“Figuring out that a beast was tracking us,” Peter explained.

“It’s… like an instinct? Honestly, it felt a bit weird. Like knowing without knowing what I know. Anyway, we got Laura with a new trick against that Changed creature,” Tom replied.

“It’s starting to be real, real worrisome,” she acknowledged. “I’m wondering what the Church will have to say about me. I don’t fit the saint profile… even discounting what you said about sorcerous ability, Jo.”

“I’m starting to get jealous, honestly,” Peter said.

The three turned to him.

“You get all the abilities, and I’m just hiding and…”

“Well, that’s the point,” Laura said to her husband. “You’re the hidden force behind. Remember how those Lepuses couldn’t touch you, but you rarely miss? That’s the right stuff.”

Then she grinned.

“It’s not the size of your abilities that counts, it’s how you use them.”

Peter rolled his eyes.

The column finally came out of the woods to find the road passing by a group of houses, most of them of modern construction, with a small seven-feet wall surrounding them. But there was one Ancient-looking building halfway built into the palisade, and not far from it, Johanna noticed a weird sight.

There were two parallel bars of steel over wooden slats laid over gravel. They ran out from the cluster of houses toward the east.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Ancient ‘railroad’. It was used for transportation before the Fall. Still is, actually,” the adjutant answered, before gesturing at the captain.

“Okay, we are going to make camp here. That’s our final resupply point for the last leg of the trip,” Devereaux yelled with his usual voice.

The news was greeted by some cheers. The levy column had been relatively spared from weather, although the last three days had been extremely overcast and slightly humid, without actual rain. But between Avon and here, they’d seen little sign of human habitation.

A pair of people with heavy overalls came out of one of the buildings and started talking with the captain. Johanna quickly looked at the hamlet, and like dozens of levies, went to have a look at the “railroad”.

The construction was a pair of parallel bars of steel, secured to wooden beams by heavy bolts. It ended near a small berm, packed with earth and paved with wooden slats. From there, the two lines of metal went on in a straight line, before curving slightly in the distance.

“How does that work?” “Did they make it at Ardenworks?” “Is that really Ancient?”

Johanna realized she’d seen a similar metal line in the ruins once last year, although there was only one. But the gravel had been there, along with some old rotted wood that looked like a decayed version of what she was seeing now. She quickly reached the conclusion that the other metal line had gone missing back there. Maybe some salvagers had taken it. Or a manastorm had ravaged the area, shuffling the construction and none of them had noticed the broken metal bits.

“There are always plans of extending the road across the Narrows to Valetta, but that’s never been done,” the adjutant’s voice came from behind her.

A number of levies turned, listening to the man.

“It’s an Ancient thing, you said. Saw something like it in the ruins, west of Valetta,” she said.

She turned back to the twin lines and asked, “how did it work?”

“The Ancients had ‘powered engines’ which we lack. But the same principle applies. You take a chariot with wheels made of the exact size, except the wheels are shaped a bit different so they fit in these ‘rails’. Then you put a train of donkeys in front, and they pull it. It’s exactly like a road, except that the metal lining makes it so much smoother and easier, you can carry easily twice the loads at a slightly higher speed and without tiring the beasts.”

She tried to picture it and could see how much smooth paving under the wheels would help.

“So that’s for heavy loads?”

“Yes. Usually, the caravans coming from the coast drop everything here and turn back, and then the freight company puts it on the next train, and there it goes. All the way to New Benton.”

“It does seem expensive.”

“It is. Which is why it’s been done up to here, but no further. There was an Ancient railway, almost intact, and it’s been maintained and repaired regularly. But the Changestorms after the Fall did cut the rails at multiple places, and the next section from here goes straight into heavy mana zones, so we’d have to build it from scratch across the Narrows.”

Agnello sighed.

“Somehow, there’s never enough money. By the time people start thinking about raising capital, something happens, and it gets delayed. It’s not as easy to make happen as it would in the central States.”

Captain Devereaux reached them, reporting to the adjutant.

“Ration shipment has been delayed, apparently. The train is expected tomorrow.”

Agnello sighed again.

“And, of course, the train is never on time.”

Moore was only half surprised when he spotted the donkey-pulled twin platforms arriving at the train station, tarp covering crates and bags of stuff, and the levies started helping to unload the “train”.

No guns. No electricity. Not even a steam locomotive. It’s all unpowered stuff.

Even accounting for an apocalypse and total breakdown in civilization, you’d expect people to have enough books lying around to at least provide pointers on some decent 19th-century technology. Coal burners were not that hard to make. Even the ancient Greeks had steam motors, although they never tried to turn them into real engines, he remembered from a video.

Which meant it was clearly not a case of losing technology. It was a case of technology not working at all.

Like a download that stalls. Back “then”. Servers suddenly offline. I was seeing the technology starting to break down when I died.

And the same thing killed him and sent him to this weird afterlife, probably.

Johanna had started noticing traffic across the road for the day. As they progressed, she spotted buildings in the distance. Then she realized there was a lot of them visible.

“Keep going,” Captain Devereaux yelled. “We’re nearly at New Benton.”