Arthur had never ridden a train before. There was a station less than twenty leagues from his home in Allendale, but he’d never had a reason to use it. When he was called by the goddess, what felt like half of the Ahanian priesthood had traveled out to his dusty little town to meet him. His eventual travel to Regos had been by coach, and that was by far the greatest distance he’d ever moved in his life. The rail station in Regos was intimidating, with what looked like maybe thirty different tracks extending like narrow fingers from its hub, snaking across the horizon.

Prag had walked him to the station, but Arthur would travel alone to the University. His train was scheduled to leave just before the seventh bell, and it would arrive at Pendleton in the evening. He was sure that the journey would become dull at some point during that half-day experience, but for now Arthur was full of excited energy. He wandered the station, making use of the half-hour cushion he had before his train departed. Everything seemed to operate so smoothly. Even early in the morning, what felt like nearly a hundred travelers milled about in his immediate surroundings, with more in other parts of the station. Workmen were a rarer sight, mostly keeping inside the trains, but they went about their duties with no apparent instruction from the conductors, who stood apart in the crowd with their matching green uniforms and hats, thanking passengers and checking tickets.

Unlike with his Urizite acquaintance, there was no official regalia for the Voice of Ahania. Arthur wore a shirt, vest, and trousers, well-made and probably expensive, but not out of the ordinary. There had been some discussion of having him wear a symbol of the faith, but ultimately the matter was left to his own discretion. As it was, there was little chance of him being recognized, especially with how recent his anointment was.

Shouts of alarm behind him drew the paragon’s attention. He turned, curious, to see people moving back from two men, forming a loose ring like schoolchildren at a brawl. The comparison was apt, Arthur realized while moving forward. The taller of the two men, who had a split lip that was presumably the result of the inciting incident here, threw a wild punch at the other, missing by several inches. Arthur broke through the circle of spectators as the other man, from Calland by the looks of him, dark-skinned with a wide brow and light hair, retaliated, landing a painful-looking punch in his opponent’s ribs.

Before the two could go any further, Arthur stepped between them. Unfortunately, his body was not enough of a deterrent, and the combatants moved to go around him, the taller one extending an arm to push the paragon out of the way.

Arthur was not a trained fighter. He’d been in a few tussles growing up, but those were closer to wrestling matches than real fights. The Ahanians had attempted to have him instructed in the basics of a martial art, but he wasn’t far along in his training and it hadn’t been particularly intense, anyway. He was a little bit surprised, then, to notice that the open hand moving to shove him away looked like it was moving quite slowly. He grabbed at it and pulled, stepping out of the way. The man who he pulled stumbled wildly, almost falling to the ground before he caught himself. It was a dramatic reaction, and Arthur didn’t think he had exerted enough force to warrant it. The Callock sprang forward, taking advantage of the opportunity, and Arthur got in the way again, only to take a knee in the belly that doubled him over in pain.

Still in some shock from the intensity of the pain, Arthur threw his body in the general direction of the attacker, knocking him off balance with his shoulder. Neither of the original fighters was in a good position to continue at the moment, but that was temporary. He grabbed the Callock’s arms, unsure of how to effectively restrain a man. Arthur settled for holding the man’s wrists at his sides, less surprised now at how easily the hold was maintained. Clearly, his body was being enhanced by the Light during combat, both his reflexes and strength beyond what could be natural for a man of his experience. This had never happened in training, but it was a welcome change.

The tall man shuffled forward with his fists up, seemingly hesitant to strike again before he knew what was happening. Blood was streaming down his chin from his mouth, but with his opponent restricted, he wasn’t as eager to advance.

“Stop!” Arthur shouted, hoping he sounded confident, and the tall man did pause, though he remained in a fighting stance. Arthur could see two uniformed policemen over the heads of the spectators, hurrying towards the fight. Good, he thought, I only have to stall. The paragon didn’t actually know how to stop the fight permanently, not without hurting the fighters badly.

“I’m the Voice of Ahania. You really should walk away.” The tall man looked surprised for a second, but his expression morphed quickly into skepticism. Arthur didn’t blame him for not believing it. The old stories about paragons had them facing down armies and taming wild beasts, not doing a mediocre job of breaking up random street fights. This definitely wasn’t the most dignified public debut, but Arthur hadn’t thought of that in time, and it was too late to back off.

Luckily, the man didn’t have to believe anything. The bold warning confused him for a second, long enough that the police officers arrived, pushing through the crowd of spectators. Arthur released the wrists of the Callock and spoke up, hoping to regain some control of his public image in the aftermath of the fight.

“Hi. I’m Arthur K-”

A baton cracked across his jaw, sending Arthur sprawling to the concrete platform. For some reason, the Light which had been coursing through his body had abandoned him, and he was as unprepared for that blow as anybody off the street. Arthur wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though. For several seconds, he couldn’t think of anything but the pain, stabbing through his head like a knife. Still lying on the ground, curled in on himself, Arthur raised one hand to his mouth. One thing he had been taught very well recently was how to use Light for healing, and he tried to gather his thoughts to do that for himself. Before he could, what must have been a kick struck his lower back, shattering his focus and sending pain shooting through his body again.

“Stop moving! Stay down!”

A loud voice cut through the confusion and agony. Arthur obeyed, unable to think of anything else he could do at the moment. After a few seconds, he felt rough hands grabbing his arms, pulling them together behind his back. Handcuffs— Handcuffs! He’d never even seen a pair before, only read about them in novels, but what could only be handcuffs were placed around his wrists and tightened. Arthur could hear people yelling around him, vaguely, words and phrases. They were too distant and overlapping to be fully interpretable through the ringing that remained in his head.

“…Innocent-”

“He wasn’t-”

“…said he was a paragon-”

“…the fuck?”

Arthur was hauled to his feet. He could stand on his own, thankfully, his legs having gone mostly untouched throughout his recent experience with violence. Looking around through eyes blurred with involuntary tears, he tried to make sense of what was happening. He could see the two men who’d been fighting earlier, both handcuffed and both looking more beat-up than when he’d last looked at either. The crowd had pressed in closer, and the two police officers were arguing with each other. One was a large man, straining at the belt, with a moustache more than proportional in size. The other was turned away, so Arthur couldn’t make out any features other than blond hair. Both of the officers had their batons out, and they were quiet enough that he couldn’t tell who was arguing for what.

Arthur tried to speak, to clear up the situation, and cried out in shock at the sudden spasm. He’d never fixed his jaw, and the words came out as a garbled mess.

Whatever the nature of their argument, the officers broke apart without seeming like they’d resolved it. The fat one turned to the nearest section of the crowd, speaking loudly but not shouting over their complaints. It seemed like he was asking for calm and keeping them away, but Arthur focused on the blond officer, who took two steps towards him.

“You. They’re saying you’re a paragon. That right?”

He looked Arthur up and down, frowning. There was a hint of nervousness in the policeman, but he didn’t seem to believe it as he looked at the bruised teenager in front of him. Arthur raised his right shoulder and turned his head towards it, trying to indicate his jaw without the use of his hands. He made another raw noise from his throat, not even trying to form a word this time. The officer grimaced, looking conflicted.

“Fine. Don’t try to run anywhere, now. If you can heal, do it. If not, then you’re a liar anyway and I’m cuffing you right back up.”

Arthur turned, hopeful now, and waited as the officer inserted a key into the cuffs and took them off. He shook out his hands out and immediately raised one to his face again. It took a second, but the Light came.

“GAHH! Ah! Hah. Huh.” The scream was involuntary as his bones snapped back into place in an instant. A small gash on his cheek that had been dripping blood down his neck closed with an itch. The Light healed well, but it was merciless.

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Arthur worked his jaw, opening and closing his mouth, but no more pain came. As far as his body was concerned, there was nothing left that was wrong in his head.

“Yes. I’m Arthur Kay, the Voice of Ahania. I was stopping a fight, and about to hand its participants over to your gentle care.” He couldn’t resist the heat entering his tone at the end. “What the Hells was that about? I’m new to the city, but that can’t be standard behavior.”

The blond police officer’s expression had been frozen in what looked like fear ever since Arthur had healed himself. A priest his age wasn’t unheard of, but it was rare enough that the paragon explanation must have started to seem reasonable.

“I—we’re sorry. It was a complicated, high-stress situation, and you were acting aggressive when we arrived on the scene. If you had made more of an effort to identify yourself, this could have been avoided. Excuse me.”

The cop stepped backward and grabbed his partner by the shoulder, speaking into his ear. They both moved away from the crowd, stepping up to Arthur and the men who had been fighting only a minute or two earlier. The mustachioed one spoke this time, and his voice was instantly recognizable as the one who had yelled at Arthur earlier.

“It’s our professional opinion that arrests would not be productive right now. In the interests of efficiency and leniency, everyone here is free to go with a warning.”

The officers brandished keys, and within a couple of seconds released the remaining two handcuffed men. Arthur still burned with anger, but by the time he had even a semblance of an idea of what to say or do, the officers were gone, having slipped through the rapidly diminishing crowd. He realized with a start that he had never gotten their names. Even if he wanted to follow up on this situation legally, the thought of which made him nauseous, he would have no idea who to accuse.

Arthur had a feeling that the appropriate thing to do here would be to make some statement, and probably reprimand the two men who had started this whole mess. But he had just gotten into the first real fight of his life, then been arrested, also for the first time. Arthur was too tired to care.

He started walking away without a word, looking for the train which would carry him to Victor and the Fourth University. There were still more than twenty minutes before departure, he was almost certain, but he hoped he could board and just sit down for a while. Arthur could feel eyes on his back, the remnants of the spectators following him with their gazes as he left, and he wondered what they thought about him as he picked up his bags where he had left them.

The train was waiting at the appropriate platform. Victor didn’t seem to be a particularly popular destination, not at this hour, at least. The conductor was standing at the door to the train alone, and in the minute in which he was visible while Arthur walked up, nobody boarded the train.

“Ho there! Ticket, please.”

Arthur produced his ticket from an interior pocket in his vest. It had survived the earlier action fully intact, thankfully, and the conductor found no issue with it. Arthur boarded the train and looked around, unsure where he should sit. The first railcar on his left already had perhaps ten occupants, half-full. He didn’t really want to deal with people yet, so he walked down the aisle in the center past them, apologizing as he brushed against an older woman who stood abruptly.

He opened the door to the next compartment, which contained a small family, a man and woman with a young boy of maybe seven years, all sitting together. He thought about it and realized that he didn’t need or want total solitude, and it might seem rude to keep moving down the train at this point. Arthur sat two rows away from the family, far enough to respect their space but close enough to be amiable. That was the idea, anyway. He had no idea if that was actually what they would interpret from his seating choice, if anyone cared enough to think about it at all.

The mother spoke in soft tones to her son, who was either reading a book or staring down at his lap for unrelated reasons. Arthur and the father sat in peace, having acknowledged each other silently when their eyes met soon after he sat down. Several minutes passed in this fashion, while Arthur closed his eyes and contemplated the events of that morning. What should he have done differently? Subdue the brawling men more quickly and securely, yes, but he couldn’t help feeling like that was a secondary problem.

When the police had arrived, he had been relieved. The situation was over, as far as he had been concerned. That was the only reason he could think of for not being able to react to the baton strike, as he had to the push earlier. He had expected violence at the time of the push, but not after. That was a mistake, maybe. Was it? Arthur felt like it was pretty reasonable to have believed that the police wouldn’t attack him without warning. He’d never seen Marshal Newman do anything close to that back home.

Then again, two armed men had just arrived at a scene where violence was arguably still in progress. When he abstracted the situation like that, it seemed silly for him to have dropped his guard. But was that an appropriate way to think about it? If the police couldn’t be expected to act better than any random armed men, there seemed to be little point in their existence. Maybe this had been a freak event, an exception to the rule, and Arthur hadn’t really done anything wrong. That seemed like a suspiciously convenient sort of analysis, though, considering that he was a divine agent whose first encounter with misdemeanor crime had ended in a bruised rib and broken jaw. He wasn’t certain, but he would bet that was unusual, and probably had more to do with his actions than anything else.

A whistle blew, and the train started to move, slowly. Arthur opened his eyes, finished with introspection. He was going to be in school for most of the next year; there would be plenty of time for thinking in the coming months. He looked again at the family he was sharing the compartment with. The boy was no longer visible, presumably lying down along the row of seats. On a second look, Arthur was shocked at how young the parents appeared. Neither could be older than twenty-five, and if the child wasn’t so old, he would have assumed even less.

The father seemed to take Arthur’s renewed interest as an invitation to speak, which he supposed it was.

“What’s takin’ you out to Victor, ‘fyou don’t mind me asking?”

Arthur hadn’t even spent two weeks in Regos, but the accent was instantly recognizable. It was uncommon among the class of people he’d been meeting, or at least less strong, but every vendor shouting in the streets on the East side of the city sounded just like the man talking to him now.

“Education,” Arthur replied before he could think about whether it was a good idea to admit that or not. Thankfully, the man didn’t seem to pick up on the significance.

“You a schoolteacher or somethin’, then? That’s good, yeah. Good job, make a difference. Might be you’ll be teachin’ Jimmy here before long, eh?”

Arthur just smiled. He didn’t want to lie to the man, but it was both less awkward and possibly safer to let him continue to be wrong.

“Me, I got an offer from Farow Minin’. Three years, guaranteed employment. Guess they’re finding too much silver out in those hills for the boys in Victor to handle, if they’re handin’ out jobs to city boys like me.”

His wife chimed in, much quieter than her husband. “I’ve got an auntie out there, she runs a laundry. Says there’s plenty work for me. I never had a real job like that.”

Arthur felt he had gone too long without talking, though neither of his conversation partners seemed to mind. “I’m Arthur, by the way. Good to meet you two.”

“I’m Lucy, this is Tom.”

Tom touched his hat. It was a cap, grey and made from cotton, unlike the straw or felt hats that some people wore in the country. The couple were dressed in what were probably their best clothes; Tom wore a suit that had only a patch or two on it, and Lucy a pristine floral dress. Arthur wouldn’t have taken Tom for a miner by the look of him, skinny and pale, but he supposed he would be a hypocrite to judge occupation by appearance.

Arthur took advantage of the lull in the conversation to look out the window. The train had stopped accelerating a minute earlier, and was now flying across the landscape at speeds he could hardly comprehend. He’d ridden horses at a gallop before, and this was easily twice as fast. He knew that there was some kind of magic on the tracks for stability and that most modern trains had enhanced engines, but most of this was pure machinery. It boggled the mind to think that dozens of these metal beasts were crossing the continent all at the same time, each with the potential to carry hundreds of people.

“Anyway,” Tom said, dragging Arthur’s eyes away from the view, “I think it’s good to get Jimmy away from the city, for a few years at least. Air’s healthier out here, that’s what I’ve heard.”

It was possible, Arthur thought, but privately he doubted it. He’d breathed a lot of rural air in his life, and it didn’t seem like anything special.

“Is that so,” he stated more than asked.

Tom nodded, still in good cheer. “Yes, indeed. It had better be, too, what with all the minin’ I’m gonna be doin’. Not good for a man, ’s what they say. Pay’s good, though.”

Arthur made a noise halfway between a hum and a grunt, which Tom seemed to interpret correctly as agreement, or at least acknowledgment. The conversation, such as it was, petered out, and after a minute or two, Arthur felt comfortable laying his head back and resting again. The fight had been exhausting, and it had been an early morning, something he’d gotten spoiled on over the preceding months. Very few people would wake up a paragon before they wanted to be awoken. The fields outside the train flew by his window, and he fixed his eyes on the peaks in the distance. That had to be a different mountain range than the one their destination was nestled in, but it was easy to pretend otherwise as he stared, entranced by the illusion of motion.

The view from the window started to grow fuzzy, and Arthur closed his eyes to clear them. Somehow, though, it was too much effort to open them again. Yes, he thought, just a quick rest for my eyes.

***

A hand on his knee drew Arthur from his pleasant sleep.

“Mister. Mister. Da says we’re getting close. Mister!”

He raised his head quickly, rubbing the gunk from his eyes.

“Thanks, uh, Jimmy,” he said, still blind. By the time his eyes were fully open and focused, the boy was sitting back with his parents, satisfied that he’d done his job.

The train was decelerating, and as Arthur watched from inside, they started to pass buildings on the left. Not many, yet, they were clearly still on the outskirts of Victor, but houses or small farms stood here and there. It was late afternoon now, and in the mountains that meant sunset was near. Over the next few minutes the gaps between the buildings got smaller and smaller, and finally the train came to a halt, bells ringing.

Arthur stood up and reached out his hand to shake with both Lucy and Tom.

“It was a pleasure meeting you three. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”

The family expressed similar sentiments, Tom particularly vocal about his desire for Arthur to visit them. It was a bit of a mystery why, as Arthur felt like he’d been anything but an engaging companion, but it would be rude to do anything but smile and agree. All four ended up heading through the next car for the door at the same time, making their goodbyes preemptive.

A bag in each hand, Arthur stepped off of the train and into a much smaller station than he had departed from. He took a deep breath, then started walking north, where he could see the towers of the University rising far above any building before them.