There was a Sorissian fable about a man and his Nesgowl, the closest thing to a bedtime story for Sorissian children.

The man had found his companion one day on the outer walls of his Tak, starved and hobbling with three broken legs. The man, taking this as a sign from Ebwinirr himself, decided to nurse the untamed beast back to full health. In this time they spent together the two developed an unusual friendship. Recovered, the beast helped the man in his hunts, and soon the man became the best hunter in his Tak. ‘It is unfair’, some said; ‘A devil prowls behind his shoulders!’ others say. Nevertheless, the man and his friend went on to rid their Tak of all the surrounding dangers. With the help of his six-legged friend, the man chased away the Takuans, killed the leading fowl of the Shudra, and learned how to easily crack Sibithian Stone. Eventually, acknowledging his feats, the elder’s council appointed him leader of their Tak. The man, once donning the old leader’s scarf, was suddenly overwhelmed by a new sense of responsibility. He felt as though he could no longer run wild by his Nesgowl’s side, spend weeks outside Tak walls or even get his friend’s drool on his hands. But he knew that a Nesgowl seeks freedom. Room to stretch their legs and prey to sink their teeth in. Afraid to lose his friend, the man chained him on a post outside of the Tak despite knowing full well that the village-folk loathed the beast and saw them as a devil. The beast trusted him, reluctant to give up its freedom but eager to repay its favor. The man kept his people from harming his friend, and this uneasy peace went on for several months until winter. It was a long blizzandrome that swallowed the light and ripped the life and heat away from everything. Slowly but surely the Tak’s food storage was drained. Starving and broken, the man’s people turned their anger onto the Nesgowl, believing that it has cast an evil spell upon the them, the reason of their bad fortune. The man barely kept them under control, until one day, the sleeping Nesgowl bit a child. The bite did not even draw blood and it has released them the instant it came out of its daze. But it was excuse enough to be used against the man. Against all his better judgement, under the gaze of everyone he was obliged to, he was forced to bring the axe down onto his friend. The villagers, satisfied, hung its headless body on the gate of their Tak as a totem to ward off evil. But the Nesgowl’s death did not put an end to the blizzandrome, and soon all the food in the Tak had been depleted. Desperate, the villagers unhooked its corpse from the gate and feasted upon it, not knowing that its meat had already begun to fester. Only the man refused to eat his friend’s flesh, disappearing into the gray storms without a word. When spring came, members from a neighboring Tak would find this windswept place, and a pack of Nesgowls feasting on the bodies of the plagued. And so they offered an eulogy to the one who reigned neither over pity nor anger; not resignment nor horror; but the providence of causality, the gray god: Divicsi.

He was alone in the passenger box. The constant whistling of the winds outside the loosely sealed windowframe, the clattering of the train’s wheels on the rails, and the pitter-patter of hail overhead all combined to form a steady rhythm. Tonight was a clear night, and he could see the faraway hills and mountains rushing by, not one of them remarkable enough to leave any lasting impressions.

Sorissu Continent’s scenery was, in all senses, nothing to gawk at. This white land quickly became an eyesore once one had seen enough of the icy peaks and desolate plains. Yet, trapped beneath all that ice were innumerable riches.

Ore deposits, generous oil wells, Sibithian stone, gaseous mineral hotspots, and, most importantly, Sorissian Soil that held bountiful yields, exported en masse to even the most distant corners of Heaven Continent. Willard stared out of the window with half-shut eyes. There was once a time when he believed he could stand above this land as the master of its riches. Or, a little bit more realistically, the master of a little bit of its riches. Instead, he was toiling his remaining life away, some hundred meters deep underground like all those other Bagiraekan expats—middle aged men who died before they could reach sixty, either to workplace competition, accidents, depression, eventual poverty or even the cold itself—who came seeking for a later life of wealth.

The train roared and clanged onward onto one of the several thousand bridges that humanity built to conquer the continent’s icy ravines. Willard felt the vibrations of a deep honk coming from the locomotive and pressed his ears against the frozen window pane behind him as the sound echoed through the still night. Below the bridge, a wide canyon stretched far into the horizon where the first moon was slowly rising.

He glimpsed at the empty seats across from him. Moonlight wrapping around the iron poles of the bridge cast long slanted shadows that enveloped the entire compartment. Shadows bounced and whipped past so fast they seemed to flash.

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He could vaguely recall resting his head on his mother’s lap, his eyes closed, trying to count the number of flashes that bounced off his eyelids. It was the night after they received their citizen’s license after arriving in Bagiraek, more than a decade ago. To him, it was more like a lifetime. Mother had placed her hand on his head, gently stroking his hair to the rhythmic chugging of the train. Even above the numerous layers of clothing she had on, he had felt the warmth radiating from her abdomen. He felt fuzzy, realizing how close he was to everything.

Another flash and the light abruptly cut away as the train entered the tunnel on the other side, and he was left alone again, staring back at the dark.

As the train thundered on, the compartment shook ever so slightly. The overhead proximity lights above Willard’s seat flickered, momentarily plunging him into complete darkness.

I’m taking this unusually well, he thought, removing his ear from the glass after it grew so numb from the frozen glass he couldn’t even feel the cold anymore, one would’ve imagine being stuck in the dark for two weeks to at least develop nyctophobia.…

He stared into the unlit back rows of the compartment, just barely making out their silhouettes. The last time he was here, this place had been a whole lot different. Young fathers going home from month shifts downing booze with their friends, brothers carrying strings of salami dancing together, and older men sitting and chuckling at them. The noise faded in his ears, and Willard stared into the hushed darkness.

As he stared into the dark, like a child constantly testing the limits to their parent’s patience, he finally felt a sense of growing unease well up within him. His pupils had dilated, his breath had become sharper, and blood was rushing to his head. Someone was watching him.

It had been the same when he was trapped below the rubbles of the ruined mineshaft. Then, some time in the fourth day, a small hole had opened between the lumps of ice covering the toppled elevator. He had screamed and screamed and screamed through it until his throat became hoarse once more, and then collapsed again into a puddle of his own blood. A few moments later, the remaining light of his glow stick dimmed. It was then that he’d felt a presence there, some place not far above the ice. Even though everything had been pitch black, he was sure of it.

There’s no one there. You’re just mad, He told him himself now as he told himself back then, mad and hallucinating.

Though his senses were dulled by the undergrounds, he always had a strange perception of unseen things. He could tell when a snowball was about to hit him, when mother was about to call, when a landslide was about to occur, or...when a catastrophe was about to happen, mere miliseconds beforehand. A mental image—a flash of hallucination—would play out several times before the actual thing happened. It was a twisted sense of deja vu.

‘Divine Intuition,’ Adrian used to joke about it. It was not divine. It was useless. In fact, it was more like a punishment, suddenly knowing that things would happen without even having the time to react. A biological mishap, the doctors had told him—massively delayed signals for neurological processing. Not bothering to test their hypothesis further, they had prescribed him tiny, bitter capsules that burns the tip of his tongue when it stays on it for too long. It did do the job of suppressing these instances, though.

It was there, thousands of meters underground, without any suppressors, when it had really messed with his head. Willard had tried to call for the figure, to get it to say something, anything. But all that had come out of his mouth was a weak croak and a bloodied blubbering. Its presence remained there for several minutes, then vanished entirely. However, within that period he had felt an intense fixation on him. He had been staring into the dark. And somewhere in the dark, something was staring back. And that stare felt like thousands of needles scraping at the exposed bone of his right arm. It had left him there, gasping for breath, clawing at his injured shoulder.

Now he sat staring at the dark again as that familiar, unnerving feeling crept up his spine. Willard shook his head. It was a foolish thought. A hallucination. An unreal image born out of pain and fear, as there couldn’t have been anyone down there with him. He had been told he was the only survivor, and the press had swarmed him the instant they saw him step out of the hospital.

Willard shifted uncomfortably in his seat and peeled his eyes away from the dark.

He pressed his eyelids hard together and leveled his breaths. However, the usual fatigue was nowhere to be found. He stayed still for another minute, then gave up. Perhaps it was because he had been bedridden for such a long time his body had finally gotten the rest it had previously lacked.

His newly installed TimeScale beeped twice, indicating the arrival of midnight.

The train clambered onward out of the tunnel, and soon, moonlight illuminated the rest of the carriage, driving the darkness away. Willard felt an unexpected sigh of relief escaped him.

Not broken after all.