This story was a dream I had, about two years ago. I wrote it up the next morning and then barely touched it since then. I’ve sat down and edited the material, and reading over it again I find myself fond of the material. For those wondering, I was reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series at the time, and I believe this train was inspired by the one in his world.<\/p>\n
\tThe train sped along the landscape, riding high. Tommy sat on the very prow, an elongated, twisted metal structure of sheet metal and piping and metal wires, looking out ahead, chewing on the peach that his friend, Frederick, had offered him. The two of them were leaving, running almost, racing from where they had been to Akobayi Junction, a dot ahead on the map that would offer safety.<\/p>\n
\tSights and sounds formerly unseen abounded here, riding amongst the canopy of the world on the top of this metal train. It had rolled into the station where they departed, grey and tall, narrow and long, two cylinders stacked on top of one another with a massive jutting jaw that hung near to the ground. Grabbing hold of the ladder and clambering up, the boys had settled themselves into that prow, protected on either side by perforated sheets of metal. It was then that Tommy had been offered his peach.<\/p>\n
\tWinter hung in the air, and the snow covered the ground in great deep white swathes. There had never been a season but winter in the boys’ lifetime, but Tommy and the others clung to the notion of seasons, of a time called summer, when the ground was clear and the snow was gone. Why, they might even see the earth.<\/p>\n
\tThe cold of the air stung the boys as they rode along the train’s wide path, full in the brunt of the wind that swept across the snowy forest. Tommy looked down from his height, nothing below him but the metal grating on which he stood. Two hundred feet off the ground was his estimate, and the train was growing in size with each passing mile. The sights and sounds of the journey appeared and then disappeared, a giant creature that could be called a mammoth, orange against the white of the snow and the brown of the trees, ambling away from the train as Tommy and Frederick rode past.<\/p>\n
\tThis was all new to the boys, for they had never been above ground during their short lives, living underground, watching pipes and cables as they sputtered, shook, and sparked. Now they stood, compelled to examine their new surroundings, yet lost in a morass of fear all the same. Tommy knew that should his excitement ever dip, he would look down and lose himself. Distant cries fell across the lands, some from behind, some from ahead, coming from the tops of the giant trees. Each tree stood over the train, their branches and trunks bending away, a host of bowing giants, facing to the north, broken by the endless winds.<\/p>\n
\tThe canopies housed families of twisted, ape-like creatures, possessed of a wide, long face, wrapped in a host of grey fur, a frill tipped with red splashes, centred around the mouth and radiating outward in concentric circles. Hooting and hollering, they swung through the trees after the train. They clambered and climbed, swooped and howled, and Tommy hid his face for fear of the sight. Frederick cried softly, his life a childhood dream that had come back to haunt him. More than anything, he feared the great fall to the ground, one that got taller with every passing moment, as the trained stretched, filling the void between the grey earth and the blue sky, forming itself into a link as it sped onward, racing away from the gibbering baboons as the apes came on, swinging from the trees above to try and grasp the boys as they huddled, shaking, on their metal prow. Through the grating below, Tommy saw nothing but a dull blur, the ground as it sped past.<\/p>\n
\tAnd it was there, in that moment, that the blur shifted, and a great white blanket settled across the landscape, smothering sounds and sight. A raised head offered vistas of rolling steppes, sunken beneath a layer of snow so ancient and deep that the world rested, hibernating until such time as it should again feel the rays of the sun. The distance offered a formless wall beyond which nothing was to be seen. Within Tommy and Frederick this bred a longing and an anguish greater than that instilled by the chittering attacks of the monkeys, for it was apparent that nothing would live and that nothing would play, and to a pair of small children that cost was too great to bear, and so Tommy and Frederick lay down to sleep, a small prayer of change escaping their lips as they looked out across the expanses ahead.<\/p>\n
\tPassing down into a deep and pained sleep, neither boy felt the rolling of the train as it plunged over that formless wall, a great rift in the land that lead downwards, the tracks bending improbably and dropping, held fast to the side of the shattered lands. In time it would flatten out, and return to the normal orientation, but as before, this was only a prelude to a following rift. The boys slept as their train followed the giant steps downward, towards the heart of the world, wrapped in the layer of snow that laid across the boys as they hid in minds full of dreams. And so on into the night Tommy and Frederick sped, in search of Akobayi Junction and respite from a world of travails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This story was a dream I had, about two years ago. I wrote it up the next morning and then barely touched it since then. I’ve sat down and edited the material, and reading over it again I find myself fond of the material. For those wondering, I was reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[36,4],"tags":[21,22],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pRIK4-1T","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":387,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=387","url_meta":{"origin":117,"position":0},"title":"Prelude to Desperation","date":"November 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The outnumbered army of H\u00e1lsiend faces it's greatest foe yet in this except from Laeccan Waters The army marched onwards, another series of days slipping by in a landscape unchanging. Each day they rose to a white plain, the only distinguishing feature the wide trail laid by the army, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Tarranau"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":91,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=91","url_meta":{"origin":117,"position":1},"title":"Rose","date":"April 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"This is sort of cheating, since it's a storystarter I created myself earlier in the day, and then I edited it, but it's there. Of course, me being me, I managed to just miss the 500 word limit. I can't seem to write in under 500 words. Ah well. I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flash Fiction"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":171,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=171","url_meta":{"origin":117,"position":2},"title":"Into The Maw","date":"May 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The next installment in the JNY serial and my FridayFlash. Been interesting writing what's turned out to be a fun little serial. Still going, of course. An alien dropship. What the hell. JNY-35167 looked to his left and his right. All along the line, the infiltrator suits were charging. Command\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Other Writing"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":463,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=463","url_meta":{"origin":117,"position":3},"title":"Creating a Magic System, Part 5","date":"March 31, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Part 1\u00a0-\u00a0Part 2\u00a0-\u00a0Part 3\u00a0-\u00a0Part 4\u00a0-\u00a0Part 5\u00a0-\u00a0Part 6 So, I've spent the last four posts giving my thoughts on how to design a magic system, but I'm sure many of you are curious as to how all of this would work in practice, so I'm going to spend this post and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Tips"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":456,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=456","url_meta":{"origin":117,"position":4},"title":"Breaking an Empire #22","date":"March 22, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The Lianese soldiers pressed forward, seeing they had the advantage on this small band, and shouted up for more arrows to fall upon their foes. Their answer came, as a body plummeted from the roof to slam on top of a Lianese soldier, driving him to the ground and breaking\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Four Part Land"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":460,"url":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/?p=460","url_meta":{"origin":117,"position":5},"title":"The Great Device","date":"March 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I have within my possession a great device. It has been said that, if used, all of those who reside upon this sphere will perish, and ascend to Heaven. Others place suppositions upon its ability to render us unto a Hell unlike even that of Lucifer. Yet I believe none\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flash Fiction"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefourpartland.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}