Station Trail
The Doom Train had stopped with a finality that sucked breath from throats.
It was not a slow deceleration, not the measured ease of scheduled halts. It was a clean, absolute halt — as if the rails themselves had decided to hold their angle in eternity. The silence that followed was a living thing: dense, expectant, threaded with a hundred small panics.
Raghu stepped from his pod with the quiet, careful balance of someone who had been listening to another rhythm his whole life. The sword at his hip felt warmer than metal should. The two fragments inside it hummed in time with his pulse — one answering the other in a soundless echo. When he drew breath the blade's light blinked, as if it were breathing, too.
High above, Harry watched the external feeds with a white-knuckled composure. The panoramic displays showed that the train had anchored itself to a featureless mass of broken geometry: Station Nine. The cameras could not render its scale properly; the pixels stretched into strange, impossible layers. Floating sigils drifted above the station like slow, indifferent moths. Spires loomed, their tips lost in haze.
His console spat a streamer of system alerts:
[STATION DETECTED — ID: UNKNOWN]
[ANCHOR LOCK: INITIATED]
[ASCENSION TRAIL: RANK GATE 1 ACTIVE]
Harry read the lines once, twice, and still felt the weight of the last one like a stone in his gut. Rank Gate — first of an Ascension Trail. It should have been procedural. It was not.
Outside, the station rose like a thing grown rather than built. Its surfaces were not smooth; they were textured with age — grown ridges, filigree that might once have been script, plates that hummed faintly in their seams. Overhead, sigil-plates rotated, arranging themselves into temporary constellations of light.
Then the announcement rolled through every Halo Watch, not in the precise CNC cadence but in a voice that felt older than any protocol:
"All candidates of Coach Fourteen. Ascension Trail — Sector Nine Gate will commence. Proceed to the Station Entrance. Trials are mandatory. Failure to participate will result in Station Discharge."
The phrasing left no room for argument. Discharge — an elegant euphemism for being cast off into whatever lay beyond the station's halo.
Panic and calculation blossomed in equal measure. Some ran with practiced calm toward the corridor; some clutched at their heads and muttered. Ayush Dhal moved with the slow, precise motions of someone cataloging variables: posture, pulse, hazard angles. Vedant's jaw set like flint; his palms flickered with unused heat that made the air smell faintly of char and ozone. Gudi laughed once — a small, incredulous sound — then swallowed it as the doors opened.
They poured onto the platform in a thin, ragged line. The station's floor vibrated underfoot, not unpleasantly — like a throat murmuring approval.
And then it stepped forward.
Not from any doorway. Not shadowed into being. It unfolded itself into the light above the gate like a storm taking shape, a vast avian presence that made the hairs along people's arms stand up even before the sound of its voice arrived.
It was a bird and it was not. Its wings were great panels of living metal, each feather etched with sigils that shimmered when the station's light touched them. A crown of filamented plumes arced from its head like fractal coronets. Eyes — two molten orbs, bright and old — swept the crowd as if scanning each heart-skip for truth. Its beak — sharp as a blade and layered with inlay — clicked once, a sound of law being set.
Candidates who had expected a human manager or a CNC facsimile were wordless at the sight. This was not an emissary of bureaucracy. This was a sentinel: majestic, terrible and beautiful, older than any file the CNC retained.
It let its wings settle, and the air hummed.
"Children of motion," it intoned, its voice an accord of wind and bell. "You stand at a Gate older than your lineages. These thresholds were set to halt the unworthy, to keep ascent from collapsing into chaos. You will find no mercy here. Sector Nine strips away retakes — it does not hold failings in a loop; it discards them."
A murmur ran through the crowd. Some swallowed hard. Someone muttered that stories always exaggerated the stakes; a few shook their heads as if to dislodge the memory of older, darker tales.
The avian's gaze slid across the assembly. For the briefest heartbeat its eyes stayed on Raghu as if the train's own memory had zoned in on a single thread. No one else noticed the pause. Raghu felt it like a blade of sun: a warmth, a recognition. The sword at his hip thrummed in answer, a chord between metal and memory.
The bird lifted one talon, and the Gate shivered. The cracked archway at the station's heart seamed with light. Symbols carved into the surface rearranged themselves, an endless reel of sigils solving and un-solving like a breathing puzzle. The avian spoke again, explaining the nature of the gates with a clarity that brooked no ignorance.
"Each of you will be met by a corridor that answers to your truth," it said. "The Gate is not blind. It knows your skill, your hunger, your weakness. It will show you a trial built from what you lack, or from what you hoard. No two paths are the same. There will be no teamwork here — the Gate demands you alone."
Raghu listened and felt the fragments inside the blade hum in consonance. The station did not merely measure force; it measured alignment — how a thing answered the world. The Verdant Pulse in him answered differently: softer, patient, aware of roots that reached into stone and code. He could feel with new acuity how the Gate's sigils watched not only flesh but intent.
"Passport or rank means nothing within these halls," the avian continued. "On this day you will not trade, bargain, or plead. You will either rise, or you will become the story used to warn those who follow. And because Sector Nine is the train's bone-deep threshold, there are no returns. Fail here, and your station is the last that will remember you."
Vedant's mouth tightened. Ayush's eyes flicked to the display on his wrist as if verifying a variable no system could confirm. Gudi, who had swaggered in minutes earlier, found her hands deliberately empty of jokes.
The avian's voice deepened, adding a truth like a hand at the nape of everyone's spine:
"Your trials will be commensurate with what you hold. Strength will meet strength; cowardice will meet itself. The Gate is just. The Gate is old. The Gate does not hate."
Then, in softer feathered tones almost lost in the breeze that came with its movement, it said:
"And heed this: the Gate will not merely test you. It reacts. It remembers. If something within it recognizes a key — a shard, a sigil, a pulse — the path it offers may change. The Gate is patient; the Gate will answer if you answer it."
Raghu felt the sword's vibration double, a harmonic that threaded through his sternum. His fingers tightened around its hilt until the leather creaked. He tried to appear steady. Inside, something elsewhere — the same hum that had filled the train's hidden registry — thrummed in approval.
Harry watched all of it on the panoramic screen, and even through the distance the bird's significance felt like a stone dropped into a still pond. He keyed a note to the central log with fingers that trembled.
Station Manager: Avian entity. Gate type: Adaptive. No retake policy confirmed. Candidates to proceed individually. Recommend surveillance of Candidate 47 for anomalous alignment.
He added a personal line underneath, the kind of small honesty officials bury in official feeds: Why does the Gate pause on that one?
His note sat in a queue that would be read by hands far above his rank. The silence pressed like a lid.
The avian folded its wings and, with a voice that carried the weight of carved mountains, instructed the first impression of the Gate to open.
The arch peeled apart in a slow luminous seam. A corridor of floating platforms and sigil-tiles stepped into being, each plate winding over a yawning void. Gravity over those tiles bent in strange ways; some floated sideways, others inverted the sense of up and down. It was not merely a path — it was a test of orientation and conviction.
The Gate selected.
A shimmer ran through the air like a thread sliding into view. A corridor of plates — one pattern among many — winked and grew luminous. The platform nearest Ayush registered, and the moment he set foot the sigils flared. He inhaled, then stepped, shoes finding purchase on a tile that tilted underfoot as if assessing his weight.
Vedant's tile glowed as well. Gudi's lit in a playful, asymmetric pattern as if inviting mischief. Each candidate's path peeled away into the station like a living map.
Raghu's path did not appear in the same way. Instead, the gate's surface at his angle shifted; runes rearranged into a thin spiral that offended no simple interpretation. The eye-shape the gate had shown earlier blinked once more, and then the spiral dissolved into a narrow corridor humming a green cadence that tugged at the fragments in his blade.
For a tense beat, the avian's gaze dropped to him. The assembled crowd was busy with their own breathless departures, but Raghu felt the weight of that look like a hand. The bird did not speak this time. It did not need to.
Ayush stepped. Vedant stepped. Gudi stepped, laughing thinly.
And with the station's dictum hanging in the air — no retakes, no returns — the first of Coach Fourteen were swallowed by the Gate's corridors, each tile closing behind them like a blink.
Only Raghu remained at the threshold.
The avian spread its wings once, a motion that sent a ripple of light across the station.
"You were remembered before you arrived," it said at last, not through the speakers, but into the marrow of his bones. "Step within, bearer. Let the Gate speak true."
Raghu tightened his grip on the hilt, the sword answering with a bright, patient note that seemed to say: I remember, too.
He stepped forward.
The tile welcomed him without hesitation, and the Gate — having seen the two fragments within his sword sing together — adjusted its course, folding a path unique, intimate, and precise.
The Ascension Trail had begun. Station Nine waited with open eyes.