Chapter 50:In Which Death Is Also The End

The world around us was like an empty nightmare and only the three of us existed. We left the dark hulking shape of the stadium behind us and ran down the wide empty street toward the train station. The once lively Tournament village was a ghost town.

A big crowd was gathered on the open space of the platform, but no one was on the train. At first, I was relieved, but then as we came nearer, I felt apprehensive. There was commotion, panic, people were weeping and screaming. I caught hold of the nearest person, a middle-aged man who looked somewhat familiar, though I couldn't at the moment remember where I had seen him. "What's going on?" I demanded.

"The train, we can't start the engine because there's no fire and no magic to start a magical one. We're trapped," He explained hurriedly in deeply accented Auranorian. "People have started to collapse."

"Get anyone you see onto the train." I said in a commanding voice that surprised me. "I'll light the fire. We need someone who knows to drive a train."

The man nodded, "I will take care of that."

"Rat," prince Joaquin suddenly said, his voice sounding confused. I turned my head to where he was looking. Some distance from us there was a clump of people, I distinctly noticed Burgen, his face scrunched and pink, his whole body shaking. He was sobbing and screaming incoherently and someone, the grey-haired nurse Mitchellie, was helping him stand.

As if he could sense that I was looking at him, he lifted his head and opened his eyes, our gazes connected, his lips parted, but he said nothing, all he could do was gape at me.

I let go of Fizz's hand and walked forward, in a straight line, bumping into people as I passed, my feet moving on their own, carrying me toward Burgen.

As I came close I saw a man in the Grand Master's black and gold robe lying on the cobbled floor of the platform. His face was gray; his hat had rolled off revealing his bald head with the few remaining tufts of white hair rising up from his scalp like smoke. It was a familiar face, one I had seen every day, every single day, for some years now.

A face I hated, a face I loved, a face I needed to see, a face I needed to approve of me. His eyes were shut as if he was sleeping; his lips were drawn into that unhappy line he always wore.

It was his face, it was his body – but it wasn't him. It did not look like him.

"Old man," I breathed out; I pushed my way through the ring of people surrounding him. Falling to my knees, I placed both my hands on his chest and shook him violently. "Old man!" I yelled, my voice ripping through a tremendous lump in my throat.

"Wenward." I gave his body another shake. "Wenward Marning." I didn't have any tears to cry, I didn't cry because this wasn't happening. I shook him and shook him, trying to wake him.

But he was dead.

Hands pulled me away, pulled me up, onto my shaking feet. "He's not supposed to die," I croaked, my voice so strange, as if I was hearing myself outside of my body. "He wasn't supposed to die. This wasn't supposed to happen."

"Rat, what're you talking about?" asked Burgen's voice. Burgen was the one who was holding me.

"He promised me, he promised me he wouldn't," I breathed out. "I was protecting him – it's not possible."

"We have to hurry and find a way to start that train," said the voice of Gruitfeld Kogg. I looked up, attaching Gruitfeld's voice with Gruitfeld's face. "Or else we're all going to die," he said.

"I'll start the train," I cried in a shaking voice, looking down at Wenward Marning. "Get him on the train; get everyone on the train, every single person. And find someone who knows how to drive a train."

"We can't take him with us," said Cala's voice, I turned to look at Cala. "We don't know how long the journey is. We can't carry a body."

"The train isn't moving without him," I snarled glaring at everyone who surrounded me, daring them to oppose me.

No one did. I found Fizz, grasped her hand and pulled her after me. I headed toward the front of the train where the locomotive stood, a big black metal monster. For the first time in my life, I boarded a train. The inside of the locomotive was just as foreboding as the outside. There were many tubes and knobs and little twisted bits, cogs and dials. I began exploring until I located logs chopped and stacked along one of the walls of the locomotive. Nearby was a small door set inside a huge metal box that was set inside an even larger round metal boiler with a complicated series of pipes and chimneys sticking out in all different angles

I peeked in through the charred opening in the box.

"That's where the wood goes," said a helpful voice from behind. Fizz and I both turned, startled. A man with a very square jaw and deeply set eyes smiled at us and waved. "Nordik from Iridiya," he introduced himself pleasantly. "I drive train, yes?"

I nodded, took a few pieces of wood from the pile and threw them into the grate.

"You light fire?" asked Nordik.

I concentrated on the wood, and inside my mind, with all my rage, with all my grief, I commanded it to burn.

The wood complied. A large green flame roared into life, nearly singeing my eyebrows. I slammed the metal door shut. Soon, the boiler began to boil. It began to dance and sing, the whole train coming to life, shaking eagerly, as if it could not wait to be released and sent moving. Nordik stuck his head through the window.

"Platform – empty!" he cried cheerful, smiling at me. I did not smile back. He looked confused, checked the engine, checked the dials around the boiler, made his own assessments, decisions and observations. "Ready?" he asked.

I shrugged. He sat down on the seat at the front of the locomotive, his face fixed on the tracks. He caught the handle of a long, thick lever with both his hands and his muscles straining, he lifted the brake.

And just like that, with puffs and tendrils of smoke and steam, with a screeching of wheels and metal, the train lurched forward. We began moving, slowly at first, and then gradually picked up speed.

Clack, clack, clack...

At his bidding, I added more fuel into the firebox. When he was satisfied, I became aware of the miracle of a moving train.

Fizz and I moved to the window and watched how the scenery flew by. One by one, the city buildings were left behind to the curse. For a moment, I wondered if perhaps the scenery was moving rather than us. There was no real way to tell, aside from the shaking of the floor underneath our feet and the clacking sound of the train over the tracks.

On a train filled with magic, sorrow, pain, hope and people, we fled the cursed city of Auran. Its streets, its alleys, its ins and outs, its good and its bad the only home we had ever known. I clutched Fizz's hand as grief gripped my heart. The tears that hadn't come to me before came then as the last of the city fell away and we entered a long, dark tunnel that went underneath the mountain.

Light sped toward us at the other end, first as a dot, then a full circle, and finally we broke out into the real world, where the sky was light blue and the setting sun painted the clouds pink and violet.

***

  It was surprising how little I knew of Auranora beyond the city of Auran. You'd think, as the champion of a kingdom, I'd know more of the kingdom I had been defending. But as little castle towns and small villages passed us by, scattered among rivers, lakes and green hills heavy with wildflowers, I realised how small my world had been.

We needed to put as much distance between us and the city, because even though it was hidden by the high mountains, the curse was spreading. Every Wielder onboard felt it in their blood. The sky would break away piece by piece; the curse would swallow everything into its timeless, lifeless vacuum, until it would remain contained inside the borders of the kingdom.

I could not help shudder at the thought of all those Wielders who never got away, trapped in the city, or in the towns we passed, dying in agony and fear. And what of the ordinary people trapped outside time? Would they just wake someday when the curse would be broken and would not be able to account for why the world had moved and the seasons changed without them?

The sun cleared off the horizon leaving behind it a starry night sky. Near midnight the train came to a screeching halt by a lone stone platform, a metal sign in peeled golden letters said it was a town I'd never heard of called Vernisherry.

Nordik turned, shrugged and informed me that this is where the tracks end. We couldn't go any farther. But at least, he added, we were near the border. I did not bother to ask him the border of which country, I didn't need to; he had that look about him of a man close to home.

I let the flames die in the firebox; the engine sighed and huffed several times before thick silence wrapped around our ears like cotton. Only the boiler continued to whir, click and tick, as if too fidgety to stop just yet – I could certainly relate to how it felt.

I touched Fizz's shoulder and shook her slightly, she moaned sleepily, curling into an even smaller ball. Had I not known that she was a street girl, I would have wondered how she could sleep so deeply on such a hard floor.

I gently shook her again. "We're here," I said, without knowing where here exactly was. This time she unraveled, lifting her head and regarding me with confused eyes. I could see the conflict raging in her mind, as her lips parted, about to question whether I was real, or just another dream.

I placed my finger on her mouth and shook my head.

She relaxed and I grinned. What was true, or real – that didn't actually matter to either of us, as long as we were together.

A/N - Thank you for reading "Rat"! I know this ending is sad, unsatisfying and not the final word in the matter (at all), but I will only begin writing the next part after I finish writing a bunch of other projects.

Rat was my very first novel written in 2012. I finished writing it and queried two weeks later, landing my agent. The novel was met with much enthusiasm and read through  front-to-back by editors. They loved it but it was an "almost" for them. They all rejected it claiming that while they loved it, they didn't know who to market it to - Rat's chapters are middle grade while Marning's chapters are for adults. One publisher offered to consider it seriously if I edited out Marning's chapters offering solely Rat's POV.

I didn't even know how to begin doing that. I felt Marning showed us something that Rat's POV could not. But it made me doubt the book - "Perhaps Rat," I thought, "was a premature work? Maybe I'm just not a good enough writer yet? Maybe I didn't write the story that needed to be written, but I wrote to appeal to someone other than myself?"

I couldn't touch it or look at it for 4 years. Finally, Wattpad made me dig it out from the depth of my hard-drive. I was baffled. it was a lot better than I remembered. In fact, it felt better than all the things I wrote after it put together.

You, the readers, helped me confirm what I felt when I read it. You've all proven to me that Rat is a book worthy of an audience after all. Even though it's not clear-cut and easily categorised, it's still a book that grabs people by the heart.

I want to thank you for the dedication and love, for sharing with me your insights about the plot, for firmly keeping with it till the very end. And for being the best bunch of wonderful, amazing, gifted readers I could have hoped for.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

<3

Einaty