My event is over – and it's possibly the last one I ever have to do. The relaxation is so damn real. My heartrate when sitting down on the day was 130, and as high as 145 when doing the event and speech. Normally it's resting at 65-70bpm. Slept awful on the days up to it, like a baby after.

And double good news in that my cat's vet visit revealed the bleeding and pain was due to stress cystitis, which the vet thinks might be a result of her old age and some aggression between her and the stray cat who lives in the nearby fields but realistically lives with us, since I feed her twice a day, she sleeps in the house and comes out to follow me when I play ball with my dog. The two cats do not get along and so I'll be pulling back on my attempts to socialise them since my eldest cat is at a very advanced age and the vet thinks it's doing more harm than good.

But hey, event over and no dead cat. It's been a good time!

Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 118

Rather than barricade just the carriage they were in, the two cars ahead of them were where the bulk of their fortifications were laid out. Train seats were ripped from their bases and erected sideways, interlocked like planks of wood. Others were broken apart and sharpened into stakes by Lily and River. Though the two children were, by now, adults in every way that mattered, they were still childish girls in physicality, and so unable to do as much heavy lifting as they no doubt wished they could. Thankfully, the rest of them were still in their prime, and Meryl, who by now should have been in her late-fifties or early sixties, was able to work in their place.

There was only so much that could be done with what they had on hand, or with what they had to work with. The train carriages were natural chokepoints already, funnelling people through a narrow doorway that one person could hold. In terms of going over and around, Blake suspected the entity outside would prevent that even if the cultists were nominally on its side. Even if it didn't, the windows were barricaded and covered because everyone was deathly afraid of the entity reaching in, and life was easier if they didn't have the risk of looking out and seeing it.

Life had become the train. It was something Blake had come to accept early on, but no less a shock for it. People lived their lives in a small microcosm of the real world – choosing a place to call home and only interacting with it, aside from the odd holiday. Her own parents had lived on Menagerie for over twenty years, for instance.

Even so, to go from having a city and a world beyond to being cramped in an infinitely repeating instance of the same train carriage was numbing. If it weren't for the people, she would have gone insane years ago. Day in, day out, of waking to the same walls, noises and experiences with no changes was agony on the mind. The fact that there was no natural sunlight might also have had something to do with it, as she could remember reading articles about what that did to people. The physical toil of it was prevented by the anomaly, but there was clearly no thought given to their mental health.

"It's not that surprising, is it? That these people would worship the monster." she said to Jaune, when they'd finished work for a while and were taking a break. Blake was sat in his lap, wishing he could take off his gloves and lay his real hands upon her.

"Don't tell me you're swayed."

Blake snorted. "Of course not. You and I know what this is. All they know is that their lives have been trapped in a seemingly never-ending nightmare controlled by the entity outside. It wouldn't be difficult to start seeing it as some omnipotent judge."

"Hmm. I could see how it would match with some religious concepts," he replied. "The idea of limbo or purgatory, even reincarnation. If people started to believe the entity was the one who decided who escaped this and when, then I could see the logic in worshipping it – or trying to appease it." He followed that up with, "But even among religious communities, most concepts of limbo or purgatory would use this as an example of what not to do. Often, those stories involve the people being caught in limbo because they act like this, prioritising their own safety and happiness by throwing others under the bus. Some sort of final lesson about how they made their own limbo and deserved their fate."

"Do you think they tried to be good before and it didn't work?"

"Maybe. I sometimes forget how long we've been trapped here. Maybe they banded together initially to support one another and do good. Or to have a sense of belonging. Sometimes, people just feel better if they can think there's a reason behind all the bad things in the world. Even if they don't truly believe it."

Blake could see it. Life was hard and short, even on Remnant, and religions often found their footing in poorer and more dangerous areas. When your life was short and unfair, it was fertile ground for a group of people promising you salvation in the next life. That this life was harsh, but your next would be pure joy as a result. Of course, many of those were unscrupulous men tricking desperate people into following them or giving away what meagre belongings they had just so they'd have an even better life in the next one.

Here, it was more clearly a psychological break. Maybe they'd wanted to do good and seen how uncaring the world was – or maybe they'd tried to reason with or even kill the anomaly, only to realise how powerless they truly were and decide to try and appease it instead. It didn't really matter which it was in the end. Blake was just desperate to make conversation.

Until, with a coy smile, she pushed Jaune down and distracted them another way. He very much was the last man on Remnant – the last sane and untaken one, anyway – and she was the last woman for him. It was no surprise they'd come together. After, as they lay sweating and wrapped up in makeshift sheets, with Jaune still having to wear his blasted shirt as he cuddled with her, Blake spoke once more.

"Do you think we'll wake back up on the train when we die here? Or do you think we will die forever and the ones coming off the train will be other versions of us?"

"I don't know."

"It'd be nice if it was the former. Then Stacey and... Cross... and..." Blake struggled to recall the names. "The others," she finished, lamely, "—would still come back to life. They wouldn't be dead, but rather they would have found a way to skip out on the decades of torture and wake up on the other side."

"True. But, if that's true and we'll wake up with our minds reset, what would that mean for us?" He ran his hands in slow circles up and down her back. "This would have never happened. We would have never been a thing. And when we close our eyes and wake up on that train having forgotten all this, it will be as though it never happened in the first place. A mercy in some ways... but Cardin and Meryl would have never met." Jaune kissed her impulsively. "And I'd never have been able to do that."

"Idiot," Blake whispered, and kissed him back. "But maybe you're right," she whispered, sadly. Blake snuggled into him.

Maybe it was better for them to die their own people, trapped and tortured as they were, than it would be to wake up and have this all erased as some kind of alternate-realty dream. At least like that, they would have lived and loved; they would have existed in their own right.

They would have been real.

The Blake who couldn't for certain say whether she was real or just a created echo of the luckier one still on that one-minute train ride closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of a man who might be just as fake as she.

It would be better to die like this than wake alone.

/-/

"I WILL BE REBORN ONCE MORE!"

The man she'd driven her blade into gurgled excitedly around it, blood spilling up from above his breastbone and over the metal. He wore a rapturous smile, genuinely happy to be escaping this purgatory. And, in a way, he would be escaping it. Blake ripped Gambol Shroud free and kicked him back into his fellows, buying her a few seconds to catch her breath.

They were in the second carriage back now, having given up the first almost three hours ago. Too quickly, in hindsight. The plan had always been to retreat and use the carriages to buy time, but they hadn't expected the battle to rage so long, nor for there to be so many people. The train would have had less than a hundred people on it, and yet there had definitely been more than a hundred who attacked them.

The anomaly must have been combining passenger loads, maybe inserting their train's worth of carriages into an ever-lengthening convoy of existing ones, taken from previous days, weeks and years. Collecting and storing its prey for long-term consumption. Did it matter? Not really. Though it did raise the interesting possibility that someone who used it as their daily commute might feasibly run into clones of themselves from previous days.

All it meant in the here and now was that they had been killing and killing for half a day now, and this cult wasn't ending. Cardin had taken first battle, then Jaune with support from Lily and River using little makeshift crossbows. He'd managed to survive without aura because no one else on this train had it other than she and Cardin. Jaune was vulnerable, but he was still trained to fight, whereas the wild cultists they fought were just civilians armed with makeshift weapons. Jaune had taken cuts, bruises and a minor injury, but he was more than able to hold his own.

Cardin and Blake dominated. It wasn't even close, but the cultists didn't care. Death was salvation in their mind, and they'd either be granted absolution and freedom or they'd die and escape this unending torment. Either outcome was a win in their minds.

"It's time to switch," Cardin said, lumbering up behind her with his makeshift two-handed mace. "I've had a rest. You get some."

"T—Thanks." Blake panted and gave ground, letting two cultists in. She and Cardin were able to dispatch them, at which point he stepped over their bodies and took control of the doorway once more, allowing Blake to stumble back.

River was there with a dry rag for her to wipe off sweat with. They didn't need water to live, which was lucky since they sure as hell didn't have any. That also meant no showers or washing, however. Blake scraped blood off her as best she could and wondered for a moment how burnt out her olfactory senses must have been that she never once thought Jaune smelt bad when they slept together. Certainly, she must have reeked just as much. It looked like being trapped in your own stench for decades on end eventually made you immune to it.

"Dad sure is amazing," River said. "He's killing so many."

It should have been shocking to hear a child her age say that, but then she was closer to thirty than ten by now. Blake considered them all lucky there were no other people the sisters' age who had been trapped on here, though even then there might be no inclination for them to enter into relationships. While they might have been adults mentally, they were physically trapped in bodies that didn't grow up, which might mean they also never developed any hormonal responses typical in the teenage years. They were pretty much asexual as far as she could tell. Which was kind of a relief.

Scraping herself dry, Blake trudged over to where Jaune was having a wound treated by Meryl. Cuts and injury could be fatal here, but his were small and Jaune took to blocking with his arms when he was in danger. Since those were anomalous, the injuries on them didn't really hurt him so much. Lines of lava ran down over his wrists and burnt the floor where they fell, but it kept him safe. The cuts he received were on his face which, despite decades down here, had never once grown facial hair. Then again, none of their actual hair had grown either. They'd been locked in time when coming here.

"There are too many of them," she said, even though Jaune would have noticed it by now. "This infinite train is spanning realities."

"I know. It's likely victims of the past few weeks or even years are trapped on here."

"That's what I assumed. It's running this place as a pantry."

Jaune smiled tensely. "That'd make more sense except for the fact its stored food is killing itself."

"The anomaly wouldn't know or understand that though, would it?" she replied. "If it's a dumb creature that only sees us as food, it'd be like a child taking food from the family fridge and never really understanding why other food is missing or who fills it back up.

Jaune looked surprised for a moment, but then nodded, agreeing with her idea. "Not a bad hypothesis. Nothing we've seen disproves it. And even if it did understand what was happening and wanted to stop us killing one another, it wouldn't necessarily know or understand how. Or why we're doing what we're doing. We're illogical creatures, us humans."

"I'm not sure it even—"

Blake's comment was broken by a horrible sound of crashing glass in the carriage they were defending against. It broke through to her because of how rare a sound it was. The clacking of the rails, the screams, the thud of bodies hitting metal – but never glass. And then more followed, grass shattering as voices rose out.

"TAKE ME, O LORD!"

"DELIVER US UNTO REMNANT!"

"I OFFER MYSELF!"

The train vibrated and trembled as horrible noises outside whipped up like a tropical storm. Winds that were not wind battered the train, shaking them so much that Cardin had to grasp onto a railing to stay standing. Luckily, his enemies were no more able to stand themselves and didn't take advantage of the moment. Blake grabbed onto Jaune for stability, both of them falling to their knees as the entity accepted the sacrifices – or, more realistically, as it opportunistically devoured the fools feeding themselves to it.

The feeding was longer than it had been for the businessman so many decades ago.

Much, much longer.

The train carriage continued to buck and rock as the entity feasted, and Lily – thrown about by the rocking – hit the wall and grabbed onto the first thing she could, one of the curtains made of train-seat felt they had strung up over the windows. The action wrenched it aside. The world outside was as black as ever, but suddenly there was a splash of red across the glass that made the girl shriek and fall back.

"Lily!" Meryl cried. "Cover it! Cover it!"

The girl hurried to do so, but in the moment before she could, something appeared at the window.

An eyeball.

And not a human one.

Bulbous and pink, and appearing on a stalk of some black flesh, it pressed up against the glass and stared at the girl for the half-a-second she took to rip the curtains back and close it out.

The entity was here.

It had always been there, Blake knew, but it obviously had a lot to pay attention to with potentially infinite train carriages. It made sense it would react to disturbances, though. Like sharks to blood and guts in the water, the entity was drawn to where food was throwing itself from the train. Maybe that was even its primary hunting method.

"Stay calm!" Jaune shouted. "It's been outside before and it's never—"

The window caved inward and sprayed shattered glass over Lily and Meryl. The eyeball, on its stalk-like tentacle, pushed through, ripping the felt curtain with it. Blinded by the curtain that had wrapped around its eye, it thrashed about inside the carriage. Another, thicker tentacle grasped the edge of the ruined window, pushing glass into its own flesh as it peeled the metal wall open from floor to window. Lily screamed.

"LILY!" Cardin roared. "GET BACK!"

Kicking his opponent back, Cardin grabbed one of the train seats and dragged it in front of the doorway, then broke from his defence to rush back. Cursing, Jaune leapt up to take his spot as the cultists – driven mad with fervour at the sight of their god fighting alongside them – scrambled over. Jaune was barely able to contain the swarm. Even then, he threw her Crocea Mors, ripping off his shirt to face the horde with his arms for weapons.

Knowing her role, Blake unsheathed the weapon and grimaced at the intense light and heat. It was painful to her, but only in the sense of being blinding and too hot, but she'd seen how much worse it was for anomalies. Advancing on the beast with it held high, she watched as its tentacles recoiled as if burned, and as the eye flailed wildly about, hitting itself on the walls and ceiling until it managed to shed the curtain. Once it did, its slitted eye fixed firmly on the sword and recoiled back into the darkness.

Blake advanced and half the gap in the train wall as Cardin dragged Meryl and Lily back. River ran to them, helping as best a person in a child's body could.

"We have to get out this carriage!" Blake shouted. "It's compromised!"

"Let the psychos have it!" Cardin roared over the sound of the tracks. "Maybe they'll do us a favour and throw themselves to the bea—"

A wrenching sound from the carriage ahead took away that possibility. The world bucked as the train rose up as if dangled in a mighty hand. There was a wrench, a crack and then a crash as the train came crashing down onto the tracks again. The carriage ahead of them, that once contained the horde of cultists, was now gone, with only an open doorway staring into the abyss.

And the train was beginning to slow down as their carriages and the ones behind them became uncoupled with the driver.

"Did... Did it understand us...?" Lily whispered.

No. It was more likely just responding to her attack on it. The beast had been hurt for the first time in its existence, and it wanted to get rid of the thing that hurt it. Ripping their carriage off did that, allowing the train and the prey within it to carry on while they were stranded. That thought made her stomach flip, especially as the train came to a slow and grinding halt.

Would there ever be a way out now...?

The train should have eventually reached its destination and let them off, and yet now they never would. What if they'd all been erased from reality? What if the train that eventually reached Mountain Glenn would arrive with a group of missing passengers? Blake swallowed her fear for everyone else's sake and stepped forward to wave Crocea Mors out the hole in the wall to act as a light source.

The "walls" were not walls. There was an abyss, and they appeared to be on floating tracks in the midst of it. Even if they stepped off the no longer moving train, there was no floor to stand on, and they would fall for what looked like an eternity. Of course it had been too much to hope, for even a second, that they might have seen the inside of a tunnel and realised they were back in Vale having escaped this nightmare.

Jaune came limping back. "The cultists aren't a problem anymore, I guess. I saw some of them scream with excitement when their train was crushed. They were pulped."

"Good riddance" spat Cardin. He collapsed onto one of the train's seats, holding Meryl firmly to his side. He took a deep breath of her hair, while his adoptive children clung to him. He, like all of them, was exhausted beyond belief. "But now what? Do you think the beast carried on with the train? It must have, right? If that sword hurt it, it wouldn't want anything to do with us. And it's not like it's low on food."

"Maybe." Jaune winced at the sword. "Blake, can you...?" She sheathed it and handed it back, but he shook his head. "Let's trade weapons. I'm not the right person to wield that in here. The only reason my family gave it to me was so that if I lost control and turned full anomaly, the ticket to someone killing me would be attached to my very person. Even an amateur huntsman would be able to draw the sword on my back and kill me with it."

"Your family is a fucking mess, man," Cardin grunted.

"I've told him that enough times," Blake said, tossing her lover Gambol Shroud. "But the point remains on what we do. Forge a life here? Follow the tracks? There's always the chance the beast isn't the only thing living in this place."

Cardin picked up a loose chunk of metal and tossed it out the gaping hole in the wall. It clunked heavily on hitting the tracks, then bounced off and fell without a sound. They all waited for a splash, but there was nothing.

"Tracks are real, if nothing else," he said. "We could walk on them, but one wrong step and we'll fall forever. And if something attacks us on them, it'll be good fucking luck. They just have to knock us off and we're done." He sighed. "Course, that's all they need to do now as well. One good push and this carriage will go tumbling into the abyss with us on it."

Everyone was looking to her and Jaune for a solution, she realised. They were the professionals. This was their job. Blake looked to Jaune desperately for an answer but could see only the same uncertainty in him.

"Let's give it twenty-four hours," he said, to buy time for them to think. "We're all exhausted and need to recover anyway, and I think it'll be important for us to find out whether our physical immunity to needs like food and drink is continuing without the entity's presence. If it doesn't, we'll have no choice but to leave in search of sustenance. If it does, that gives us more options."

"Also gives the thing time to come back," Cardin pointed out.

Jaune shrugged. "Better we fight it in here than out on the tracks in that case."

"Tch. True. Well, whatever." Cardin let out a sigh. "I'm exhausted anyway and we're going to need bigger weapons if we want to fight that thing. Knives aren't going to cut it when it can strike us from metres away. We need to make spears at the very least."

Blake glanced back to the carriage they'd come from. Technically, she and Jaune had brought with them the means to fight it – though they came in the form of bombs filled with dust. Dust, being an anomalous material, ought to have the destructive power to harm it, but the blasts would definitely kill them all as well, especially in such a confined space.

Jaune shook his head, silently warning her not to tell them. They'd been open about just about everything, but never their goals in coming on here. Jaune told everyone that it was to investigate and find out what was happening, but not that it was a suicide mission to kill the beast and everyone along with it.

Blake wisely kept silent.

Soon, they were moving back, abandoning the carriage ripped open and exposed to the beast and retreating to the darker ones where curtains still covered the glass and provided the safety of darkness. Cardin and Meryl retreated to a corner where they could hold one another, though there would be no lovemaking since Lily and River, both shaken from the entity's appearance, were sleeping between them.

Jaune and Blake moved further back to the "funeral carriage" where the still-fresh bodies of the two women who died lay covered in thin felt sheets. They hadn't even begun to decompose despite the years. Jaune carried the briefcase with him.

Once they were out of hearing range, Blake turned to him. "We're going to detonate the bombs, aren't we?"

"It's our only real choice," he said.

"We can see if there's a way out of this."

"Of course. I didn't mean immediately detonate them. We'll exhaust other options first." His words calmed her, reminding her of the differences between him and Adam. Even after so long, the concept of bombs on a train distressed her. "But you and I both know we're not going to magically come across a door out of here if we follow those tracks. It'll be an infinite circuit with no way out."

Blake did know it, but she also knew they couldn't say that to the others – even if they, too, probably suspected it was the case. The sanity of the family back there demanded they all pretend to believe there was a way out.

"What if the entity doesn't come back?" she asked. "What then? We'll never catch it if we have to follow on foot and it's on a speeding train."

"It'll come back."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because you harmed it," he said, tapping the pommel of Crocea Mors. "Anomalies like it are childish and ignorant of the world around them. They crop into existence and only know their world, like a child. And what does a child do if it's stung by a bee?"

"It cries."

He smirked. "I meant to the insect."

The answer dawned on her. "They would kill it."

"Exactly. A childish mind doesn't understand that the bee was frightened or protecting its hive. All it knows is that this creature hurt it, and so this creature must be killed so it can't hurt it a second time." Jaune glanced at the covered windows and shivered. "It will come back, Blake. It will come back because it won't be able to forget a pain it's never felt before, and it will feel fear for the first time in its existence. A fear that will never go away so long as this weapon exists within its realm."

So, like a child not understanding the world but knowing an innocent creature had stung it, the entity would come back and kill them. Maybe not now, maybe not today, but it would inevitably do so because, for once, it knew what it was like to fear for its life. That was why he'd given her the sword, she realised. Beyond the fact he couldn't use it so well without harming himself. Jaune knew he'd be killed easily by the beast due to his lack of aura, but she would have a better chance delivering a killing blow.

Blake clung to Crocea Mors with all her strength.

Next Chapter: 14th October

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