Chapter 1077: The Front on the Fertile Land
“These are the last rails for today,” Leaf said. Her head emerged from the treetops the way a periscope clears water — quick, precise, already scanning. “Thank you.”
“No problem!” Molly patted her chest and blew the whistle she wore around her neck. “Come out, Momota!”
The blue ball materialized at treetop height, swelling from the size of a fist to the size of a house in the span of three heartbeats. It extruded its arms, scooped the rails from the ground in one clean motion, and gulped them down — but the rails were longer than Momota was wide, and both ends stuck out through its body like pins through a pincushion. Molly decided this looked undignified and resolved not to let it bother her.
Leaf tilted her head. “Momota? I thought last time you called it Momoka.”
“Did I?” Molly tipped her head sideways, considering. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is saying the name out loud. That’s how you demonstrate your power.”
”…Did Mystery Moon tell you that?”
Molly blinked. “How did you know?”
“I—” Leaf coughed. “Nothing. There are new supplies coming in from Neverwinter. I have to go.”
She transformed before the sentence was fully finished. One moment she was a face in the leaves; the next, nothing — just the rustle of branches settling back, and the faint impression that the forest had simply absorbed her.
Molly stared at the gap she’d left. Leaf could cross the entire Misty Forest in an eyeblink, draw magic from thousands of trees simultaneously, deliver construction materials to the front in a continuous and apparently inexhaustible stream. Beside that, Momota’s carrying capacity felt like something you’d brag about only to someone who had never seen what evolution could do.
When would she get there?
She’d been in Neverwinter four or five months. She’d learned the basics of reading and writing. She’d started on Principles of Nature. The book was dense and the chapters on material transformation were frankly intimidating, but she’d heard that evolution sometimes triggered in the gap between understanding nothing and understanding a little — that threshold moment when the ability recognized you were trying to grow and decided to meet you halfway.
She climbed onto Momota’s head and steered her out of the forest.
Tower Station No. 0 hit her first as sound: the rhythmic call-and-response of work teams coordinating across the site, the scrape of iron on gravel, the constant percussion of hammers finding stone. Then as sight — thousands of workers in a scatter of different clothes, some half-naked in the warmth they were generating, throwing themselves against the problem of a station where nothing had existed a week before.
A blockhouse at each corner. Trenches connecting them. Parapets still being finished, raw earth showing where the form-boards hadn’t been pulled yet. The railway stretched northeast from the station’s edge until the plain swallowed it. The whole assembly looked less like a military installation than like a city deciding very quickly to become one.
“Miss Molly! Thanks for coming back!”
“We need help tipping a steam engine upright — the train unit is completely overwhelmed—”
“Hey, isn’t that Momota? She got bigger!”
Molly navigated the greetings with practiced efficiency, dispatching small tasks where she could — lifting a bogged cart free, steadying a beam while workers drove pins — until she’d deposited the rails in the storage area and worked her way clear of the busiest section. She knew almost everyone by name now. That had taken less than a week, which still surprised her. On Sleeping Island, even the witches hadn’t all known her name. Here she was a celebrity, and she couldn’t decide whether the feeling it produced was pride or something more precarious — the sense that this could be taken away, that the appreciation was contingent on continuing to be useful, that she should be careful not to take it for granted.
She decided it was mostly pride and kept walking.
Beyond the station, the sound changed.
Engines. The deep chested rumble of trains in motion, steel on steel, the hiss of released pressure. Three of them — that was nearly everything Neverwinter had — running without pause, without apparent fatigue, carrying more in a single run than Momota could manage in a day. Princess Tilly had been clear: the trains were irreplaceable, the logistics chain couldn’t break, the Seagull existed precisely to fill the gaps the trains couldn’t reach rather than to replicate what they were already doing. Molly had accepted this without difficulty. It was obviously true.
She watched a cargo car discharge its load — crates, bundled timber, coils of wire — and felt the scale of it settle over her like a hand on her shoulder. This is a war being won at the level of tonnage. She was one small part of the tonnage.
The soldiers she passed came in two varieties. The new recruits tracked Momota with open-mouthed attention, craning their necks even in the middle of instruction. The veterans didn’t look up. Polishing their rifles or bent over maps or simply waiting with the particular stillness of men who had learned that waiting was its own form of work.
An instructor tapped a picture on a blackboard: a creature with thick arms and a hunched silhouette, hand drawn in charcoal. “The most common type is the Mad Demon. Large bodies, thick arms, good at throwing bone spears. They don’t throw in rapid succession unless it’s an emergency—”
Laughter from the class.
“Silence.” The instructor’s voice cut the sound off cleanly. “I hope they won’t scare the hell out of you when you actually meet one. The only thing that saves you is pulling the trigger before it kills you. Fleeing won’t work. Yielding won’t work. Do you understand?”
“Yes!”
“Next.” He pointed to a second picture — a demon with a vertical eye on its forehead. “This is the Fearsome Demon. Fewer of them, but far more dangerous. They can paralyze you on sight — you cannot move, you cannot act, you simply wait for whatever comes next. A God’s Stone of Retaliation will protect you, and everyone at the front receives one. But if you encounter one without the Stone—”
“What do we do then?”
“Picture something you love. Think of someone you’d die for. Use everything in you to push through the fear. Every possible means.”
Someone in the class turned to look at Molly.
She smiled at him and winked.
“You.” The instructor’s voice cracked like a whip. “If you’re not interested in my class, get back to the construction site.”
The soldier’s head dropped instantly.
Molly pressed her lips together to hold back a laugh, turned Momota forward, and kept walking.
Another few hundred meters, and she reached the end of the line — literally: the point where the railway simply stopped, its last sleeper still half-buried, the track ahead not yet laid. Workers, soldiers, and witches occupied the space together without any apparent hierarchy, each doing whatever the next step required.
A girl stood at the center of it all.
She was slight, flaxen-haired, wearing a work suit designed for function rather than anything else — cuffs tight at the wrist, collar close, the fabric already dusty from days in the open air. Her hair was pulled back. She was holding a map with both hands, and she was talking to Karl Van Bate, Minister of Construction, and Edith Kant, head of the General Staff, with the unhurried authority of someone who had never once doubted that what she said would be acted on.
The route of the railway. The speed of advance. Construction sequencing. Things Molly couldn’t hear clearly from this distance and wouldn’t have fully understood even if she had.
Anna’s lake-blue eyes caught the light off the map, and for a moment — just a moment — they were less like eyes and more like the kind of open water that has no floor you can see.
Molly stopped Momota and stood there, watching.
She’d heard people say the Queen of Graycastle was not the most striking witch at a glance — not the tallest, not the most decorated, not the loudest. That was true, as far as it went. But it missed something. It missed the way every other person in that cluster angled slightly toward Anna as though she were the fixed point around which the rest of the diagram organized itself. It missed the quality of attention she attracted without requesting it, the specific texture of deference that made no distinction between veterans and new recruits, between officials and laborers.
Molly had decided, sometime in the past week, not to interrupt her when she was working. She quietly directed Momota around the crowd, unloaded the rails she’d been carrying into the storage area, and didn’t say a word.