The interior of the Mist Train was dominated by an otherworldly silence that severed it from the clamor of the outside world. A heavy residue of odors drifted from the worn wooden seats: the stubborn scent of sweat left by years of travelers, mixed with the sharp reek of soot from incinerated divine cores.
Koyoi rested her slight frame against the cold wooden backrest. She felt the rhythmic, insistent thrumming of the steel wheels—a dull thunder vibrating deep within her ribs.
Pale lantern light flickered with the train’s violent swaying. With every pulse, the shadows on the walls stretched and contracted like living things. Koyoi’s eyes were drawn to a passenger sitting across the aisle: a man shrouded from head to toe in black robes. Where his face should have been, a featureless white mask was fixed, devoid of any pattern. He sat perfectly still, clutching an old wooden box on his lap as if it were his own heart.
The presence radiating from him lacked any natural warmth. Instead, it chilled the air like ice, exposing the seams of the Order. Feeling a shiver pierce her spine, Koyoi instinctively checked the gods within her drawstring pouch.
At the bottom of the pouch, the Moon God sensed its master's anxiety and pulsed with a sharp silver warning. The Wind God, reviling the stagnant scent of death drifting from the man, whipped up a gale within the bag. Only the Glass God remained calm, using its power of reflection to analyze the invisible waveforms of divine energy lurking inside the wooden box.
Picking up these discordant cries with her soul’s hearing, Koyoi felt the prickle of static electricity against her skin. She understood then that the train was mutating into a massive Otherworld.
Kuon narrowed his prosthetic left eye, tracking the microscopic dust of the Order floating through the air like a cold sensor.
"Watch yourself," he muttered. "The Order in this carriage is no longer within any normal parameters. That man in black... he’s forcibly embedded fragments of a Nameless God into his body."
"Fragments?" Koyoi whispered. "Is he with the Observers?"
"No. His breath is fundamentally different. He’s likely a Grave-digger—the kind who scavenges the dregs of the Order that overflow from the Scripture Repository."
Kuon wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, enduring the agony of an Order overload burning in his left eye.
"Grave-diggers... do people like that really exist?"
"Yeah. They’re the lowest of the low, mining gods erased from the Record to sell them on the black market. To them, a god is just a power source."
Kuon’s voice was laced with hatred born from his own past as a test subject. Koyoi caught her breath as eerie blue light leaked from the seams of the man's wooden box, searing itself into her retinas.
As the train crossed an iron bridge over a deep valley, the mist outside grew even denser. The distortion of the Order reached its zenith. Particles of soot rose from the floorboards, drifting in ominous spirals. Koyoi felt her body lift slightly off her seat and instinctively grabbed the muscular arm of Asahi, who sat beside her.
Asahi silently squeezed her hand back. He thrust his greatsword into the floor, using his weight to tether the three of them to this precarious reality.
In that instant, every light vanished. The world was painted over in absolute black.
The only thing visible was the wooden box, pulsing with a malevolent, crimson glow like a beating heart. In that light, the man’s mask was suddenly covered in ink-like stains—thousands of words of resentment: Help me... help me... help me...
Koyoi felt a shock so cold it seemed to freeze the air in her lungs. She could only stare at the blasphemous Record. In the dark, Kuon’s prosthetic eye glowed a brilliant blue, capturing the silhouettes of thousands of dead gods overlapping behind the man.
"Just as I thought. That box has the lamentations of gods trapped inside. The Wardens of the Repository won't let such a foul Record pass."
"Wardens? Is there something else waiting for us?"
"The Repository is the tomb for the world's Correct Records," Kuon said. "It’s guarded by the Sentinels of the Record—cold-blooded entities that erase any fluctuation that would pollute the Order."
The train’s whistle let out a shriek like a dying beast. The pale lantern light returned.
The man in black had vanished without a trace. All that remained were the curtains fluttering in the wind and a single streak of black soot on the floor. Koyoi felt her heart thumping against her ribs and let out a long, trembling breath.
Asahi wiped a smudge of black dust from his blade. "Looks like we caught a bit of the Order's poison before even reaching our stop," he muttered.
He pulled a ticket marked with a vermilion seal from his robes and traced the characters for Scripture Repository. Kuon stared out the window at the silhouette of a gargantuan, pitch-black gate looming through the mist.
"There it is. The Scripture Repository. From here on, a single misstep means the total erasure of our existence. It's a brutal gamble."
Kuon’s words were a final declaration of war. Koyoi clutched her pouch tightly, feeling the distinct warmth of the three gods within her palm. The silver light of the Moon God, the soft breath of the Wind God, and the sharp reflection of the Glass God. They were her only weapons to carve a path through the darkness.
The train plunged straight into the abyss of the Order. The metallic shriek of wheels against rails cut through the smell of soot, vibrating mercilessly in their ears. The scenery flying past the window was now a mere torrent of light as the boundaries of the world converged.
Koyoi gripped her armrest and pressed her forehead against the window. The chill of the glass seeped into her bone. Inside the pouch, the three gods huddled together in silence.
Through a rift in the mist, the pitch-black gate slowly revealed its form.