Chapter 2: Of Trains, Towns, and Time - Part 1

As I walked hand-in-hand with the little lady, the town opened up before us, as though the flickering lights were slowly swallowing the forest we had left behind. Night had already fallen, wrapping everything in long shadows, and there we stood, at the entrance of a place that, in some way, had summoned me. I didn’t know what I would find here, but for some reason, we had nothing to fear.

I smiled as I looked at the small tigress clutching my hand. There was something both tender and melancholic in the way she held on.

The air... the air was thick with something. A scent that could possibly have back memories ,sank me deeper into confusion. It was sweet and bitter at the same time, like those places where time seems to fold over itself. I couldn’t tell if it was just an impression or if something deeper thrummed in the atmosphere.

Mi Fan walked beside me in silence, but her ears, those little signals I knew so well, twitched in rhythm with something I couldn’t perceive. It was almost as if she was picking up on things beyond my comprehension.

“It’s the unmistakable scent of…” she began, her voice taking on a tone that, for a moment, made me think she had sensed something deeper, something I hadn’t yet grasped.

My eyes widened. Perhaps the girl really could understand what was happening faster than I could. We never know for sure. Sometimes, the young catch what old eyes can no longer see. With the right training, she could become the best bodyguard in the world—more than anyone would ever expect.

“Apple fritters,” she finished, her tail wagging from side to side as she squeezed my hand excitedly.

I stopped for a second, processing what she had just said, before a loud laugh escaped my lips. I couldn’t help it. We always think too much, while she... she could still allow herself to be a child.

“Of course, apple fritters,” I said, smiling and still chuckling. Maybe, after all, bringing her along was helping me more than her.

As we crossed the threshold into town, the place unfolded before us like a postcard frozen in time. Gas lamps illuminated the streets with a soft, flickering light.

Gas, I repeated silently. Who still used gas lamps? It was as if Hemlock Ridge had decided to stop moving forward, anchored in some point the rest of the world had forgotten.

The houses were made of wood, all single-story, forming perfectly aligned rows, as if someone had drawn an invisible ruler to ensure everything fit just so. The dark color of the facades—perhaps walnut or some other resilient material—and the sloped roofs gave them a cozy air, yet there was something that didn’t quite sit right. Maybe it was the silence, or the rust creeping over certain edges, as if time had tried to claw at the town but hadn’t quite managed to finish the job.

In the distance, like industrial phantoms, the enormous structures of the train depots loomed. At a glance, they didn’t seem out of place, but their size clashed with the small, orderly nature of the houses. The depots stood like silent giants, witnesses to a time when things here were different. They remained still, wrapped in the hills that surrounded the town. Hills that rose like sentinels, or perhaps like walls, keeping Hemlock Ridge trapped in its own bubble.

Far off, I saw a circular plaza, dimly lit by flickering gas lamps. The gathered townspeople clapped in an almost mechanical rhythm, while low music drifted through the air, accompanied by the soft voice of a woman. It was barely audible, like a whisper, but enough to send a shiver of unease through the atmosphere.

We walked along the main street, glancing at the houses. We had arrived, though I still had no idea why. But there was something here that pulled at me, something that had called to me long before we’d decided to come.

As we passed one of the houses, my eyes stopped on a symbol painted on the façade. The old Mahayan company emblem. I recognized it immediately. My breath caught for a moment.

I swallowed, feeling something inside me tighten. There was something deeply unsettling about seeing the long retired symbol here, in this isolated place.

When I first started looking at maps to find the place calling to me, I had found Hemlock Ridge. The scant information I uncovered about the town didn’t say much. Just a forgotten note in the Mahayan family archives: this site, far from civilization, had once been used as a repair yard for the old transcontinental trains.

In those days, mechanics worked around the clock, breathing life back into the titans of steel that crossed the oceans, machines that connected continents at the expense of the very earth they traversed.

It was hidden deliberately, kept out of sight so that the curious wouldn’t see what was being done here. The old Mahayan technology was a closely guarded secret, power that not everyone should know. We kept the trains running, far from the eyes of the world.

But that was before. Now, those machines were gone. And yet, seeing the old family symbol painted on one of the houses shook me. The memories came back unbidden.

We had left part of our history here, in this remote corner, and though I tried not to think about it, the past never truly stays silent.

I swallowed again, feeling a pang in my chest. This place, once home to the trains, now felt like a shadow, an echo of what it had been. But the old Mahayan family symbol was still there, as if time had forgotten to erase it.