Chapter 1 - The Other Side of the Tracks

Boot-spurs clacked as harsh leather boots met even harsher earth. Dusty amber desert spanned eternally on with sparse sickly vegetation as the only sign of life on the surface. Above, buzzards and vultures circled greedily, symbols of the death that haunted the place. Below, lizards and tumbleweeds skittered, moving quick and desperate; Here, to stop is to die.

Arizona, 1868, the scar tissue of an America torn asunder by civil war only three years earlier. A young, wild place, full of ambition and the bloodshed that by nature accompanies it. Promised gold and silver lured men from across the nation westward to La Paz, San Luis, Tombstone.

One such man walked across this desert; his light steps barely impressed themselves on the dust beneath his feet. His head stayed low, shrouded from the assaulting sun by a cattleman’s stetson.

Clint Morgans was his name. It seemed to him that all he did these days was walk. His horse had died a few towns back in a poker game gone wrong… Though that’s no story worth telling, after all, good stories need a hero, and Clint Morgans was no hero.

Clint was a mere man, and like any man, he needed two things, a drink and some rest. Unfortunately, these things seemed to elude him, he was down to his last canteen of water and his bedroll had long since blown away on some cruel desert wind. He had nothing to his name but the revolver in his pocket and a scarce few bullets.

The gun was the one thing Clint could not live without. He had gone days without sleeping, dehydration had long since grasped his throat with its sandy hands, but he did not care. So long as he had his gun on his hip, he felt complete. It was only a simple thing, a well-aged Remington 1858 that had passed through many hands before it wound up with Clint. Six chambers, .44 calibre, and most importantly, a smooth wooden handle that always nestled perfectly into his palm. He ran his hand over it, he would have to use it soon, he could feel it. His eyes traced the horizon, his pace slowed, in mere moments he observed everything around him.

He’d always had good eyes, he had to; They were the key to survival, after all the deadliest threats were the ones you couldn’t see coming. No matter what manner of danger approached, if it could be observed, it could be avoided, outmanoeuvred and killed.

Quickly he found it, a shimmer in the distance. It was the sun reflected in recently laid train tracks. Civilization was close, and civilization meant conflict. It was the natural order of the new American West. To call it civilization at all was generous. It still operated on primordial rules, dog eat dog, every man for himself. Everyone here was desperate, chasing the western sunset in the hopes of claiming some of the gold it blessed the horizon with. The core principle of the West was simple, if you have nothing, take it, but after years of destiny being manifested, much of it was already taken, leaving the desperate scavengers competing to strip one another of their nothings, hoping to someday scrape together something.

The tracks were a natural place for an ambush, train robberies were among the most lucrative prey a wandering outlaw could ask for, the difficulty was that they only came so often. This far west the train system was fresh, still an experiment. You could never know when a train would finally arrive, let alone what it was carrying. It was a desperate gamble, typically taken by people with nothing left to lose.

People like the ones Clint saw in the brush.

He noticed them immediately, a few wiry, scraggly bandits. Six of them, three either side, faces haggard and eyes sunken from days in the desert awaiting a prize that never came. Clint was too close now, if he walked away, he’d turn his back on them. The only thing more foolish than walking into an ambush is turning your back on one. An observed threat could be countered, an unobserved threat is certain death, that was Clint’s philosophy.

Clint walked directly into their ambush. They had spotted him now, to act unaware and give them a false sense of security in their surprise attack would only be to his advantage.

The leader of the group made himself known; he was an unshaved prickly cactus of a man, tall but not imposing, a mere feature of his environment. “Your water, hand it over.” he hissed, throat hoarse. At his word, the rest of the bandits sprung up from their posts, similarly ill-mannered and sickly. Each of their hands hung eagerly at their waist, hovering over their own pistols in the same way as Clint, fingers tapping and twirling in anticipation.

Only one bandit faltered, a young boy, barely 18, his hat too large for a small head bursting with adrenaline. Clint instantly identified him as a weak point.

“I ain’t got enough water for six.” Clint spoke firmly, devoid of fear or excitement.

“Neither do we, why do you think we’re robbing you?” The bandit leader scoffed.

“A robbery? You sure? This don’t have to be a robbery. If you gentlemen listen to reason, we can leave this as just a couple travellers passin’ each other by.”

Five clicks of drawn revolvers echoed in chorus around Clint, followed by a delayed sixth. He smiled somberly under the shroud of his hat. He figured this was how it would play out.

A gun is the most profoundly terrifying thing a person can be faced with.

And now he was faced with six.

A gun may just be the most powerful thing ever devised by man. In theory, it's just a series of mechanisms that launch a projectile at high velocity. At its core, that’s all it is. A glorified sling. While deadly, it should be no scarier than a sword or a spear, and it should pale in comparison to bombs and the like.

Despite its ability to dispense instant death, it's fully possible to survive a gunshot, even several. But there’s more to a gun than its physical properties. When a gun is pointed at someone, they don’t see a series of mechanisms, or even a weapon, they see the potential for instant death. They see the grim reaper himself staring them down, unavoidable fate directly before them, knowing they are unable to run or hide. Unlike a sword, it cannot be parried, unlike an arrow, it cannot be blocked, unlike a punch, it cannot be dodged. If a gun is pointed at you, you are effectively already dead.

The only thing scarier than the gun itself is the person behind it. A gun doesn’t fire on its own, after all. It needs the conscious influence of a human ready to kill. Whenever you stare down a gunman, you don’t know if they’re capable of firing it or not. That’s more terrifying than the certainty of death. Hope is perpetuated by the off chance the fallible man behind the cold machine may miss, or not have the heart to shoot, only to be crushed by the inevitable despair of the bullet.

Despite this, Clint didn’t flinch at the sight of the six revolvers on him. He didn’t even look at the guns, just at the eyes of their wielders. He panned across, watching them carefully. Did their pupils shift? Eyelids flicker? Did they blink fast, slow, or not at all? Was there that spark of dark madness that made one able to take the power of God in their hand and fire as judge, jury and executioner?

Sure enough, they could all do it, they all had eyes like his, the eyes of killers. All but the young boy, of course.

“I told ya, drop the-”

The Bandit leader had a hole through his head before he even clocked Clint’s draw. The second bandit fell before he even knew his superior was dead. The third nearly got his arm up before Clint’s bullet ripped through his chest. The fourth and fifth only managed to share a glance, the last sight each of them saw was the light leaving the other’s eyes.

Only the boy remained.

Clint kept his revolver raised at the boy, who squirmed and shook, but never fired his own weapon. “P-put your gun down! I’ll shoot!” the kid cried, knees shaking.

Clint’s pupils danced as he followed every jittery movement the young man made. “Relax. I only had five bullets. I ain’t a threat no more.”

“You just killed those guys and you expect me to believe that?”

Clint nodded. “They were gonna kill me. I had to do it.”

“A-and I wasn’t? Why leave me? You think I couldn’t?”

“You’re no killer. That’s a good thing. Put the gun down.”

“Shut up! I’m still gonna shoot you!” The boy’s voice quivered, undercutting any power his shouted threats had.

Clint had no more words, he just stared. His yellow eyes wide and waiting, cruelty and kindness all spun together in the pattern of his irises. Eventually, the boy broke on his own, dropping the gun and sobbing in an overwhelming wave of confused emotion.

Before the young man knew it, Clint was already past him, the only thing alerting him to his movement being a metallic clang and the noise of swilling water. Clint’s canister lay at his feet, glistening in the sun like the treasure it was in this environment. He grabbed it, drinking greedily and eagerly, life restored to his weary body from just a few sips. He turned to thank his saviour, but found no one there waiting for him.

Another day, another brush with death. Clint was numb to it by now. He just focused on reloading his revolver. It was an intimate process, finicky in all the right ways to totally absorb him. First, he half-cocked the hammer, releasing the cylinder and allowing it to spin freely. He rolled it a few times with his thumb,, feeling the weight of the single remaining bullet in the six chambers. From his pocket, he retrieved five more bullets, slotting each one in carefully and packing the chambers with the in-built rod beneath the muzzle.

As he walked, the world seemed to slip away from Clint. With each step, the world blurred and darkened around him, until finally there was nothing, just him and his gun. Load, pack. Load, pack. Load, pack. Everything as it always was, him and his six shooter.

And then there was a train.

He stood on the tracks, air pressure from the gargantuan metal thing barreling toward him a forewarning of his imminent death. He barely had a chance to register it before it was upon him, all he could see was the lights beaming the front of it.

And then there was only light.

“This is it, huh? Death.” He wondered, peripheral vision filled only with absorbing blackness. “Well, was always gonna happen.”

Even in the face of what must be his death, Clint’s hand gravitated toward his waist, toward his revolver. Lo and behold, he found it there.

“Hah, you made it to hell too, huh?” He chuckled, stumbling toward the light, perhaps toward peace, perhaps toward damnation. Ideally, toward yet more days of wandering.

Ultimately though, he found nothing of the sort. He found the light was not the grace of death, but the mouth of a cave, and this light was quickly snuffed out by the cave’s dweller, a great, red-eyed beast, somewhere between a boar and a bear. He couldn’t quite make out its shape, but at the sight of it, he knew for certain now that this was hell.

Nearby, unbeknownst to Clint, the peaceful town of Floraison was just awakening; mothers hurried children out of bed, eagre adventurers stomped into their boots and slung swords on their backs ready for the next battle, and Brann, the town’s lone bartender, was preparing to open his tavern.

Floraison was just one of hundreds of little villages across Gallia, a peaceful place for children to be raised and for the old to retire, a comfortable environment for young adventurers to begin their long journeys with low-paying, low-risk quests. It and its townsfolk had no clue that they would be the first to see the world change. Or rather, hear it.

The sky itself seemed to scream, the air ruptured with an unfathomable, explosive sound. Birds and deer leapt from the woods in utter horror, repulsed. It was like the wrath of God, divinely terrifying the populace to its core. Much like God’s wrath though, there was a beauty to it, an alluring majesty. Something had arrived, something unknowably powerful and deadly.

The people of the town all fell silent, trying to process the foreign sound. They attempted to rationalise it as thunder, but they knew this sound was something that denied rationality, that denied the very laws of the world they had come to know.

And so of course, the townsfolk grew curious. All the adventurers, the nosey mothers, Brann, the lone bartender, they all gathered and ran en masse out to the woods, sprinted even, tripping and falling over themselves to satiate that killer curiosity, all asking the same thing; “What in the world?”

Current Party: Clint Morgans