The morning mist over Oakhaven valley had changed.
It wasn't the thin, cold fog of a kingdom running out of time anymore. It was thick and white and smelled of coal-fire and hot iron — the breath of something enormous coming to life. I stood on Platform Zero and looked at what we had built in twenty-one days, and for a moment I forgot how to speak.
She was called the Phoenix's Breath.
She was massive — black iron from nose to tail, her boiler wrapped in laminated iron-silk, her drive-wheels six feet in diameter and polished to a mirror shine despite everything we'd put them through. She didn't look like the elegant locomotives I remembered from history books. She looked like something that had decided the concept of distance was personally offensive.
"If the tracks hold, we make history," Bastian said quietly, standing beside me. He was in full combat gear, a new iron-silk headset fastened at his jaw for communication over the engine noise. "If they don't—"
