“Don’t you ever go near that train station, you hear me?”
Those were the words her father always told her, which Siara obediently followed — well, most of the time, anyway. It was hard to stay away from a place like Catenary Station.
It was a beautiful little white building which sat on a brilliant green field furnished by all sorts of wildflowers at the western edge of Sorrel Wood, and it had absolutely nothing to do with carriages. Naturally, it had to do with trains.
It wasn’t that Siara didn’t like carriages. Rather it was that, by her own design or divine intervention, she couldn’t like them. They rocked around in such a vile way that they always made her sick. Her diagnosis, officially given to her by an aunt who was dismally drunk on a particularly grey afternoon Siara clearly recalled, was that she suffered from severe motion sickness.
Siara’s condition plagued her so severely that in all her nineteen years of life, she had only left Sorrel Wood once. That had been when her father had sent her off to study at the age of ten. The carriage ride from her home to the convent in Purslane Hills only lasted a quarter of an hour. Yet in that short time, it had made Siara consider the idea that she was the reincarnation of a terrible tyrant who was receiving karma by way of a lurching stomach and frantic heart.
Much to her surprise, Siara had survived the journey to the convent. With an equal amount of surprise (but substantially more cursing and hurling), she also survived the journey back home some nine years later.
Those nine studious years had nourished her most prized dream: to see all sorts of new things in all sorts of new places, without the use of carriages.
If only she didn’t live in Sorrel Wood, she often brooded.
Sorrel Wood was Siara’s hometown. A quaint place surrounded by tall mountains and thick shadowy forests, smack in the middle of the Country of Cress. It produced friendly people, good beer, and ample amounts of wool and fine paper, but this charming town which offered such high quality things was best known for none of that. Instead, its fame came from the way in which the denizens of Sorrel Wood believed in legends and superstitions like they were irrefutable truths. Those denizens took apparent joy in spreading new rumours themselves, fabricating more nonsense than one could think was possible.
It was downright frustrating, akin to a curse that plagued the land. Siara would all too often ball up her fists, scaring her maids as she furrowed her brow and stalked through the manor halls wishing Sorrel Wood would come to its senses.
Siara had eventually found herself debunking myths as an eccentric pastime. Opening umbrellas indoors, or walking under any ladders she could find — exposing silly rituals with the help of books or her own wits, it turned out, put her in high spirits. To Siara, superstitions were just an annoying way to control others through fear, and fear be damned.
The greatest source of superstitions in Sorrel Wood, however, was another matter entirely. Much like spirits and ghosts, Siara couldn’t debunk the rumours around it, or rather, him. He stood at the top of the gossip food chain and had no equals to oppose him. At some point this man had been blessed with a monicker by the locals, one which hadn’t changed in a long time: The Dreaded Stationmaster.
A tall, mysterious, dark-haired man with devilish green eyes and fangs for teeth. Sometimes he had curled claws for fingers, or a large vulture perched on his shoulder. What the Stationmaster looked like boiled down to how bored the reporters were when there was nothing interesting to report about in the newspaper. Or, similarly, if the older folk felt that not enough rumours were circulating to tease the young.
The charming train station that Siara was so fond of was run by this supposedly terrifying man. Consequently, no matter how charming the station looked or how great trains could be, it was never used by anyone in Sorrel Wood. In fact, Siara had never been able to solve the case of how it still operated.
Maybe it was the rumours themselves, she pondered, that kept it from becoming obsolete. Those came in spades:
“Haven’t you heard about the man who spoke to the Stationmaster once, and then died shortly after of an incurable illness? That poor soul…”
“A young noblewoman once went there to buy a ticket, and went mad and disappeared as she walked down the tracks, never to return!”
“If you look the Master in the eye, it’s said you’ll be cursed!”
It was agreed upon that all of these unfortunate individuals had never managed to stave off the Stationmaster’s curse, because they hadn’t preformed the very important ritual one needed to partake in when walking past the station. Namely, one had to twirl around on one’s heel three times and clap once, then shout the first colour that came to one’s mind.
As much as it made her sigh in exasperation, it had been a great source of joy to Siara once. She happened to be near the station when a group of six older gentlemen, dressed in suits and top hats and fine accoutrements, were walking by the station as well. Then they suddenly began to twirl and clap out of synch while yelling colours into the sky, many tripping as though they’d been possessed by drink. The memory still made her laugh, and she often thought back to it when she felt down.
How exactly things had come to be like this, Siara didn’t know. She could only take a guess, or excuse their superstitious way of life by reciting folktales about spirits and madmen.
What she did know was that Catenary Station had become her own personal problem. Those doltish tales about the Stationmaster, much to her consternation, had left her train-deprived and carriage foisted-upon all her life.
One day, not long before her twentieth birthday and spurred on by very serious matters, Siara devised a plan: she would run away from her fate by buying a ticket from the Dreaded Stationmaster, and ride the train to a faraway place, where superstitions had no place in day-to-day life.
The day those serious matters put a plan as daring as that into motion had finally arrived…
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