Two days in, and the ceiling of Rowan’s train roomette was practically mocking him. How could days in this room overlooking gorgeous rolling hills and forests be so mind-numbingly boring? If he read another page from his books, he was going to gouge his eyes out, and he couldn’t believe he thought that was possible. He’d spent years locked away in college, but nothing compared to the torment of stuffing cotton into your ears and locking yourself in a room where you could touch both opposing walls with outstretched hands. He craved escape.
The last time he freed himself from his self-dubbed “broom closet”, the train was packed with other travelers. Granted, since then, more and more people left the train than stepped on. But the memory of grouchy glares because of his mostly dirt-covered apparel as he squeezed his way through the filled observation deck and sleeping cars to a locked car five cars down was enough to keep him secluded in cabin 1A.
Finally, his restlessness winning out over caution, he let out a hefty sigh and pushed himself up to his feet, gingerly stepping out onto the carpeted floor. As he’d hoped, the hall only had one woman, with a wrinkled and pinched face, waddling back into her roomette. The observation deck was more occupied than he’d hoped, with a scattering of passengers, but he could at least pause and take a look up through the glass and see a gray covered sky.
All the booths were still taken with people far too focused on their mugs of coffee or newspapers to truly enjoy anything beyond the glass. However, there was one table in particular that caught his eye. A young woman, a little younger than himself, hunched over a makeshift fort constructed of books atop the table. As he approached, he saw a small pinprick of light hiding between the books, casting a slight glow on her blue eyes, soft freckled face, and blond, braided hair.
Rowan cleared his throat. “Mind if I join you?”
Doing exactly the opposite of what Rowan had intended, she jumped, sending a tower of books cascading down. A green tome fell right into the light, and for a moment it hovered in the air while the other books clattered onto the table. Then it collapsed in on itself, vanishing along with the light.
“Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” she shouted, drawing disapproving glances from the other occupants.
Rowan looked down at the table, noting the clear markings of an alchemy sigil. While many people in Neosilica revere alchemy in all its glory, the further north you get, the less supportive people become. Especially when it’s done near them, on a train, where they can’t escape if something were to go wrong.
Acting on instinct, he slipped into the booth, shielding her exposed sigil work from the prying eyes of the few passengers present.
“What was that?” Rowan whispered, his gaze fixated on the fading symbols. The complexity was mesmerizing, especially the recurrent elemental symbols intertwining in an intricate dance.
“It’s… nothing,” she mumbled, a little too quickly, clearly flustered. “Professor Valeria warned me about practicing on the train. I’m dead if she finds out I lost her copy of Aether to Quanta.”
Rowan picked up a few of the books, reading titles like Quantum Alchemic Paradigms and From Cauldrons to Quarks: An Alchemical Guide to Improbability. “Name’s Rowan,” he said, smiling up at her. “Recent grad from Flamel.”
Elara sighed, looking around the room as she pushed the books aside. “Oh, good. Flamel? Me too, second year. Elara Frost.”
Rowan held up a paperback with a rather lewd image on the front, and the title: Briefs and Bosons: The Story of My Quantum Entangled Underwear. “Quantum, I take it?”
Elara’s cheeks flushed, and she snatched the book out of his hand. “Dr. Phomen writes some… questionable books, but he has some real practical uses in them. I mean, his personal life is a mess too, cheated on his partners after that came out.”
“Really? Well, I for one am shocked,” Rowan said, exaggerating as he clutched his chest.
Elara laughed, shoving some of her books into her bag. She looked out at the rolling green hills. “Just six more months, then I’ll be back in class. Back where I can actually make a simple space fold without making everyone panic.” She looked back at him and frowned. “You graduated, right? What are you doing going north?”
“Post grad study,” Rowan said. “Dean Vayu has me checking on some greenhouse in Frostfern. Ever heard of it?”
“You could say that.” Elara looked down and smiled. “My mom’s the mayor.”
“Oh!” Rowan said, a little louder than he intended, based on the grumbles from the other patrons in the car. He leaned in close and whispered. “Wait, how does a kid from Frostfern get into Flamel? I mean—” he stumbled over his words, seeing the look on Elara’s face. “I mean this far north, with the magic and all, how?”
Elara looked away and shifted in her seat. “I wish I could say it was talent, but my mom got me in. Hard to say no when a mayor, even a small one, from the north is willing to send her daughter to school at a magic academy.”
Rowan nodded to the stack of books. “But quantum? You’ve got to be a genius to get any of that stuff.”
For a moment, she smiled. “Try telling that to my mom. Quantum alchemy? Might as well tell her I’m throwing my education away. We northerners aren’t stupid. We know about alchemy. We just care more about the practical ones. Ores, electrical, heck, even automaton studies would have been better than quantum.” She looked him up and down, her eyes stopping on a few stains in his shirt. “What’d you study?”
“Botanical.”
Elara leaned back and grinned. “Ah, you’ll fit right in then. Better watch out for Mr. Tiller; he’ll talk your ear off if you can help his crops.”
Rowan smirked, running a hand through his unkempt hair. “That might be a nice change of pace.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Elara said.
“Botanical alchemy is a dead art. Even after my final, the scouts walked right past me. Not that I expected anything different, but I mean you’re in quantum for a reason, right? Maybe the people up here won’t roll their eyes when they find out what I studied.”
Elara smirked. “Oh, they’ll still do that. They don’t love alchemy, but help them out here and there, and you’ll turn them around. You’re moving into that old greenhouse, right?”
“I am,” Rowan nodded. “Why?”
“Because the last guy who was there got the crops to grow out of season. I don’t remember it much when it happened, but people now complain that we ran the alchemist out of town when things were getting good.”
“Well,” Rowan said, laughing to himself. “They better watch out if they try to run me out of town.”
Elara frowned.
“Remember the sentient fungus?”
“That was you?!” Elara shouted.
A man behind her turned around and glared. “Keep it down,” he hissed.
Elara crouched low to the table. “That was you?” she whispered.
Rowan nodded, rubbing the back of his neck. “The one and only. Took a whole year to get it all.”
“Remind me to stay on your good side. I remember Professor Berms was stuck working out of a closet for four months because of that.”
“It wasn’t my finest moment,” he admitted.
She wiped away a tear from laughing so hard. “It was nice meeting you, Rowan. Just don’t make yourself a stranger. I might lose my mind if I can’t talk alchemy to someone.”
Rowan grinned. “As long as you don’t collapse me into some space fold.”
She smirked, gathering her books. “Deal. And in return, no sentient fungi.”
“Deal.”
Hours turned into days as Rowan and Elara took up residence on the observation deck. Others slowly filtered away, and soon enough, it was just the two of them. Rolling hills turned into mountains, and the train slithered up and through stoney corridors until all Rowan could see were snow-covered mountains and dark green blotches of a valley forest below.
“We’re almost there,” Elara said as they both settled into the booth early in the morning on their last day. She sat across from him, holding onto a steaming mug of hot chocolate.
“Is it always this cold?” Rowan asked, clutching onto his two layers of button down shirts.
Elara chuckled. “Up here, yeah, but Frostfern is down in a valley.” She looked out the window and straightened up. “You should see it in a second.”
Rowan leaned in close to the window as the train rounded another corner. Below them, between jagged mountains and snow, was a valley that looked like it was taken straight out of a fairy tale. Clusters of homes, each topped with a smoking stone chimney and sharply pointed roofs covered in moss and splotches of lingering snow, huddled together between cobbled streets. Even from this distance, Rowan could see the buildings were colored in pale pastels and light flickered from within as the town woke.
Following the streets with his eyes, Rowan found a downtown lined with glowing lamp posts and trees just budding, late into the season. People moved about slowly, opening up their shops and setting up a market in a large open square.
Surrounding the town, creeping up the sides of the mountain, were farms, slightly browned, but mingling among the dense trees that cascaded up the stone.
On the other side of the valley, a massive waterfall streamed down, crafting a river that cut the landscape in half before vanishing out into the forest.
“It’s… beautiful,” Rowan breathed.
“It’s Frostfern,” Elara said, sipping from her mug. “Home, sweet home.”