ARDEAI

The night air quivered like ink bleeding across a boundless canvas, thick with the aching scent of rain and rusted steel. Above the slumbering city, an unfinished colossus brooded, its skeletal frame arching into impossible, serpentine curves. The building seemed to breathe, its golden veins glimmering like dying stars against the indigo expanse.

Dia stood at the lip of a trembling platform, her gaze lost in the abyss below. The air pulsed with a mechanical murmur—the building’s hollow heartbeat. Shadows moved around her, silent and solemn; their faces blurred by the mist that twined like restless spirits through the structure. No one dared speak, as though a single word might rupture the delicate membrane between reality and the dream this place had become.

A distant light shivered through the fog, casting wavering specters across the cold steel bones. Then, with a sigh as ancient as the sea, a train emerged—a serpent of glass and gold. It slid through the half-born station, its intent unknowable, its destination lost to time. No one boarded. No one disembarked. It came from the pale clouds of oblivion and would dissolve forward into the mist, as though existence itself hesitated to remember it.

“Where does it go?” Dia whispered, her voice a fragile thread against the void.

“Nowhere, and everywhere,” a woman answered, her presence blooming beside Dia like the fog itself. Her eyes, pale as moonstone, held the distant sorrow of one who had watched the train pass too many times.

“If you follow it, you might find what you are looking for,” she murmured, before melting back into the labyrinth of scaffolding and shadow.

Dia felt it then—the tug, like a silver thread coiling around her heart. She knew she should turn away, descend to the living city below, to the warm amber lights of certainty. But this building, she thought, with its molten gold veins and impossible geometry, was more than stone and steel; it was a threshold, a purgatory of glimmering dusk, where lost souls might yet be found.

And so, when the train returned, Dia stepped aboard without hesitation. The doors closed with a sigh that seemed to know her name, and as the station dissolved into mist, she understood: she was no longer awake, nor was she dreaming. She was simply traveling—to nowhere, and everywhere.