Shadowcry by Jenna Burtenshaw

residents of smaller villages kept watch, making sure the train passed them by.
    The people of Albion had not always lived this way. The seas dividing the island country from its cousins had once been filled with huge-sailed trading ships carrying goods like wool, fruit, and wood to the Continent and bringing fine cheeses, oils, horses, and lotions back in return. Trade flourished. Towns grew. The wild counties were veined with roads and walking trails, and journeys between towns were commonplace. Wardens had not worn robes back then and they had not been feared. They had been trusted men—the towns’ defenders—tasked with keeping wolves from the town gates and guarding the people who traveled across the wild counties in between.
    The country had been great once. Its vast towns and grand architecture were the envy of every country on the Continent, but while the fighting of a war had not made life any easier, the rot had begun to sink in long before war had been declared.
    For more than a thousand years, Albion had been ruled by the governing High Council. The council had thirteen members—usually men—who had shown distinction in many different areas of public service. Being chosen to wear one of the High Council’s robes of office was the ultimate honor, giving the members a coveted place of responsibility at the very head of Albion’s society, as lawmakers and defenders of the country’s history and its people. The system ensured that only people who had proved their commitment to bettering Albion were put in charge of the decisions that would shape its history, and at first it worked, but it took time for ordinary people to recognize its one fatal flaw.
    The power attached to members of the High Council lasted until death. Only then could a new councilman take an old one’s place—and some people did not like to wait. Those who were hoping they were next in line soon began to take chances, often going so far as to employ assassins to speed up their ascension to the council’s chambers, and those who were ruthless in their acquisition of power proved no less ruthless in their wielding of it. Under their influence the focus of the High Council gradually began to shift, and corruption spread like poison through the halls of the old ruling city.
    Council members who resisted the greed of the others had a tendency to disappear, leaving their seats open for new blood more willing to accept changes in how things were done. Soon personal wealth meant more than anything else in the selection of new council members. The welfare of Albion became secondary to the greed and personal gain of those in charge of its laws, and council seats began to be handed down through bloodlines, offered to people who could pay their way into power, or presented only to those whom the existing councilmen knew they could trust. Shaped by such grasping and devious hands, Albion soon began to suffer.
    No one really knew when the first change had come. There was no single moment, no sudden day when everything was different. Darkness crept slowly over Albion. The High Council became more secretive, the wardens gradually drew back from the wild counties, and without their protection to rely upon, travel between the towns became dangerous. People began to go missing on the roads and many chose to stay within their own walls, letting nature creep in around them rather than setting out to brave the world alone.
    Within fifty years of the wardens’ retreat the councilmen had become suspicious of their neighbors and wary of their own people. They were rarely seen outside their chambers. They recruited the wardens as their protectors and enforcers, called back the trading ships and put them to work patrolling Albion’s borders instead. Within a hundred years, the towns had become completely isolated, their people linked by only two things: the High Council’s laws and the Night Train’s tracks.
    At that