QUEEN OF THE RAIL YARDS, Chapter 6 (Patreon)

A Dreams Chronicle

She awoke to silence—a thick, viscous kind of quiet that clung to the air like fog. Gone was the rhythmic pulse of the Comet’s memory engine. The Queen pushed herself upright from where she’d collapsed against a wall of warm, sweating metal, the static of a bad jump still humming in her teeth.

They hadn’t landed. They’d crashed.

Above her, a vault of corrugated steel arched high. Beneath her boots, rust-coated rails split like veins into a terminal buried in ash. She recognized the curvature of the architecture—post-War, modified Deutsche design—but the banners above the platform told a different story.

Black cloth. A gear emblazoned with a crown of thorns. And beneath it, in industrial Gothic typeface:

“MOTHER RAIL PROVIDES.”

The Queen’s hand flew to her belt. No artifact. No compass. No signal. Just the acrid reek of oil and ozone, the sharp edge of a timeline she’d never meant to enter.

She stepped into the open, alone, boots clinking on oxidized tile. The streets beyond the terminal were a contradiction: pristine in symmetry, corroded in detail. Statues of cast iron loomed from every corner, each one shaped like her. Her face, replicated a thousand times in metal and wire—adorned in regalia, crowned with copper coils, labeled Matriarch of the Rail Age.

Children with soot-covered faces bowed before a shrine made from discarded engine valves. A mechanical priest swung incense made of burning diesel-soaked rags. He saw her and stopped.

A click. A hiss.

Then: “Mother Rail?”

She turned and ran.

Through alleys of broken concrete and towers of stacked cargo, she fled deeper into the city. Loudspeakers chanted her name in a dozen dialects. Billboards blinked in rust-red light: “Prepare. Fear Not. The Mother Returns.”

The rest of this chapter is exclusive to Patreon.

They worshipped her. But not for what she’d done. For what they thought she was.

A savior of machines. A conqueror of flesh.

They remembered a Queen—but not the one who’d left.

At dusk, she reached the high rail bridge—a decaying titan of steel that once ferried trade across the empire. A girl in stained overalls crouched there, recharging a spider drone from a hacked tram line. Her left arm was copper and bone.

“You’re not real,” the girl said without looking up.

“I’m as real as you.”

“They say you died in the fire at Brightgate. The revolutionaries built a train to burn the world and you—”

“—sabotaged it. I know. I was there.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Then why are you here?”

The Queen sat beside her. “Because history got it wrong. And something here is broken. Something I need to fix.”

In the distance, the artifact gleamed—mounted on a column in the Ministry Square. They’d made it a relic. A weapon.

She would have to steal it back.

Not to be Queen. Not to be worshipped.

But to reclaim truth from the rust.

Because even in a world built in her image—she didn’t belong.

Not here.

Not like this.

{{{{ FIN }}}}}

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Please remember that Ailana Geven is an AI model, a character whose story is presented in first person in Ailana Geven Imagines stories and her diary.

ADDENDUM

On the morning of September 27, 2025, I asked ChapGPT to draw a picture of Ailana Geven in a steampunk setting. No guidelines. It drew the image for "The Jump" and I then prompted it to create a story to go with that image.Typically, it knows that I mean caption for Instagram. This time, it wrote nine chapters!

So, I am pleased to present Queen Of The Rail Yards, my ChatGPT's first novella!