Icy rails whiplashed to the twilight ground, and from them grew shards of ice that sat up as cave-less stalagmites. The heavens lowered, stars erased, so low sat coal-charred clouds. The wind carried not the nightingale, yet a discord of insomniac crows born of vampire’s breath. The trees did crumble to ash, yet no fire did we see. No scent of burning did come. Then to the rails a ghost train was born, not fashioned in the usual way. It was scratch-slashed into the ether with jagged gouges of rough form. Scritch. Scratch. Slice. No Christmas train was this. No carriages of mirth would such a beast ever bring. No! No! This was the nightmare train. This was the rattler that bore dread’s very name.
Slumped on age-bowed rails, was a train of deep set misery. It’s one dirt encrusted eye did dim at twilight’s howling hiss-command. It hunkered squat and low, for gravity had cowed it, lashing with wintry-whips. How it did moan! How its wheels did whine! How its soul rattled at bars skank-grim. In diesel bouquets, as burnt and morbid offerings, it crept in as the very death nell of mirth. Involuntarily I stepped away, stumbling almost to the ground. Around it all was cold and becoming colder still. Is this how it moved? Did it steal heat? Did it bring hearts to a hypothermic stutter-halt? It could not be a thing of this world, yet a ghost train, a spectre made of evil’s song.
The realm of the ghosts had needed a healer, one to to repair their fractured souls and let them flow once more in the divine channels. That's when Angel came to town.
The ghosts in this town were the ones we called "scared kittens" for they haunted themselves over the most silly of things.
The ghost town was not a place, nor a thing of this reality, yet a pocket of time and space that was a hospital for lost souls.
The ghost town was a hug of spectral homes upon a spectral hill, yet to those whom arrived there it was a warm and sunny place for healing and eventual redemption.
The ghost town was more than an empire, it was its own reality, a place between all others where souls could recover and choose to try again, to be reborn and make a legend, a good one, so that they could pass next time around.