Varum's northern station was the smallest of the capital's three.
The southern and western hubs handled the vast bulk of imperial traffic—the endless commercial lines, the heavy military freight, the sprawling passenger routes that stitched the Empire's major population centers together. The northern line, by contrast, ran only twice daily. It served a narrowing, desolate corridor of increasingly sparse settlements before terminating at Edran, a hardened garrison town sitting exactly on the Empire's effective northern boundary.
Past Edran, the infrastructure simply stopped. There was no economic or political reason to extend steel any further into the dark.
Varian bought two tickets without consulting Vane about the class.
