The sound came first.
The hammers had been part of Ashenveil's acoustic architecture for four hundred years, as permanent as rain. This was different. Deeper. More rhythmic. It carried from the southeast on still mornings: the percussion of iron stakes driven into graded earth, one every four seconds, steady as a heartbeat measured by a machine that hadn't learned to tire yet. On clear days you could hear it from the canal district if you stood still long enough, and most people didn't stand still long enough, which was why most people thought the sound had started recently when it had actually been there for months.
The railway.
