The glass doors slid open to reveal a vast, Gothic hall, its stained-glass windows streaming with brilliant light. The interior resembled a vast train station, devoid of trains or ticket counters. Noah’s brow furrowed involuntarily at the sight of the steel canopy structures supported by massive stone columns.
Steel, in the afterlife?
He took a few steps, then glanced back. This side of the "station" held only a few dozen glass doors, identical to the ones he’d just come through. Nothing else. The floor, a seamless expanse of polished, light-grey stone, was spotless. Between the columns stood rows of benches, all empty. But the station itself was not.
Noah’s eyes were drawn to movement at the far end of the hall, where a neon sign blazed above wide gates. The script was foreign, yet its meaning clicked instantly in his mind: EXIT. The clear destination for everyone who had made it this far.
He hurried to join them, eager to meet the others who had passed Gaudemunda's test. Had they asked better questions? Gotten more useful answers?
The thought struck him now—he’d wasted his own chance questioning the test's nature instead of preparing for what came next.
Because seriously—what now? Gaudemunda had hinted at a newcomers' tour, a job offer, and his decent chances... yet Noah had been fixated on whether she was “bad,” as if that mattered now. She’d left him alive and even seen him to the elevator with a wide smile. He hadn’t even thanked her. Idiot...
“Thanks, Gaudemunda,” he muttered, hoping that a five-hundred-year-old being was powerful enough to hear him at this distance—because riding back down just to say it would be… odd.
By the time Noah reached the gates with the neon sign, the people he'd seen earlier had already passed through. He stepped without hesitation into a slightly dim passage. A dozen paces later, it ended at another set of doors, and then Noah stopped dead in his tracks, spellbound by the panorama that opened before him.
He found himself at the top of a stone staircase, the Gothic building now at his back. It was cradled by sheer cliffs and swathed in dense, green vegetation, as if the station had grown from rock itself, merging perfectly with its surroundings.
The stairs descended into a circular courtyard dominated by a fountain at its center, its spray casting a shimmer of rainbows over empty benches and tables. The other newcomers had already passed through, drawn toward a flawlessly smooth cliff edge. Beyond which Noah saw only… clouds.
An endless, unimaginable sea of cumulus clouds stretched to infinity. The sight hammered a realization home: this station, with its rocks and fountain and life, was merely a shard of reality—an undefined space, just as Gaudemunda had said. And it was damn impressive.
Noah stared out over the clouds, half expecting something to surface from within—something titanic he’d never seen in his life.
* * *
About two dozen people had gathered at the edge of the cliff, their ages and appearances varying greatly. Noah struggled to imagine how a girl who looked barely twelve could have passed Gaudemunda’s test—yet there she stood, gripping the iron railings, eyes fixed on the clouds.
There was an old woman, bent double under the weight of years, her hair white as snow. Noah couldn’t fathom how she’d hauled two extra buckets up those stairs for her first two points.
Unless Gaudemunda had gone easy on her…
He shook his head.
Easy? The same Gaudemunda who had liquefied the majority of entrants?
Only a few people at the railing were talking; the rest kept to themselves, either still reeling from their ordeal or simply unsociable, waiting for someone else to make the first move. Everyone of them noticed when Noah finally approached. The white-haired granny gave a brief, kind nod. A dark-skinned man with a lush mustache held his gaze a moment too long before turning away. A guy his own age, with rebelliously tangled hair, looked him over with faint derision but stayed quiet. A doll-like young woman in a sharp suit curled her lip and pretended he didn’t exist. He wasn't offended. It was a familiar reaction, even from the living.
His eyes moved past them to the modern fittings of the ledge. Beyond the essential railing that separated them from the cloud sea, a small balcony jutted over the drop, closed off by a gate. A metal post beside it, equipped with signal lights and a speaker, glowed with a single red light. The whole structure had the forlorn air of a dock after the last boat had departed.
There was little else to see. Just the station, the dock, the endless clouds, and their small group, waiting for something.
* * *
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Time passed, the clouds drifted lazily, but no vessel appeared. Noah tried to track time by the sun's movement until he realized it wasn't moving at all.
Then it occurred to him that perhaps Gaudemunda's test wasn't over yet. This was just another place where they had to solve some kind of puzzle for the situation to change.
So, he started wandering around the cliff edge, searching for hidden clues. Until a voice stopped him.
"There are no secret mechanisms here," a punk teenager commented lazily, apparently understanding his efforts.
Noah glanced at him. This time, he detected no mockery; the punk just wanted to talk.
"Did you look?"
"Everyone looked," the punk said, eyes back on the clouds. "We all came to the same conclusion. We just have to wait until a certain critical number of people gather. Then something will happen."
"Might happen," Noah corrected.
"Yeah, might..." the punk sighed.
“How long have you all been—?”
“That old guy in the red T-shirt,” the punk pointed, “got here first. He’s been waiting the longest, but even he doesn’t know how long. As you can see, the sun doesn’t budge.”
Noah glanced up. Normally, he wouldn't stare long, afraid of burning his eyes. But now the light simply dazzled and nothing more. His eyes didn't even tear up.
He also didn't intend to end the newly started conversation so simply... but what else was there to say? Ask how the punk 'kicked the bucket'? He wondered if that would be very polite...
"Did you get flattened by a car too?" the punk asked abruptly—subtle as a hammer, and thereby outing his own cause of death.
"Victim of a construction flaw," Noah said.
"A house fell on you?"
"Something like that." He certainly wasn't going to tell anyone that he'd been killed by his own bookshelf.
"Metal," the punk said, impressed. “I got smeared outside the university by some asshole in a red carriage. Didn’t catch the plate. No idea if he’s here with us—if he crashed running from the cops.”
"Where are you from?" Noah asked, noticing the mismatch between lip movements and the words.
Do we even need to move our lips here? He wondered.
“Germany. You?”
“Lithuania.”
"Oh, so we're practically neighbors," the punk brightened, offering his hand. “I’m Adrian.”
The two got acquainted. They compared their deaths and their first moments at the abyss. They talked about Gaudemunda and that 'doctor' partner of hers, whose name both had amiably managed to forget.
It turned out Adrian had been far less patient than Noah, but even he had restrained himself from pushing Gaudemunda into the abyss. He'd just sworn at her a few times in frustration. He’d spent longer farming points for power-ups before realizing there was almost nowhere to use that power. Later, he worked out the rest of the hidden danger. It seemed his underworld was identical to Noah's, only the experience differed.
For example, the Weeping Angels hadn't spooked Adrian at all, because he'd never seen the show. He'd been held up much longer by an ant-hill-like castle courtyard. Adrian had convinced himself the final boss fight would happen there, so he avoided stepping inside for quite a while.
No one else joined their chat. The doll-like woman in a sharp suit listened intently, even opened her mouth to weigh in once or twice—but never dared.
And then she was out of time.
* * *
“It’s coming,” the twelve-year-old girl announced, still glued to the cloud sea.
Noah looked where she was looking, as did everyone at the rail.
Sure enough, far off, a bright red dot glimmered among the clouds, growing with every heartbeat. Soon he recognized the oncoming object—and it was neither ship nor raft. Nor a balloon.
“Is that a train?” Adrian squinted.
“A tram car,” Noah muttered. “An old one.”
He remembered seeing something similar in a museum. Such cars came into use in the early 20th century, when horses gave way to electrics.
Except the city trams never flew through cloud-bank skies.
Minutes later, the red tram let out a sharp signal and began to brake. It moved so steadily that it felt as if it truly rode rails. Noah heard the whine of an electric motor and the squeal of brakes as wheels spun in the air.
A few moments later, the tram gently nudged the "dock" with its front and came to a stop. Red doors opened at the front. The balcony gate unlatched in unison. The red signal died; green lit up.
The speaker hissed softly, played a three-note jingle, then a cheerful woman’s voice announced:
“Attention, passengers. The tram to Regia will depart in ten minutes. Please board in an orderly manner and avoid pushing.
Those not traveling at this time may take the next tram in seventy-two hours.
Time remaining until departure: nine minutes, forty-five seconds.”
The jingle played again, and the speaker fell silent. Above the tram doors, a mechanical countdown began to tick.
No conductor and no driver emerged. The car was empty.
“Just missing the statistic on how many of these fall off per year,” Adrian grumbled.
“I think this thing is in a state of perpetual fall,” Noah observed.
People crowded curiously at the open gate. No one opted to wait for the next run. Everyone boarded, though none yet knew their true destination.