Cyre 1313, the Mourning Rail

Cyre 1313, the Mourning Rail, is a phantom train eternally severed from time, its whistle a cry of grief that echoes across the Mists. Once a lightning rail fleeing the Mourning that consumed the land of Cyre, it now barrels through the fog of the Domains of Dread, unable to stop, unable to arrive, and unable to forget.

Cyre 1313 was one of the last lightning rails to leave the city of Metrol as gray death blanketed Cyre. Its passengers were nobles, soldiers, artificers, and refugees—each chosen or coerced to board the train under the promise of survival. They never reached safety.

When the Mourning swallowed the city, a sickly gray wave rolled through the lightning rail’s path. But instead of being destroyed, the train and all aboard were pulled into the Mists, preserved in undeath or twisted memory. No other lightning rail station recalls its existence. No House Cannith ledger lists its construction. Yet the train continues to run.

Cyre 1313 is not a static land—it is the domain. Its iron-clad cars roll endlessly through featureless mist, sometimes emerging briefly in other Domains of Dread to take on new passengers who don’t realize they’ve been ensnared.

• The train consists of thirteen railcars, each haunted by passengers or horrors from its final day.
• The rail’s elemental conductor, once bound by dragonshards, has fused with the Mists—an agonized spirit whose will keeps the train moving.

The train’s Darklord is known only as the Mourner—a veiled figure glimpsed in the forwardmost car, eternally silent save for weeping. Their identity is uncertain: a grieving royal, the train’s original conductor, or a warforged prototype designed to preserve Cyre’s legacy?

• The Mourner controls the route of the train, but is unable to stop it.
• Each time they try to change the rail’s fate, the train loops back into the Mists, the passengers’ suffering beginning anew.

The inhabitants of Cyre 1313 exist in varying states of denial, madness, and spectral unrest:

• Some believe they’re still en route to salvation.
• Others know they are trapped, whispering of failed escape attempts and the car that no one opens.
• Ghosts relive their final day, reenacting arguments, betrayals, and confessions as the train loops eternally.
• Some passengers are dead, their corpses unrotted and eerily lifelike. Others appear alive, but their memories fray at the edges.

New arrivals are treated with suspicion, pity—or hope, as many believe newcomers might hold the key to the train’s release.

Notable Railcars

• The Metrol Car: A luxury car for the elite, now faded and silent. Illusions of opulence flicker and fail.
• The Labor Car: Once for warforged and servants, it now hums with mechanical whispers. Some of its occupants no longer recognize their own bodies.
• The Nameless Car: Sealed tight, etched with rusted runes. Its door is cold to the touch, and passengers avoid it.
• The Dining Car: Always set for a feast. Food appears, but grows gray and bitter with every loop of the journey.
• The Mourner’s Car: No one enters. No one returns.

Themes of Cyre 1313

• Grief and guilt: No one on the train is innocent. Everyone left someone behind.
• Memory and repetition: Passengers cling to fragments of the past, even as they are rewritten or forgotten.
• Escape and futility: The train may sometimes appear to stop. Stations emerge from the Mists, but they are illusions—or worse, traps.

"This is Cyre’s salvation," they told us. But salvation is just another word for forgetting what you left behind. And the Mourning never forgets."