Trent Jamieson - Night's engines

Kara flashed him a smile. “Or you're just a lazy old bastard.”

Buchan snorted, patted her on the back. “There is that, too,” he said.

David considered Cadell’s words again, of what must come after the ice and the snow, and wondered what was happening down south, what perhaps stirred and grew beneath the snow. The thought of Mirrlees and all the cities remade by minnows filled him with no little terror — would he find himself back there an addict? Would he see his mother and father again?

But that lay in the future. A whole people with a whole fabricated history, one that started and stopped and stumbled and slipped, always coming against the Roil, always being beaten back by it.

But now they’d forced a change. There were so many possibilities, for the twelve metropolises lost, and for the Roil itself. It would return, after all, it had never really left, just been driven down again, and David had no doubt that it would come back faster next time, it had learnt a lot in this iteration. David knew that's what he would do.

But they had learnt a lot, too. The great wound of this world had to be healed and not with fire, ice or war.

They were being given another chance.

Margaret Penn stood across from David and he was startled by what he saw. She was smiling, and in her eyes there was something he had never seen before.

He saw hope.