There’s a tradition where people create works of art to present as tribute to the god of the world on a periodic basis to keep it from destroying everything. The gifts must be pinnacles of human achievement that would inspire legends if they were ever meant for anything besides sacrifice.
There’s a train that takes prospective gift givers North to a town near where the god resides where they can spend the equivalent of years honing their craft in a matter of days. Painting, sculpture, weapons, armor, clothes, jewelry, instruments, song, dance, literature. Anything that can prove the world and its inhabitants deserve to keep existing.
The world outside this town is desote. Homes are run down. People go hungry.
Not everyone that boards the train makes it to the end of the line.
Not everyone that boards the train does so by choice.
There are cats on the train that serve some sort of specific purpose. The nature of that purpose is a matter of debate amongst passengers.
Just before reaching the town in the North, the train passes through a tunnel with the massive corpse of an angel hanging over the mouth of the tunnel, chained and nailed to the mountain. This always upsets some of the cats, especially on the rare occasions the train brushes against the divinely tattered flesh.
One day a young woman winds up on the train (and eventually in the town) who feels she has no talent or skill for creating a worthy gift. Unsure what else to do, she begins a journal of sorts, interviewing everyone on the train and in the towns they stop in along the way and in the town at the end of the line. She seeks to capture everyone’s greatest joys and sorrows, or, failing that, at least record their names as a testament to the fact that they once lived. She comforts the cats whenever the train passes through the tunnel.
Eventually she finds purpose as a fixture on the train and in the town as a recorder of human experience rather than a gift creator.
The dream ends before this journal is ever presented to the god.
