Chapter 10: Dinah’s Song

From Hurried Ascensions
by Esi Noire

The wind stilled.

Rene turned, sensing the presence before the voice came.
It wasn’t the man by the blade, not this time. It was Dinah.

But not as she’d first appeared.

Now her shawl shimmered with threads of deep blue and gold, the colors moving like smoke across river water. Her hands no longer trembled. Her eyes, once soft with memory, now glowed with knowledge too sharp for comfort.

“You listened,” she said. “Even when it hurt.”

“I heard them,” Rene replied. “The lost. The rerouted. The ones with no ticket.”

Dinah stepped forward, her feet not quite touching the earth.

“The line responds to listeners,” she said. “But it obeys only the remembered.”

She raised her voice, low and guttural, wrapped in a language Rene didn’t recognize, but understood in her spine.
A song, woven with syllables older than maps. Words that cracked the stillness like thunder made of silk.

The ground responded.

The blade pulsed once, then slowly, soundlessly, receded into the earth like it had never been.

In its place bloomed a white flower, ghostly and luminous, petals wide as a hand.

Dinah touched Rene’s shoulder.

“Every station must have a keeper,” she whispered. “But only a singer can wake it.”

Then Dinah was gone.

Rene looked at the flower.

And it began to hum.