Chapter 15: Arrival at the Eversoul Platform

From Hurried Ascensions
by Esi Noire

The ground didn’t shake. The sky didn’t split.

But something changed.

Rene felt it in the center of her body, like a door opening behind her ribs. Not pain. Not joy.

**Recognition.**

She was still kneeling where she left the seal in the soil. The world around her had shifted.

The broken tracks were whole.
The field was green. In the distance, she saw the train returning, slow, deliberate, glowing from within.

This one wasn’t empty.

Figures leaned from the windows, hands waving, eyes wide with something more than relief, **remembrance.** Those who had waited. Those who had wandered. Those who had climbed. All of them returning with the sound of her voice still echoing in their names.

The train hissed once and slowed.

The door opened.

And he stepped down.

Older than she remembered. Shoulders straighter.

Eyes full of what he never got to say.

“Grandpa,” she whispered.

He smiled and touched her cheek.

“I couldn’t remember which name to follow,” he said. “So I followed your voice instead.”

Rene wept, not for grief, but because the line had been completed.

The whistle sounded one last time, not a warning, but a blessing.
A note that said: *someone waited. Someone remembered. Someone sang.*

And behind them, carved in light above the door where she had first boarded, now shone a name:

**Rene Dey – Keeper of Platform 1885**