The Wake and its Sentinels
The train makes its way down the mountainside. Jean has managed to find a secluded carriage, with just her and four travellers, ready to set off on a new adventure.
“Well!” she says, “I suppose it's time for us to leave. Saying goodbye to this world isn't likely to get any easier.”
The students nod. Jean extends her hand, and all falls away. The trees in the distance are first, and then the hedgerows either side of the tracks. For a moment, this lonely carriage of the Anchor Rock Express speeds through a starry field before it, too, falls to nothing.
The last vestige of the world to leave is the bodies of those on board. Jean's mortal form falls away first, revealing her true nature. Astral. Ephemeral. Beautiful.
Jean's students soon experience the same. It is a strange feeling. The feeling of your consciousness growing, expanding out across space and time. It reaches a breakpoint, held in place by your mortal vessel, when…
The vessel gives. The travellers are overcome with a new sensation. Weightlessness.
In a moment, the stars around the group realign to form a long, straight road. On either side of the road hang stars, and from far, far away – right at the other end - echoes a quiet whalesong.
Jean turns around. “Welcome, sentinels, to the Wake.”
She produces the white disc-like stone from her pocket, and places it amongst the other stars. It shines bright, holding a record etched in its soul that will not soon be forgotten.
Jean looks back, seeing her students staring at the little blue gem upon the cosmic canvas they've left behind. She smiles, and leaves them for a while. Somewhere, those who the sentinels knew see a shooting star trace across the sky. Some have reason to suspect what it means. Others don't. And yet, in that moment, each seems to know the truth. Their friends… their loved ones…
They are where they're meant to be.
Over the next millenia, the new sentinels pore over the records of their homeworld. They find memories of people they knew and people they didn't, and place each in its proper place on the cosmic canvas. They remember a world that is long since gone.
And still, amongst all these experiences there's something strange – a vision of a penguin, waddling along the coast. They ask Jean – all the other experiences from earth are of humans, aren't they?
“Oh! Did I really forget to mention? The wake… plants the seeds of sapience in the worlds that it passes. There were three beings that awakened on your world, I think… a penguin, a wolf, and…
A bear!”
On Gentoosday 2nd of Berrygather, at the third howl in local time, the Trans-fur-ence occurs. The Sentinels descend to a familiar world, and hold a promise they'd made uncountable aeons ago. Much has changed, but more still has remained the same. There is a small town nestled in the mountains, and there is an oddly-shaped rock. The locals call it the penguin's foot, and if you squint you can just about see it. They sit by a campfire out in the woods, for just a few short hours before the dawn. They have travelled the cosmos forty thousand years, and will travel it for hundreds more. Still, this place…
It is hard to forget a place – a people – that forever changed the path of your life.