This Epilogue came about after I'd finished the events of my other stories, especially The Rails. When I decided to really tie the other three stories together I thought that alot of the little things that might have seemed obvious to me probably weren't so clear, specifically the events and how exactly all the stories really relate to each other. That's when I decided to write up this Epilogue which takes place where The Post left off. The purpose of this story was to really explain almost point for point how the events came to be and how they all were tied together.

Epilogue

Looking down the street I glanced at the letter and the row of houses that all appeared in decent shape. Plants all over the city were usually dead, however the grass and bushes along the street were all green and full of life; hefting my satchel I made my way down the street. I could hardly believe the sounds I heard as doors from numerous houses creaked open and several hesitant people walked outside of their homes to watch my passing. I wasn’t quite sure what to do but habit acted for me, simply tipping my hat I continued to walk down the road, drawing the stares of everyone I passed until I came to the address written on the letter. The address written on the front of the house was almost completely worn away; no care had been made in upkeep since no mail carrier had probably visited this city since the Great War nearly forty years back.

With a host of spectators at my back I straightened my posture and rapped solidly and quickly on the door. The seconds that passed seemed like an eternity before the door finally creaked open. The women that answered the door couldn’t have been more then twenty-five, life in this city was probably all she’d ever known and probably all she ever would know.

Clearing my throat I held out the letter for her and managed to speak up, “Miss Cassandra, here’s your post.”

The woman looked at the letter and smiled deeply at me, “I, I don’t know what to say,” she finally said back in reply. Moving aside she waved me inside, “Oh please, why don’t you come in for a bit.”

I thanked her quickly as I walked inside. The house was far older then anything I’d seen, most of the walls seemed to have had quite a bit of repair work done on them over the years, nothing like the houses from the town that I had come from. The walls of the house were covered with old pictures and photographs of various people, most of whom looked like governors or town leaders, all wore what looked like fancy white cloths.

“Those were pictures of my grand-father, he was a scientist way back before the Great War,” she said as I looked from picture to picture in awe. “He always had stories that he used to tell my father, but he’s been gone since before I was born so I never got to know him.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied as I turned to face her.

“Please, have a seat, I’ve got some tea boiling on the range,” she said as she slipped away into the kitchen around the corner.

Pulling my satchel over my head I set it aside one of the large chairs in the room. All of which were splendidly cushioned compared to the hard wood chairs and stools from my home town. As I sat down another gentlemen walked into the room, startling himself and me at first. Jumping to my feet I quickly tried to apologize before Cassandra came into the room carrying a tray of cups and the teakettle. “I’m sorry father, I should have told you. This gentleman brought us some mail today.”

“Did he now,” the older gentleman said as he took up a seat across from me. Reaching across he offered me his hand, “You can call me…Ishmael,” he said the name after a short pause. Stretching out my hand I shook his extended arm, “My name is Keith. Cassandra was telling me your father was a scientist before the Great War. My own father was too, he worked on some railroad project up in the mountains around here, perhaps you heard of him, his name was Jonathon.”

Ishmael’s expression turned quite serious as he reclined fully back into his chair. Turning to his daughter Ishmael smiled, “Thank you for the tea Cass, would you mind if I talked to our new friend alone for a while?”

“Of course father,” she said sweetly before leaving the room.

The man took a sip of tea from his cup before looking up at me. “Well Keith, I’m sure your father mentioned me a few times before while you were growing up,” Ishmael said, as if this conversation was the most natural one in the world. “You see, the final rail system your father and I worked to create all those years ago on the mountain, it wasn’t supposed to end it. The whole point was to start the process again. You see many, many years ago I was once a boy, much like you are now. However my own childhood was destroyed when the Great War broke out. My own hometown, this place, was far from the fighting but the Machine, the Machine brought the war to everyone.”

“It had destroyed whole towns, armies fell in its wake, it destroyed everything in its path and for some reason I felt it was my duty to stop it. But I was only a boy! How could I stop something that devastated the very ground it walked on? That’s when I remembered the stories. The old stories I’d read about the magical Rails of Time. I ventured into the mountains and found the abandoned research station and the new railroad that had been formed. I found the hand cart.”

“It spoke to me Keith, in a way I can’t describe, it spoke to me, and using it and those Rails I knew I could stop the Machine. At least, that’s what I thought when it all started. For years I wondered along the Rails of Time, searching and finding certain things. I had no idea what they were for, or why I thought I needed to gather them and after almost ten years of traveling those damnable Rails I escaped them. I had grown to hate them so much but the urge to go back to them was always there, constantly gnawing at me. I knew the only way for me to be free of them forever was to destroy them, and so I learned about them.”

“I first studied the ways and techniques of the alchemy used to create them and through my studies I found ways to extend my own life, to allow me enough time to accomplish my goals. Once I had found the weakness of the Rails I knew then exactly what had to be done. There was only one thing I knew of that could generate the means to destroy those special Rails, but to create such a machine would require some of the rarest and most exotic of materials, materials I had already been gathering during my years traveling along the Rails. That was when everything started to make sense.”

“Ever since I found that old hand cart I had gathered materials to make a machine, the Machine. I was far older then when I had started and when I returned to my own time I set to work as a scientist, earning my way into military workshops so I could build the Machine. However in the end it didn’t work, the Rails existed in such a way that I was unable to destroy them. I knew that they were built after your father’s initial rail system and so I thought if I could destroy that system, the Rails of Time would never have been created.”

“I couldn’t have been more wrong, for even as I destroyed countless sections of the larger rail system the Rails were still protected and so I set out on a new plan, to discover how the rails truly worked, something that required I go back to the beginning, where the Rails were built. That’s where I first met your father. After working with him and his team to try and solve the issue of why his rail system was being destroyed I fully understood the complexity of the issue. It was then that I realized I was the perpetuator of my own fate. Every adventure requires a beginning Keith, and I had traveled to point where my adventure’s beginning hadn’t been written yet. It was in fact my own idea that the Rails be constructed in the first place. It was weird to realize that all this time the cart was so attuned to me because I had in fact created it. Even as I worked with your father I knew that I as a child would discover the Rails and thus the beginning of my adventure was ensured. As the years passed on and I watched time unfold as it had already done I knew that it was also my duty to in the end to stop my own Machine.”

“Having come back years before the Great War would occur I enlisted in the army so I could be in a position to stop my Machine. When the Great War started again and my Machine began to sow its destruction across the rail system I let it run its course until the last remnants of your father’s rail system was gone before stopping it from destroying the Rails of Time. In the end the Rails of Time must remain as they are for they were the conduits that allowed everything to pass. My initial discovery of the Rails that led me to make the Machine that eventually brought me to a position to create the Rails which in the end allowed me to go back to a point to stop my Machine from destroying the world.”

“And that’s where it all stands Keith, why things had to happen the way they did. I’m sorry what it did to your father in his later years, I truly am, but the time line had to be preserved. Our current world is a far cry from what we used to have but in the end having something is better then what would have come to pass which would have been far worse. Far worse indeed.”

As the old man reclined in his chair after he finished his story all I could do was blink. I realized my mouth was hanging slightly open, the cup of tea in my hands unmoved since he had started his tale it was now cold in my hands. The story the old man wove was incredible and at the same time ridiculous. Traveling through time on a magical railroad was like something out of a children’s story and yet the notes and journals left behind by my father all started to make more sense; his frantic notes about the rail system he had worked on, the strange occurrences that jeopardizing his works. Ishmael’s story seemed like nothing more then pure fantasy, yet as fantastic as it was he seemed to know things that no one else should have known about the events he related to me. In the end however, it was the solemn look in his eyes, the look of a great responsibility and guilt. That look in his eyes was something I’ll never forget; the look of relief that he had, in the end, succeeded in his goals, but at the same time the realization of the cost that had been paid both in his life and the lives of those he had worked with throughout his journey and even more so the lives his mission had cost.

Cassandra had bid me farewell, having packed some extra bread and sweet cakes for my travel back. Even as I left, the man who called himself Ishmael sat in his chair, staring off at the wall in his house covered in pictures from his own travels. Pictures of a man that was him, but all the same different, a man whose own name had long since been forgotten and now could only distinguish himself amongst the annuls of time as a man that called himself Ishmael.

Copyright 06.2007

The story "Epilogue" is the property of Jeff Fischer and can not be reprinted or redistributed without my permission.