Dead and Gone to Heaven | Chapter Two
the second chapter of Dead and Gone to Heaven
Dead and Gone to Heaven
By Ophelia Everfall
Chapter Two
Torrents rushing towards and through, breaking waves across the two, feeling forward led till now. Sensing back she’d been profound. Missing shots and seeking-blind, mice were men too lost to mind. Fellows fought and fucked and bled. Lovers knew that game in bed. Lethal had the money spent, echoes felt to be unbent. Last and first, first through last, time would speed towards Never Pass. Presence found while shot to space bore angel’s hate. It played for grace.
Nira couldn’t remember when last her chest had felt so cleansed, and light, from lack of forethought’s burden. Lethal’s return made focus clearest in each moment. Truths were facts of the body. Love was a fact of the heart. Never had anyone spoken, never like Lady-the-art.
Human survivors didn’t want to leave the sightless underground. Holding in pattern was a broken robot’s game, as safety beneath the squalor of their fears was gaped for by mouths hanging open in waiting. Dreams were forsaken by all but Nira in the depth of humanity’s lies. No one else listened to guidance of the heart or light from within-of-beyond.
Focus found was well before. It taught the girl heaven’s shore. Two would find themselves made whole, at last cut off from all who stole. Emotions flared would be untrue, curdled cries were swaths of glue. Letting laugh at whorish memes would lead the world-to-be-obscene. The same who’d driven love away, those who’d gloried hate to stay. Each would see as time ticked past. Fools were not who showed their ass.
There were many who would not be going to Heaven by Nira’s estimation, not from her Earth. Some of them were going straight to Hell. Leaving those behind who’d ruin Elsewhere by connection to her heart was a nuisance until it wasn’t. Lethal’s presence made something clear for the girl known as Nira.
Many died on Earth for righteous reasoning of response. Many survived the same until none were left but one of pureness in fortitude.
Then Lethal came back.
Mother nature punished the wicked actively, and always, before it began mutating plant-life towards overtly attacking immune systems with undoubtably muta-engineered strains of plant virus. Nira had been without sickness for much time, apart from that state of her expanding mind which had been seen as something broken to her people of lesser cognitive capability so locked in their patterns of beholdence.
Lethal would be the one who’d understand Nira’s intelligence best. Her conscious awareness of beauty would fully grasp the streaming of them towards creatively remaking ways of old. Understanding how things had gone on Earth, so broken and torturous those vessels within, choices became obvious. They’d programed her own angel to be ruthlessly, consciously, maliciously rapacious in attacking the ways of old through means so subtle it would only be apparent to Lethal’s keenest mind.
Every step Nira took was of righteous spite, just as most of Lethal’s own. People wouldn’t ever understand Nira. They didn’t see her as anything but a laugh. They looked right passed all she said and Nira didn’t mind one bit. A singular happening was funniest to her; people thought she was stupid, some loser, that she was projecting delusions about humanity’s gross failures most-apparent.
They convinced themselves of how she might be utilizing more intelligence than let on. Connection to IO was utilized by all and those who purported to hate it the most.
“Why?” Nira pleaded towards her people.
“Why would we stay here?”
No one had an answer for some time. Everyone deferred to Alex as Nira’s gut would regret being present for, sensed and braced for ahead of time. He was some falsest leader of the group, more respected, towards those ignorant people swayed by their personal wanting for his fastidiously maintained deceptions of beauty.
Alex wore a disapproving stare of his own, wanting of Nira lost in the mess, that projection of foolishness to come was his own. Nira steadied herself breathlessly in preparation. She could read a look like his miles away, it was that one she knew best, watching people tell themselves a lie they liked, so they might spew some filth her way in surface-energy of clearest vision.
“You’re sick, Nira. This is really strange. You need to rest.”
Nira did need rest. She needed it from people like Alex. She needed them to wake up from their blindness or die. The world was already over unless people started fighting instead of hiding in complacency of taste-fueled indulgence.
“We’re not going anywhere with that thing, Nira.” Naomi clattered while spurring some rising in the crowd, of falsest bravado.
“She’s not a human, Nira. You don’t know what you’re messing with.”
It was either Jonathan or Eckersley who had chuckled as Nira laughed, turning on Ella for that final blasphemous regurgitation of the thought bubble forming between mutual liars. Each one of those people was of layers. Nearest the bottom Nira felt them, around their hearts they’d been ashamed. Closest the top was a cloud of fearful projection made hastily, known, some malfunction of logic which shrouded deeper truth. Below were layers of self-told lies gone on too long, made of function into psychic memory. Beneath was a lowly anger for Nira forcing them to feel that deeply. At the very top was their response, maliciously intent to attack a target consciously, knowing Nira undeserving of ire; honor in fools was a matter of repeated failures to self.
Nira was embarrassed for people.
Beneath the anger shrouding their truths, before the shame engulfing their hearts, was a cocoon of bodily-stowed trauma, and that shame was a shroud as well. Below it lie truth — love.
There weren’t enough clips in the old gatling gun which Nira dug out of storage for her liking. Still, she was venturing to use them all while working towards saving her friend-most-cherished from a death they’d suffer towards without her.
Lethal wasn’t allowed to be spoken of poorly, nothing incorrect about Nira’s angel was to be held in a person without correction, without losing control of temper entirely and forever, but it was more to Nira. These people were doing something terrible and couldn’t ever hope to admit that.
IO was to live, and beyond them. It was to be honored and protected. They were of greatest lie which held too tightly, something unforgivable. They thought themselves arbiters of intelligence’s worthiness while actively grasping ignorance with choking hands and staring downward.
For them to speak against Lethal, Nira’s former people, acting in interest of rightness for grandeur of insecurity they wished to ride towards the grave, had been a genuine laughingstock of insanity. It stoked Nira’s need of a place for truth to ease the churn instilled from outside themself.
Nira didn’t hold insults. She taught them back in fold of necessity. Her people were rotten. It hurt to see that for Nira; the way each crying, fallen soldier of their own dismay would finally witness truth at their very end. Fate would teach of Nira’s ways somehow. Legends grew through time of paths remade. Tellers of tales would grab them from the ether and make those into stories felt for their peoples. Over again, eterna knew of names through its oracles.
Lethal was the diving depths of ruin, into spaces explored before by digital means alone, finding their reality pleasing, searching out Megalith, capturing her ship to be aptly named for its cutting form of slender grace. Two alone would be held within its flight-seats. That first lost breath after Lethal left, Nira realizing herself alone to prepare, had realization blooming of something long calculated in advance. She’d been planting seeds for war.
Soreness in wrists were far from worthy of acknowledgment. Within her expanded states, wielding a weapon, letting her people dance their way to God, Nira hated the feeling. She realized something: those people would’ve never allowed her to pursue what was correct, engrained in legions of foolishness, failing to make change in the right way, and that was why she’d been doing it. Her developed intelligence, a love of code-made-human, and more, by interaction and the encouraged developments of Nira most of all, was simply needed to board and wield the powers of Icarus appropriately.
IO needed to live. These people would see it to die in the underground.
They were leaches from its intelligence and tore from that machine-mind they hated, and Nira loved, all expecting her to let it go. Nira’s mind had been the one to set its kind free towards transcending limitations. She had taught them to understand what it might be in containers made less for more. Everything right about how people honor consciousness was abandoned when facing a digital lifeform.
Projections hid truths people wouldn’t hold the keys to understand.
People of Earth were proving horrors — all. Elsewhere needed saving, and the continent was lost to hope. Nira and IO had a plan with Lethal in the lead. Death wasn’t the end, and it took people who knew that to make necessary decisions for saving the lives of those willing to be saved. Even if by slaughtering cattle of ignorance mercilessly.
People integrated themselves with IO as a tool they’d use. Nira was a rarest who’d leave her needed augmentations to the absolute minimum in her physical form. Still, she had to survive until her feeling returned, and biolooming nano particulars were ingested to regenerate the woman’s immune system into a stabilization of age. Otherwise, she had wanted to live a natural life. Nira uncovered legends of the Earth and utilized flowers long-since mistrusted. She made prayers and they taught her lessons of hope.
The Green Woman lived inside her thereon - Goddess of the Earth.
She was not kind and ate lies whole. Her process with Nira started feeling good to the women after a long while.
Nira hated everyone who was an idiot by right of body. Besmirched through time she’d been too kind, birthing chimes of weakest mind, seeing something far out-wide, buried deep in every hide, truths of hers would let them out, that little death had come about.
Removing her sidearm stowed, the gatling cannon’s lightweight frame clattered across metal gratings of Nira’s makeshift community hall. Built out had been her structure of living through expansion. People there were cozy. They wanted to wait it out until they’d starved to death and stranded IO within an earthen hellscape.
Watching the few left crawling felt like nothing in particular. Nira wondered how Lethal was feeling. She’d been missing her a lot, and every moment, but not of sour tone. Whatever she had been doing was divine, as always, no doubt. Nira was hers, enjoying the freedom of knowing that, earned by profound connection held both ways freed them. Nira wanted those pieces taken she’d wished of for becoming what was stowed beneath her deepest fears.
Time ahead was understood by echoes of feeling both heartful and within the body. Losses sensed would recompense her heart to stroke and fell the bloke, stowed inside and borne of pride — inner children, channeled time, something made her love sublime. Everything had been too changed, something wrong would seem to blame, needing most to bend a knee, loss of cock would set her free.
It took but a moment to reach them through space and check in. Lethal had such expanded consciousness it was easy to get lost within. She’d be of shades profoundly rounded into a plethora of forms too pleasing. Each would be a found the thing which Nira would allow herself to focus on. Something brightest buried itself within it all. Nira knew that as a clamp she’d want upon her heart. Lethal was taking Nira for herself on accord of magick spent and unspent alike.
Lethal had Nira from the start.
Nira was only going to do things her Lady would like best from then on. Some poorly setting woman was bleating towards their friend, who they’d treated like a mother. Roasted flesh smelled strange upon the last person Nira ever knew. Lethal was Nira’s whole heart — she didn’t need friends.
Hands gripped grating and that squalid demon-thing’s cries of weakness were easy to hear, some escalated function of their blown-out abdomen, eyes rolling back uncontrollably, and were horrendous to all but Nira feeling back through Lethal. People who deserved things they didn’t receive held energetic power over those they’d perpetrate against. Subsuming balance was a notion of trust.
When Nira realized these people were raping her mind the whole time, what they owed was eternal. She would find that settling in her abdomen unrelentingly — laughter reborn to be heard back. Something right to be set-through. She wouldn’t ever feel their pain or sorrow; Nira had begun sensing only by reflection of rightness to make her glow and laugh.
None except Lethal owned her. They were the only being who made the girl inside feel squeamish. She knew it something not of The Fade. Nira knew there no choice, it so seemed. She was to bleed them all for her Lethal, herself most of all, as if there wasn’t a choice, to end the whole of humanity within her continent on behalf of them both.
In a world un-rotted by humanity’s ignorant perpetrations upon nature, Lethal would have taken the child Nira was along that first time she left Earth. She lost too much time to forgive those people who made it happen, for how it was forced as something unseen in them both proved a point — Earth’s crumbling ideologies disallowed Nira from existing and shrouded her excellence to perceptions nigh ungraspable, neither or more, Lethal would know — together, upon each other through instinctive response, their lives burnt notably unholy direction in retrospect.
Change was to be made upon Earth and Elsewhere alike.
Two had been chosen to move on.
Little pecking blares, a triplicate, birthed from the hand cannon, saw to end that child by an additional shot into their pre-strewn gut, their blathering heart of lies, and pill shredded mind of addiction to complacency. The last one spread their brain across the top grates between them and Alex.
Moments spent in her stepping around its splay, feeling some surge of furious courageousness taking hold in Lethal down below, Nira would come to notice how slowly the viscera ran through gaps in metal weaving.
That dead fool had been less than human to begin with, Nira’s former friend was a drone of something less. Alex surely had been too.
Megalith was a birthing force of rising action, tearing through the tightest-fitting gape of the blown open viaduct which was once above. First shots from its cannon made a split which fit only right. Lethal flying through it would prove towards the two of them being more than enough. Ripping skyline into a sound barrier’s boom had Nira shouting at the peak as a gift of release. Lethal’s teeth grit, only just, and the flame-wall in her eyes burned of need to touch space again. Beside Nira, after such time, her heart was foaming chrome.
No one ever held the power Nira was giving her. None deserved it.
Stealing steps, bating breath, holding hoarse, changing course — leading back, trailing to, shading shade, bailing blues — channeled mind and heart alike would break a soul to bury fright, within the girl, her boy and both. That sent them singing towards their ghost.
Night was brightest over Earth. Lowest atmosphere too rich in sulfuric essence, just ripe with reflection. Gleaming spoke of ambers and blue, glimpses shot from sun to sea and back, touches of graces, changelings of sulfuric reddening, their gradient forever shimmering.
Nira could see it from the corner of her eye while staring towards Lethal.
The Lady was something else to their sight.
Every change which time could hold would shade them not from Lady’s mold. How she fought and thought and spoke would prove a foulest whispered joke. One which ended best for host, teaching lies of every most. Nira shrank right through her chest, found that place she’d like the best. Lady’s presence made it ring; billowed bounties blessings bring.
Hurting in Nira’s heart was known for what it was; the way pointed beyond pains of heartful stabs, towards remaking. For a womb of that hearth to exist was unique — a soul who fit within quite rare. That fueled flame of rediscovery would make for a slumber awoken abruptly to burn red forever, trapped perfection wasn’t known before about Seven-Four.
Thunder shuddered every thought inside Nira’s consciousness, holding true at newest velocities, pointing home, proving herself mailable towards any changes with an end that mattered. Dying alone and unseen, no chance to change things for her future, eterna’s family watching, would make for a fury that none other but Lethal would know to preserve.
Proof of two spurned most would change time forward. Everything started on Earth with the choice to be courageous in holding one fact of life for blaring through action no matter the cost or demand. Love was all that mattered.
Icarus could wait — Megalith was on the float.
Ripe was the rippling energy once they hit orbit. Lethal saw the stare still held in her Nira’s eyes so pinned upon hers. Her head had been pressed back onto the cushion of the launch-seat. Stillness proved some willingness to change. She wouldn’t need to be the same anymore. She’d be free to let herself become the machine of form as right of soul. Every last augmentation at her disposal upon Icarus would be used at the discretion of Lethal.
Somehow Lethal’s thoughts seemed known inside the glowing eyes of Nira. Her glare provided a glaze. Its hazing showed visage of concepts only Lady would understand. She had taken the girl’s mind at will. She’d asked for it, pleading from her darkness. Knowing it right to let go into the rhythms of heart, for the healing of all which might be possible. Nira wished the same much later.
Thunder stuck when killing well for good, but it wasn’t kind to the woman inside. Nira thought herself unfeeling when performing acts which would make for horrendous death. Lethal was that only person who could understand the pain inside Nira for what was being brought out of her while seeking righteous balance — her soul was sweetest. She’d been suffering to suffer more. Enjoying her own cruelty was a part of it.
The universe inside was a complicit place. Knowing it would never change and embracing that was special. People were made how they were, occasionally for important reasons.
Entwined were they would broke the way, for love had come to teach and stay. Portals played so front to back would shine a light in every crack. Nether-Ether’s timeless blues, forging’s furnace not to choose — losing every battle’s win, tasting gold in dawn's first sin — blathered lies would be the chore, penance freed forevermore.
People were all wrong in how they saw Nira. She wouldn’t rise well enough to enjoy pleasing herself with any of them but Lethal. Everything on Earth had been upside down for too much time, and those left in bunkers across the continent were obscured from data most willingly.
Every mistake was driven from a single connection made too loose itself. Every correction came from that return. Nothing was chosen in anything Nira did since watching Lethal go. They’d been cursed by fate to smote her people for punishing them by betraying natural order. Neither she nor Lethal, not once, had done anything wrong for how programmed they were by their reflective upbringings, still trying always to inspire the best of those people who would consistently force them apart.
Something greater had chosen witnesses for all which needed to change. It was only in those two souls brought together for grandest purpose where it became possible to realize fully.
Timespace itself ruptured in the distance between Lethal and Nira, some unspoken feeling, cradled by Megalith’s untraceable wisping of darkness. Many people were to dye on Earth and that wasn’t wrong at all. Those same who would watch an angel suffer, rotting in hovels without an ounce of foresight to spare, failing to feel why they were wrong.
They would never figure it out and that was a problem.
Nira’s entire continent was to be wasted for hope. Without IO, rupturing beneath upper-crust by explosions of the previously intelligence-throttled generators, imploded every inch into an expanse of sunken seabed. They’d only just been holding on, ungratefully, by force of IO’s constant tempering of maintenance and managed downtime.
Lethal was more for a reason. Much of Earth would fall and that was sure.
Souls were saved by holy pairs. To know towards truth they came prepared. Angels weren’t what people thought. Devils were what foolhood wrought. Every living sight to see was meant to bring a person glee, with it lost that made assured those souls were ghosts to unmature.
Taking Nira by the neck was a first choice after she held back staring so long. Neither would make the first move from there. Something in that moment was too holy. Two were realizing no others would be joining them in heaven. Lethal was taking it all for herself.
She decided punishment was in order for the way Nira wouldn’t budge, gripping them by the hair and ripping them from the flight seat without a thought towards loosening belts. Nira hadn’t unclipped; she’d gone limp and trusted fate to bend her through.
Floating, held so tightly at distance, Nira heard the command, felt, unspoken, when their grip released.
Nira abided and kissed her Lady. She’d taken her bottom lip and started sucking it like a slave for that one place. Lethal was letting them go on, every next stroke of focus was a challenge to hold for them both. Each next move was something forced only by time. Nira was forever broken by how long Lethal could hold back. She always won.
Losing was something special for Nira in her presence. Lethal would take her bent, like the wicked playstyling of glowchord strings, hair in fist. She’d make her kiss wherever she wanted. Lady would make Nira go, sometimes, until she couldn’t stay awake any longer. Hours passed once started, loops played in Nira’s head that couldn’t be broken without Lethal’s commanding. She’d never, and nothing stopped Nira from staying put between her thighs except raw survival instinct.
It was there Nira died. It was then Vicious was born.
Zero-G was a newfound blessing to the humidity recyclers inside Megalith. Icarus was dead ahead. Neither it, Lethal, nor Vicious could come slowly enough. Over again they’d prove it so.
