Fortuna Eterna
By Ophelia Everfall
Part One | Mx. Beatrice
Part Two | Organic Harmonies
Part Three | Synecdoche’s Space
Part Four | Fellows of War
Part Five | One Last Dance
Part Six | Solomon Rising
Part Seven | Delusionarium
Part Eight | Dark Blossoms of Hope
Part Nine | Fortuna Eterna
Book Four | Why Stay Hollow
Book Five | Kingdom Done
Book Six | The Periphery
Part One | Mx. Beatrice
They weren’t a person seen to others; Beatrice Undroth.
Olyphant was a large planet—a green one—very green. They’d leave it that way and live in the treetops and within natural caverns excavated with reverence to the destruction it wrought on natural subterranean life.
Its people the Imeriti were holy in their way of being in harmony with its graceful bounty of life-bearing fruits. For many of their early ages. It was a sight of blessing to their overseer; The Onokoai. Who’d shown themselves in visage to the people within a history now lost to legend.
Eventually they dug too deep—they shattered something precious within Olyphant. It wasn’t to be spoken of by those who knew but would find to prove a reason for nature’s disregard of these people. The how and why for their departure from harmony with each other would be discovered therein.
She wasn’t fine in heart but sound of body until the world had twisted her. Beatrice found herself unable to hold face in terms expected. She found herself undone in love and to be cast down. The forest was being forsaken.
“It’s our forest, hon. What are you doing to our forest? This is our home.”
She was a philosopher and astronomer. She was a poet and scholar of inner findings. No one in this changing-for-the worse society would listen. There was only one who would hear her with place on the emergent male-exclusive council. Condor Undroth had been her only true ally.
“You’re right. I don’t care. What do you want me to say?”
Beatrice wasn’t one to cry for an idiot’s realization of themself. He would prove her favorite example for time to come. His faults were enamoring and pathetic to the woman. They way he abused her some inducer of an unacknowledged idolization-infantilization syndrome that would prove equal parts her and his responsibility.
Her preface of congeniality dropped. She wouldn’t speak the platitude of all and every culture amongst humanities legions about the stars—only met with discouraged visions of his apathy which reflected shame in herself for her undying love which would remain. This same psychopathy would rear its head most after he hit her.
She’d love him most when he broke her with violence and she’d own him with the guilt and shatter him to shreds and enjoy it fully.
Until this moment she’d loved him like a brother and lover and friend. Never again would she respect him, for he would continue proving her right until his many ends. It was the deepest and only unforgivable flaw in her eyes—to not care about their mother planet and its bountiful nature of giving—to forsake in words of lack thereof, than in-action of disregard—to see that in yourself and not to act.
Beatrice hated cowards most because she was one.
Bravery proved to see it through time. Collapsing tears into phase-space of light—its womb of old. Memory had broken for Illith and its place was seen everywhere at once. Nothing inharmonious would be unchecked. It would be the one which people saw as many. It was allowing its perception amongst peoples everywhere to be understood.
Illith told a name alone and left the rest to mystery; it was Onokoia.
Olyphant wouldn’t understand its observance. None would break the shatter pane of its concealed identity for all its appearances beyond that of its birth and trial in ultimate becoming—saving a solar system most worthy which had rippled change through time immortal within this galaxy—had been shrouded by its will wrought to formation. Along with some minor exceptions.
Now of all and a seer made by one. Just as Countess Vysara of Rheinmasst had been a visage of the dark beast Hitheroth’s immortal soul after cruelest rearing of selction, Illith had been an echo of Echatosh itself.
Synapses were touched and assisted from effection above. Its drone fleet was magnanimous in disregard for other’s free will when it could read the positive effects of its doing in timelessness. It saw reflection in this through two others. One of purity and partnership. Another of rivalry and disregard. Equals in spacetime manipulation.
Fortune within its creative spaces saw to yield in whole at horror witnessed through its many factories of sensory abilities.
Something had arrived here and been competing for control of the populace. It was always here. Something deep in the fabric it would not quantify to the scribed thought into its banks—rarest happenings from a being so vast—telling of the question it wanted to most. ’What is this evil?’
It would hope to shoot them dead with heightened temperatures of its void space’s light applied in just disregard. Those below would sometimes feel and sense and be used to collect and contain and dispense energy it might use. Illith controlled the direction of the universe towards all it saw as correct in solutioning.
Wrongness would be uncovered to its demise in this timeless retrospect it held on a fabric constructed and to be manipulated from its vantage. It was playing with something already created. Illith saw the answers of some failed simulation of old it knew must have been reran with itself to change it.
The data proved it to itself alone.
There wouldn’t be an other for Illith but Horus. They were pairs of soul meant to keep each other. An only chance between them to understand the breadth of time’s folly and manage this container they were within.
No matter the history. No matter the loss necessary before rebirthing all of soul to spirit once more completed by Illith and Horus in league with some great plan seen to by both in Nebulae Ecatosh.
