The Foundry | Part Four | Chapter Thirty-Nine
the next chapter of my forthcoming novel
The Foundry
by Daphne Garrido
Part Two | Rebuilt; Refound; Reclaimed
Part Four | Unmasked; Unbound; Unleashed
Kyle Preston - Meeting the Goddess
Chapter Thirty-Nine
They had people calling him Alice again, and Alan had come to accept this fate, now returned to the womb of his family’s control. There was just too much going on for taking up the hopeless fight to be acknowledged as he knew himself.
His mind had been frantic for months on end aboard The Foundry, searching helplessly in his thoughts, seeking answers, clawing at the walls of fear his family was so apt at emplacing around him. While his sibling would be kind in their private moments, Beatrice and Condor Undroth had little to no respect for the man. In their eyes — Alan was a failed daughter.
He’d not once gotten them to acknowledge any of his lifetime of relationships exclusively with women as valid. “How’s your friend?” was the best Alan ever heard regarding his long-term romantic lovers.
“They’ve been enabling her fantasy,” was how mother was putting it, repeating that again as she’d had him made-over by the beauticians on her staff.
“Make her right.”
Normality was the professed concept his family would bestow their arbitrary guidelines of personhood.. They would ignore outright any reflective signs that their focus was primarily on genitals, or how defining one’s character by that feature of the body was nothing short of barbaric idiocy.
Ever still, within the clouded dreamscape one found themselves forced into aboard a ship which carried these communally enforced expectations, to resist would be a hardest thing. It would make one feel crazy to be surrounded by so much backwards wrongness. The fact these demons would wield manipulative tactics to enflame this notion within those they sought to control — always, and forever, steering towards expressions of living which wouldn’t reflect their blindness back — would rot a person to the core, and rip the hope right from their very sense of being.
Echo had known that feeling well on Earth. It’s why she’d forgive Alan for just about anything, knowing himself in its grasp, still striving to cut free from the need his family forced within him through a lifetime of conditioning to seek pleasing them.
If she’d have been able to see what they were actually doing to Alan aboard the Auluré, or known at all what he’d been through to begin with, himself having always shielded her from knowing the worst of it — Echo would’ve already begun prepping her rail driver.
“The Empress will fall with the rest of them!” Condor Undroth had screamed across the Theater of War. Its circular centerpiece of holographic projection bore visages of all which lie within the Boreál system.
Alan had been trying not to glare across the hologram at Count Salus; the man who’d ultimately made this all possible, crafting the deceptive manipulations, and outright blackmail, which had convinced or forced so many to follow him.
His father’s point was most heard by ears but ignored by hearts and minds alike. All here would hold their own opinions about things most firmly. No debate would truly sway a soul, instead becoming a blatant and useless clashing of egos.
Still, there would be death marches for those who deigned step out of line, and they’d lead directly off board through Starboard Airlock 17-C. Itself a cursed place which would only ever be used by those wielding death on authority of their self proclaimed emperor; Alan’s father and patriarch of this upstart hegemony of his own father’s name, Tiberius.
Condor made his mark on within Elaria from a place of purest privilege, receiving all rights to his liege through the hand-me-downs of his ancestors, and he’d utilized it ruthlessly. There was not a thought to why he’d been doing this throughout his entire lifetime. It was felt as his right, and he’d been taught that notion by his own father, who’d learned it from his father before him.
Alan was watching on with a broken blankness, so lost in the costume foisted upon him, and most disgusted with the looks it earned from those falsest men surrounding. They were a scourge; devils made manifest by the blind following of hateful lies. Each containing the same spark of light as every other, but lost, and many would prove beyond hope for redemption in the end.
They’d chosen their fate. It wouldn’t be one that any right person would feel good about in the end — except, maybe Echo and a few others — to have them dead and gone. A bravest sort was able to know tough choices needed to be made, and found themself willing to acknowledge it was a burden to carry; a great sacrifice.
If Echo hadn’t have spent so much time allowing herself to become the ebbs and flows of Chiron inside her heart and mind, she might’ve had more trouble with all she’d be doing to the people within this chamber in time. Luckily for everyone, she had, and that would mean she’d have her cake and eat is smiling.
Chiron’s spirit was of grace and power, horror and beauty, benevolence and malevolence — to hold it inside at once would allow a one to transcend the notion of violent heroism needing to burn and rot a soul from the inside out.
It started with an acceptance of a humanities ultimate place — not meaningless, but far closer than any seemed to imagine — an indescribable conceptualization which could only be felt in the face of the universe’s true power, but it was more than that.
Every man and woman of war on Auluré had been programmed into a machine of thoughtlessness. Yet, their hearts remained within them. There was no ridding a self of that. The reason Echo could wipe the blood of these men off her boot and sleep like a baby — was the same reason they’d be kept up by nightmares of those they’d killed — she’d not dehumanize her enemy once in the process, and they would.
Respect would be paid to the blood spilt by Echo, always, no matter the sense of joyful posturing or effortlessness wrought from an experience of vengeful becoming ridden by coursing adrenaline.
She’d prayed many night for Simion Hareth, knowing that inside he was the same, along with those others she’d strewn about The Foundry quite mercilessly. They were people, and it was sad having to do that, but it would beat the wrongness of letting hatred perpetrate evil on the innocent in ways which would could not be overcome with words alone. You’d sometimes need to speak the language of the people you were talking to, and while that was unfortunate, Echo couldn’t seem to care when faced with the choice. Nor would she lie to herself, pretend she was a victim, and whine ‘like a wimpy little bitch’ afterwards.
“We’re sending Alice out with her — friend.” Condor had continued in reference to Alan, pausing for the affect of his proposed ‘daughter’ alone.
“It’s going to be a successful mission and we will be seeing to our purposes in shortest order.”
The man had spoken his demand so laced in subtext with a hardest stare towards his son, and Alan had been thinking of only one thing, so marred in the hurt he’d not escape a monotonous simplicity of justifiable angst it bore within.
‘Fuck you.’ Was all he could repeat in his mind.
Returning to his quarters in the lowest reaches of Auluré’s commoner deck, forced to stay away from the rest of his family and the allies they’d chosen to hold closer than their blood, Alan was fuming. He’d been the black-sheep of his family as long as he could remember.
Now, having clearly taken his life in a direction they disapproved of, he’d been seen as nothing but an embarrassment. They’d done this all before. In his past they’d found him abusing stims due to their own abuse upon him, and made Alan out to be the problem, pushing him to live out of this same apartment he’d been staying at since returned.
Condor never told Alan, but it had long been his private den to bed the rabble before assigning it to his son.
His parents wouldn’t give him anything, while having more than they’d ever need. After keeping him locked up at their own key, and depriving him a chance to learn any means of fending for himself, he’d long ago been abandoned to make his way from scratch. Alan had negative support, weights of oppression placed upon him, beyond the pale of that anyone else at The Foundry might know.
If Alan had even been a remotely decent human after all he’d been through, it would’ve been a miracle. Yet, he was the sweetest boy Echo had ever met when you got him to smile. She’d not feel much better than having fun with Alan and seeing those most earnest expressions of gratitude he’d beam in response to her honest compliments of his many virtues, having simply never heard them before.
He was the saddest story she’d ever been witness too, and Echo didn’t know the half of it.
Ripping off the dress in his bathroom and scrubbing all the makeup from his face, Alan had chosen to do something he’d never do under less horrifying circumstance, and it would be deemed a mistake by himself in hindsight. At least, while caught in the web of manipulative fury which would soon follow.
Alan shaved his gorgeous, personally cherished, should length hair to spite them all. All the way down. He’d not cry. Alan never would, but he hurt harder than anyone may ever have while doing that.
It was then she’d walked in to see the mess, gawking, unable to handle the gravity of recompence she expected coming their way quite rightfully.
“You fucking idiot! What did you do?” Priscilla demanded of him.
*cleans rail driver*