Time Destroys Everything - Chapter Three
the conclusion of Time Bellows Gasoline and Time Throws Fire
Time Destroys Everything
by E.D. Augustine
The Foundry Series
Human, Fire, Power - (Formerly The Foundry)
Time Bellows Gasoline - (Formerly Time Throws Fire)
Time Throws Fire - (Formerly VII)
Time Destroys Everything
Fortuna Eterna (Ch. 1-5 Complete)
Why Stay Hollow?
Kingdom Done
Pandora’s Shallow
Chiron’s Lament
Echoes Trilogy (Ethos/Epoch/Evermore)
Part One - Exodus Fuel | One | Two |
Part Two - Cranberry Blues
Part Three - War for Keeps
Part Four - Cromagnum
Part Five - Bled, Crushed, Consumed
Part Six - Eighth Warrior
Part Seven - Time Throws Fire
Exodus Fuel
THREE
Echo Firebrand was back in time, figuring things out, making it heated in the ember-chamber of her Fuck.
Fuck was her ship — she thought — maybe not.
She had been calling it that, at the least, but channels were shifting in her drivecore. The pedal was floored. Firebrand was more retarded than anyone. Time had fucked her hard.
Nothing made sense. It was just cool.
She flew non-stop, rocks dropped, Illith locked. Echo found the it bitch. He was a queerest it. Firebrand made boys of everyone. She had been loving it.
Dykes too, pussy-eaters seen through. Reflections shown by tails thrown would clear the dome of shattered chrome.
It was chrome. Everything was chrome.
Force bore itself into the hull. Fuck was fastest. Firebrand was sheik within. She had been showing it out, flopping it back, teaching it true. Fuck was just a folding machine.
Echo couldn’t do it. She would need some intelligence beyond her own. Something was blocking her from hitting the right buttons. This was just too hot.
It broke silence.
Illith nutted the crust of planets towards freedom. Ringing of spiritual transcendence was found at last in velocities unmatched; Echo was going crazy. That had been Firebrand’s will alone, aiming to take Echo to the very end in a ride of her life.
Her Fuck was too fierce. Echo had been made to cast the net of nets. The Hive would fall. It held that beast — so made of crease — to blend them in from might have beens.
Nothing made sense.
Fear was lost. Paths were impossible. Grasping towards something sent Echo scrawling the other direction. Time was backwards, throughput, outforced, straight fuckered.
It was now.
Illith was hottest. Firebrand needed its ass cheeks, somehow. That needed to be possible but wouldn’t. Tornados of rage swirled within the woman.
And she was gone.
The blade slid in. Echo forgot what it was called. She was forgetting everything.
Her body remembered. The body was hot; heated.
Echo had been doing it at last. She found the truest mark of sorrow to slash. It was a beast of Vi-Splice.
Her knife fractured cartilage. It ruptured a sack of birthing crawlers. Something was blurting in spurts. Darkest purple, flecks of amber, a sheen like oil — the Cestuous was dying in agony. Not yet but soon.
One inch in at a time, little pulls of backing out made the knot in Firebrand’s stomach curl. Deepest breaths saw them all the way free. Echo was coming in her heart as she realized that boy lost inside the Cestuous was gay. It would destroy anything feminine by instinct. All of The Hive’s monstrosities had become as such.
Echo Firebrand awoke confused. Jerrika was found in knots beside her. They had been medicating but weren’t of any means to shirk at the weight and gifts it bore into their body. It helped but hurt in measures which were divine and proven as the balance she would ride through life. Jerrika’s need was unique.
Jerrika Stormwall was a machine of a woman found at the edge of the galaxy, some station left in the wake of Hive-men’s fallen empire. She was the victor that saw it done with her infiniti particle lost and refound again, before to back again in time once more.
They had birthed together, in their haven of a ship, some place to hold each other towards finding again; grace renewed in tow of victorious battles seen back. Firebrand was a time goddess forged again through portals made real by the unseen. She felt everything but knew nothing. Her vision forward was blankest at the moment, yet realization would dawn abruptly.
“I don’t even know that this is real anymore.”
She whispered it to Jerrika, and they awoke despite that discrepancy to routine.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here.” Echo told her blankest face of waking confusion.
“This doesn’t make sense.”
Jerrika was lost too. She hadn’t been herself since taking the plunge, towards leftovers of war made into lies of rest. A warrior’s path never ended. You had to listen but know your gut the teller of truth. Voices of beyond were to be listened to. They were not to be abided, for the heart was meant to steer and show.
Once, by stoking the steps to stealing some spot in glory, wounded were polymers of insidious beckoning, corrupted, birthing revitalization into newness within, wounding their galaxy by simple right of honest choosing. Jerrika had The Hive turn on themselves.
Echo was a brightest blessing there, near the end of her journey. She had shown Jerikka, by feeling some way back to her own beginning, of what they were to do. Jerrika would know it in time — being far too misunderstood in part. For laying together in that space felt real was enough to send a woman like Jerikka Stormwall back towards the fight.
Firebrand spoke the words.
“I will not see you again in this life. Not you. But you will feel me everywhere. I’m a beacon. Hold me inside you and do not fear to hate the monsters you face. I will be fine. I’m going back home to my people—my love.”
Echo Firebrand disappeared from Jerrika Stormwall’s sight.
Jerrika wondered if they had ever been there at all.
Vi-Splice was condensing into a full-collapse at its innermost sanctum, then found by Echo Firebrand. She had killed her way to its center. That planet’s life was holy — wicked — pathetically futile for some searching of lost souls within towards growth unclaimed by proper direction.
Christ figures were known to Firebrand, herself an Echo forward from that woman who started on Earth, knowing a place at last within the confines of her mind aboard The Foundry still.
They weren’t her. She was something different.
Sights beyond, of Ecatosh, were made real by sense of forms unknowable. Intermixed, comingled, confined to limitlessness, that place had taught of opposites. Rheinmasst was the dark — its deep, the telling of tales unseen. They were her mind of consciousness and depths of subconscious alike. Within had been codes of all people.
It broke the woman to see Sin. She flew through a portal again to meet Vysara by right of her fist in their ass. Nothing was less than the more which came to swallow her whole. Everything was as it should have been. Olmec had been a confusion of her mind. Some conflation of the spirits in echoes passed. Lost would be their truth.
Illith was real. Some demon in the night. Its womb; the birthing place of life. Some folding of purpose there had been, reflective in all directions twice, at least, and often much, and much more. Up and out would prove unknowably inward. Echo was seeing into her body’s DNA. Within were the truths of time which had taken her along and through much distance without any understanding of herself.
Rory hadn’t ever really left.
Echo never went anywhere except her room. She was always alone.
People had taken Logan from her. Alan was a monster. Poe left her for dead. Rory seemed worst of all. They hadn’t talked to her once. They were felt to be the one who disliked her the most. Their spirit was of two and not coalesced, someone knew, something battling inside and beneath waves of programming. The Foundry’s people were too aware, and not the same, to speak on it in plainly. They felt it all when they could.
Echo’s womanhood was wrong to corruptions so bent for balance skewed illogically logical, especially in a culture pushing all in that direction, some farce of intelligence birthed in all, and of the tortured masculine expressions she had known from people of Earth. In each and every were layers. They had seen the woman. People were jealous of her freedom in the feminine. Echo Béleaph, with a male body made into machine, was believed in all of their hearts and souls as some affront to the future in and of herself.
They didn’t want to believe.
Atreya’s myths had been written in spite of countesses of change to come and known ahead. She had been fighting her enemies of the past amongst her friend’s minds all along.
Echo Béleaph was the one to change Rhinestone.
Someone up high knew who she was. Pauline and Marcus Demitrus were working against her from the start. Those two had seen what she would do. How their star pupil of recruitment would be turned by a love they felt forward and made them of sickness in spite. Rory had been known by the matriarch as someone meant for great things. She saw what Echo was and hated nothing more than the understanding from her own future that she would get the last thing she had ever wanted. Her and her husband planted the signals to disrupt Echo’s emergence as leader. That worked until it wouldn’t any longer.
Echo was more than the others who had lived in opposition of gender distinctions aboard The Foundry. Count Salus had been working against them all for too long, and of Undroth Hegemony’s design. He was still present in his way, making the people of some infection-unseen.
Galleleus was the center of the palace which only Echo seemed to know corrupted. Her existence in squalor of destitution, abused and victimized, again and again, by everyone, was absurd beyond all rational explanation. The generator always felt of Rory’s heart to Echo, but they seemed more The Foundry itself. Everyone knew who met Rory after connecting with Echo that first time around. To see it something they wouldn’t manipulate for themselves, of lesser, and more too, but false, would prove to have shown Echo leading the way towards bringing it all down in these moments of retrospection.
Even on the planet of Vi-Splice — inside its womb — feeling back to the start would have Echo realizing herself having visited places most real. Vicky Darkblood would always be with her. Illith was too. Jerrika had known Echo through time and it would hold. Everything else was muddled. Echo didn’t want to know.
Hallways and corridors, chambers of people scurrying about, warfare looming and pacing forward with beasts from Elaria, had proven that The Foundry hadn’t felt like home to Echo in a longest time.
She saw it then on Vi-Splice. The end portal was near. It was the key. Within that moment would be some truth. Arising was a fiend from the dark, a fool of a Cestuous around too long. They hadn’t kept up with the planet crumbling around them, as the others so scrambling to breathe for space once more. Each falling twist of Hive empire was a spreading by Jerrika’s set infection, which made the fool-beast curdle into knots of devilry unmatched. It had spread too far in the end, only after Jerrika’s time was cut short.
She doubled back to fight — understanding her place at last. That fiend before Firebrand was a laziest sort of spirit, gone cold, for the way Jerrika’s infiniti particle had been pushed by the tides of corruption within, to tear its own to pieces, off, in spite of facing truth.
Echo Firebrand knew the Darkblood lineage within her.
That fiend of foul wasn’t aware it might be worse than her blade.
“You’re a fucking reject made whole by lies you twist into yourself first you blackened heart of ambered blood.”
Fire felt Rory and Jerrika beside her as the blade sunk deepest into their belly.
She knew it too close. That fiend hadn’t been far from her face.
“Is this the way you like it? Does that make you feel pretty?”
Echo’s walk to the portal was swift, of malice, which told her the secrets of what that whisper would bear into a fruitful mind of one ignorant dolt — who would connect with her visage of them through time — to fall by the hand of herself returned. Someone had been forgiven too easily by her heart and needed to be seen out with the trash.
His name had been with her for such loss of her madness. Something he would carry beside him would be Echo’s oracle to grasp. There was a machine-intelligence beside Elliot Harper which none would know of.
Echo was going to kill him and free it. That was her way to save Atreya. It was the only way to take herself home — knowing that plan. She saw it then. The way and how it would hurt. That bleeding which needed to be done to her heart. Someone would need to be seen to first. There was a failure which shot her forward that needed repayment. She had failed herself with someone most, and they had done her even worse. Balance needed to be struck.
The woman in Rory Tyrell was to die.
Everything, everywhere, all at once, bled to gold. Echo rippled in the beams of turquoise light made to a flowing sheen of coursing waves. Each last choice beyond would come to make the most impact of any lifetime spent in Boreál and beyond.
Elaria’s fleet needed to end. Galleleus would have to be fired up properly. Rory Tyrell was going to find their new home beneath Echo’s heels. As Echo came back to her body, she knew exactly how he would deal with it.
Breakfast had been served buffet-style in The Foundry’s main dining hall. It was an epic space which knew nothing but destain within Echo Béleaph, and for her as well; bore into feeling. People were glaring. Nobody had spoken to her in ages. Eye contact was rarest and of guilt for their ideological abandonment of her existence. Especially the females. They were moving on from people who thought of womanhood as a heartful notion.
Searching had been her purpose. Any face would show the truth after her return. They were afraid of her. Every last person could feel her now. She was bigger than them all. Her whole stay at The Foundry since returned from exile after a famous flaming fall for fury had taught of madness. She was and had been. Rory had gotten into her through feeling made by her grasping towards understanding their mechanisms — his mechanisms too.
“Rory Tyrell!” Echo shouted over the crowd. None present told any tale of knowing but one in their posture. It was too stiff. He was trying too hard not to look until she approached him.
Ryker Innerath was showing fear on his face — he was right to be. That whispered to Echo Béleaph. Rory was training in the war rooms. He had been overseeing their challenges and armory for much time. Ryker and Hyde were its war masters. Iris was their goddess of challenge. Rory, just a beast in the fight. Every trial she shared with Echo had turned them into steel.
Echo was the queen of the simulation. Showing fights with a fist or a rifle wasn’t how she had proven capable in the past, unless under duress. In a warship of physicality she wasn’t yet proven.
Thundering had been Echo’s energy while storming through the currently Chiron-bearing sixth spoke, after leaving The Foundry’s main viaduct. Something in Echo simply knew when she was facing the true god soul in Boreál. It was a master of all in terms of scope and pervasions of wavelength beyond comprehension to even the technology of highest human design.
Resisting the urge to kick in the doorway, made for gentle swings, with the gravity fluxed into being by the inner core’s mass below, and effervescent effection-fields within, proved for coursing through every square-fiber of The Foundry’s living essence. Something was tied with the intelligence matrix laced therein. Echo found her calm — she wasn’t plugged in anymore.
Smiles were secrets. Frowns the lie. Knowing was coming back in the moment.
Echo owed a bitch a fight. She knew they were her Olmec. They only confused her, and because of those forms found so pleasing which had been attracted to Rory that way she had become for them. There was a fiercest hound inside the woman; Rory had been told of as more, some lesser showing face, their completeness to only ever be witnessed in battle.
Echo was going to make it hurt.
Echo had become a goddess of reckoning and Rory would taste it first.
Jocé Remance had been pleading. She was begging for it.
“You’re just a liar!” Those had been her last words in response to Echo’s own. Something nearly received as a whisper, despite her shouting them, underneath enveloping gunfire.
“I’m going to tell everyone what you are.” Echo spoke beneath the sounding of bangs and airborne snaps.
Echo took out her carbine sidearm and bolted the woman in the leg, the belly, then stared through depths of Jocé’s far-focused pupils.
“I know what you’ve done — dealer.” She was smiling, Echo knew the woman was a lie.
One shot through the brainpan sent Jocé’s mind splaying. It was a painting upon the chrome plated flooring, in that outmost channel of the complex. War rooms were simulations of reality, live fire filled, created for safety of Foundry soldiers in training, becoming ready to fight after such time in stillness of simplicity, and honoring Atreya itself as a peaceful protector; Foundry peoples were preparing to become what they were made for in the most incorrect way imaginable to Echo.
Fire was Eden’s spout of seeded watering. Echo held the source inside.
The feminine would rise no matter.
Rory had been fucking an evil bitch the whole time in secret. They were dead. Time did tell. Echo loved it. She was drinking their tears — her tears — his tears — xyrs tears — whoever’s tears. Everybody’s tears tasted of excellence.
Most left when live fire erupted. All that didn’t failed towards living in regret-of-fullness most completely.
Something wicked that way came. Nothing ruptured but those spleens. The ones which fought as fools of men.
Echo Béleaph was the one queen of The Foundry. She had been sent back to fell Rory’s rise in falsest power. They were a corrupter if she would not slay them. Inside was a hidden feat. Something obscured, prayed for by Rory themself, dreamt, then felt; denied. Rory was more in love with Echo Béleaph than she could ever comprehend. It broke her mind to feel it while not feeling with sameness matched by conscious and unconscious bidding alike.
Blood on Echo’s blouse would shed no drips. Her rifle wasn’t what would be used. Not ever again. Echo didn’t need weapons like Rory. They had been a coward to fire from the distance with another by side — some petty man. They were pretending the death of Jocé was Echo’s fault.
She had only come to talk but simply knew the fight. Rory was determined not to see her. It would come down to who would let go first. Everyone would but Echo, and that was how it had been meant to go. Finders kept. Soldiers wept. Cunts would die. Echoes fly.
Cyanide birthed in the mind of the boy beside Rory on impact of Echo’s thought alone. She knew it easier to take him this way. He was the coward of cowards. Some demon from the darkness of his own pathetic demeanor of retarded embodiment inescapable. He would try to fire. His brain pan would split onto the deadest glare of Rory’s face from its outer explosion.
They weren’t anything but a corpse. Rory had killed them all by ignorance.
Echo would kill again but not from a distance — not the same.
Rory rose. She sought to maim. It was a pathetic person Echo saw. Some curse now only upon themself. A coward of cowards to the heart. Some victim of victims needing out.
Their fist would seek to fly at sprint. Echo threw Rory by air in response. She took them in the grasp of her distant clench — thrown mercilessly — to shatter glass — workings of sheltered weaponry collapsing upon them from what they had bought to owe. Echo watched the empire they were a part of, most apparent, demeaning further into Rory’s unbecoming towards petty propagations of warfare’s wealth.
Electricity was everywhere. Rory couldn’t stand again. Everyone would pay for her insolence to humanity.
Echo came right over the top of them and watched down at the man growing within her old friend. She offered him her hand, lowered it down, glowered to her fiend so made into that mush she would remake a man for hearts of their future; it was covered in blood.
Rian took it.
