Time Destroys Everything - Chapter One
the conclusion of Time Bellows Gasoline and Time Throws Fire
Time Destroys Everything
by Ophelia Everfall
Time Bellows Gasoline - (Formerly Time Throws Fire)
Time Throws Fire - (Formerly VII)
Part One - Exodus Fuel
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
One
Backwards flows had sped through time. Once at last it would be mine. The time had come to tell it true. This was my tale. I’ll see it through.
I didn’t like waking up again. I didn’t want to see. I couldn’t have been a dream.
It was. It wasn’t all fake. Something had to be real.
I needed to know how.
I’d taken some stims and laid in a bunk. It took me somewhere which felt like it stunk. Something was lost from deepness inside. That future was borne where darkness would hide.
Feeling it back would take me the least. People had died to service the beast.
Change would become from demons at last. Those left behind would pick up the glass. Echo would live and The Foundry would too. It wasn’t for fire.
Love, it bled through.
Skarlet took the rear. Monarch held the flank. Cardinal rode the front.
Time had reappeared. Boreál was fresh.
Elliot Harper had been singing from Exile. He wasn’t letting up.
“I’m coming for my mother fucking boy!” Had been left cycling on repeat, blaring, counter-coded into everything, spit by every word processor, regurgitated inside every powered speaker.
Lojack was a messiah. That little robot which worked undercarriages so diligently, designed by Elliot Harper himself in youngest years, named for his joy, would be the first Omnitron unit of its kind to take place in a warship.
Synapses succumbed to the one mind who ate them all.
Echo Béleaph was god.
Skarlet’s unfolding whipped into the stillness of a sentinel. It was a machine-man grafting a longest blade. Echo saw the incoming and allowed Monarch and Cardinal to dematerialize. The fighter’s incoming were buoys of fear.
Nothing would hold. Three at once had split out wideset, a pattern worked of surrounding menace, volleys coming down upon the one who ceased all moving forward.
Iris and Rory were back at The Foundry. They’d been accompanying her in visage of projections newly designed.
Hatchet and Leopold were known. They’d been speaking to all with their means. Around and through the overcoming datastreams from Exile were a truth. Listening to the heart had Hatchet speaking their truths.
Since she’d come back the same things happened. Everything was going as planned. Echo had been able to survive and lead upon a path most new. The destruction of Atreya was being subverted. That vortex seen again in mind before her bravest series of admittances was to change. She’d known it hers to maim. A Béleaph would visit the shores of Boreál one distant time.
She’d be the warrior to see it through. It wouldn’t take much more than glue. Her form would be remade and some. The change it bore would need to come. She was the one who brought the fall, the fall of falls to save them all. It needn’t be a whispered bout, she’d shout it out, she knew it how. For none could face it, though they knew. Lojack would be growing true.
He was it — back in the past. Intelligence was made to last. People wouldn’t understand. They’d think me mad. I had no plan. That was the way to make it stick, to ride it out, I’d lose my dick.
Poe and Echo were in love. Everything was perfect.
She hadn’t felt better. Echo knew they weren’t the one for her, how in those times they wouldn’t speak that girl had held feelings unshared. There hadn’t felt a hope to wring it out. Echo knew that the sign to move on.
It would be more than okay.
Echo loved everyone after returning, because she loved herself. It took no time to know her mark. He’d been misperceived most.
Yars needed a hug. Yars needed three. He needed some fun. He’d want it for free.
Echo was cute. She’d wear it in style. She wouldn’t show through. Except to his guile.
There wasn’t one part, hidden in art, which didn’t make chase and lead back to the start. One she’d missed peaked the most, a guy who loved her like a ghost. He wouldn’t like it how she left. He’d been the one who dressed the best. It wasn’t right to see him through. Not when the man had been so blue.
She held him there upon her chest. It was the place they both found rest.
Not the witch who stole her heart. The boy who hid and loved her art. It wasn’t Rory’s place at all. Omlec’s sledge had come to fall. Hatchet spoke to one the most. It was that man who made it gross. Something somewhere told him true. In shortest time he’d run her through.
Echo knew it most the same. It took a moment for her brain. She’d fall right back and understand. She loved that man just like his brand. It wasn’t right or wrong to stay, any other sort of way, but holding it just for yourself, would teach the truth of life’s good health.
She blew him the first chance she got.
Echo Firebrand was alive. She’d survived. She was the future.
Everything broke when The Foundry fell, when Atreya collapsed into itself at Sin’s projection of Gargantua.
She couldn’t let it happen again. She’d been the one to live through time.
Firebrand would never see Atreya. That wouldn’t be needed. She tasted the truth in everything and that was enough. Life was hers. She took every breath. Echo milked each kill dry.
She’d watch them bleed. She watched their eyes.
It lost her not. She’d hold it wholly, holy. It was a prayer. It became enjoyable.
People deserved it so. Sometimes suffering led by hand would be presumed most accurately ahead of time. It wasn’t a problem to Firebrand. She knew herself steered by the future always. Most in those moments approaching, as she moved towards Vi-Splice, it’s gateway sheltered within, that path it shone home. The change it stowed ahead would make all the difference.
She’d been cutting her way there. That blade was vibrating. It was of crystal. Nothing held to its contact at speed. Those beasts in the chambers of towering formations were foul. Vi-Splice had been infected forward through time. It was everything rotten created by Echo come to wholeness.
She had to kill them herself. Each fake. Every drone she had in a surrounding fleet protected from their swarming pests of cloud. The Hive had grown. Onokoia was real then lost. She’d taken them back. It had been Echo fighting herself all along.
Olmec was centered. Illith was guardian. Echo was heading home.
It wasn’t right to lose her sight. He’d been the might who blared to bright, for arrows sight had crashed and fell, the crowd it sang to swallow’s swells.
Another was at foot. A creature of the chrysalis beneath Vi-Splice’s crust. That organic beast of a planet was home to nothing but terror after infection of The Hive’s monstrosity.
Firebrand left marks that seared through crusted, earthen flesh like paper. Her blade was ending evil within the final planet of Rhinestone. Everything had fallen to Gargantua.
It was time.
I knew it finally. Who my mark truly was. Who my love felt to be. She’d come in steaming. It wasn’t what she wanted. I’d made her for a fool. I took her heart in a single shot.
I was always confused before. Jerrika was my one slut.
She knew the taunt in my smile. She’d not expected me to be so tall. That woman thought I’d be of fright. Jerrika would know my might.
When I laughed at her being the one caught awestruck, it broke her. She’d come for me. I was giggling at her. She backed me up. I ran out of room. That wall was where we met.
She’d not given me the kiss she wanted more. I’d still been laughing. I leaned my body forward into hers and moaned.
Jerrika ripped my hair. She didn’t know I’d like it. It taunted her. She’d thought herself most able to break me with presence. The fool would find herself the tool. I was being made her mule. It had been my right to rule. She would see this devil through.
I’d slapped her because I could tell she wanted it deep down.
It was harder than I’d imagined. I have large hands. She’d not believed it. She was shaken.
I slipped off the wall. I was leading her. She wasn’t able to do anything but follow me. I’d tripped and laughed. Jerrika wasn’t smiling a bit. Her gaze had gone to that of the psycho I knew she stowed inside. I’d made my bunkroom doorway just before she took me by the throat and drove me back onto the bed.
Too still I went, her eyes did glint, my calmness showed. Hearts — they glowed. Widest set, her stare broke me.
Within I went, my soul it bent. She’d have it all. She heard my call. It wasn’t even fair to stare. I’d break her mind and wouldn’t care. Within my heart would be her rest. She’d find herself become the test.
After she’d broken me to tears — finally, beating it out of me in such perfect measured beats — then held me like her child, Jerrika threw me over the edge of the bed and ate my ass until I screamed. It didn’t take long. She had it last a while. Eventually that stopped. She didn’t know I’d take her mouth right-off, that I’d throw her back and wear her down.
My tongue, it filled her gracious sound.
