Time Throws Fire
by Ophelia Everfall
Part One | Redux Eterna
Part Two | Polymath Blues
Part Three | The Feather
Part Four | Wizard
Part Five | Coward’s End
Part Six | Whirls of Wind
Book Three | Fortuna Eterna
Book Four | Why Stay Hollow
Content Warning: This is only a story.
Part Five | Coward’s End
Chapter Thirty-Three
Clean was the word—the feeling inside.
Echo would see Rory only that once after her waking. Why Stay Hollow became home beforehand. She only made that visit to take the beating herself for healing the scars within by their absence. They didn’t feel the same need at all. The change in them would prove beyond that of what she’d dreamt. They were split. They were lost to a space beyond mind. They’d broken and been remade into something cold.
Spite was the choice and the choice alone for Rory—pointed toward a deserving enemy and herself and anyone who deemed the dare worthy to attempt loving her while on a vengeful mission of unbecoming known righteous in its way.
She was a demon and no matter their place in past or Ecatosh it wasn’t the one who they promised themself to be who was felt. It was the reflection of that they might cast into Echo and others for their own becomings. Rory had become a void of darkest mirrors.
Walking beneath the dome. Feeling at home in its place of sensual release to natures grace reborn in space. Breathing in the oxygen of this green farmland. Something was necessary—lost back and known to be of hope and held in the future—connection to this place and a planet. Echo never made landfall upon Atreya as many of her peers had the opportunity.
She’d see someplace better. She would be the one to find the planet they would call home.
Without a dreadful burden held so long in her own body. That opportunity of remaking by which she’d seen cybernetics and bio-synthesized prosthesis synchro-meshed. Echo found less panic in the notion than when she’d seen it in splays of future.
Things she’d wanted most were found—relaxation into the grace she sought to hold of movement in hips and waist and legs—entire body of the goddess she so felt within her heart. How everyone would see it without hint of artifice, how the drudgery of existing the way she had, freed of the discomfort from dysmorphic ideations. She would find the way things felt always in harmony with her spirit.
Trees here were from a planet which was far and wide from where they’d landed. It was a home much like Earth for a people who would likewise never see the stars despite greatest exception of Onokai intervention. Koralis was the place Chloe had come from.
Logan was back in her favorite place and the freedom bought together would hold Echo towards a changing guard of night and light. Something wicked her way came and Fox was most complete in his calculations of another fiend of foe; Empress Lithia was on her way.
Simulation was a home for seeking speed. Remaking Scarlet had been a digital happening. Fox was saved. Debris from its wreckage salvageable beyond that of his containment and Echo was negligible.
She needed time to meditate on how they might return in honor of her newfound completeness—such addition by subtraction. Yesterday’s trash resided where the present was meant to be.
Speeding along the cracks of its deepest and most narrowly cut crater. The Run was not a place for velocities Echo might reach. She was proving herself most able of defying the laws of limitation here.
Everything about Scarlet was changed—rebuilt and this record was to be hers again. Ender took it from her once with the sleek adaptability of their own designs. That boy inside was a robot like all humans. A taskmaster of completion and his way of reaching heights in these cervices would be surpassed and then some. He’d only learned from the best and his chances of matching her were limited by the lack he saw in himself still. That, and the way he’d wrecked his brain staring at the great portal. Along with the fact she was always just better at this.
Slithering ballyhoo was an Undroth remanence inside the woman. Alan had left a stain. She was shaking it out.
Five miles of pure throttle saw her into the blackness of the endzone at a thrice re-beaten record she’d only see a threat to in future of herself. Thirds were always the best.
