The junk-hauler was a load bearer. It saw to become the shame of a fleet without some home of Planet. There’d been a loss to the efficiency and holistic respect to the universe which need be paid by all in Boreál.

“I can’t believe these fuckers!” Poe’s voice resonated with graceful and cutting ferocity.

Echo could feel her from the forest where she’d projected herself back—Hardline holding her a single jump from their target—allowing this chance to help with a moment heart told of coming. Some need to feel back and make change anew.

Her dance was changing things. She’d been seeing to one great difference from her visions which would make many. She would save Atreya at cost.

She was the hope for someone else. She was going to save a people by saving them. That’s what she’d always known. Rory was needed. Something would be broken by all she’d done and left and then seen to make in her anger by their leaving. Echo was atoning.

Shortchange was in first flight—Yars Borseph taking it out for a run.

He’d not seen himself the pilot until Echo inspired the notion within. His intelligence was vicious, futile in hope to contain. Hatchet would prove to be the burden against all manner of villains these people wouldn’t understand the depths they’d need to sink to for that chance of overcoming their hatred.

Elliot Harper’s hand was placed upon Glowing Tree. His heart was awakening by the moment. Things left unpondered coming back. Something out there calling.

Lithia had become the captain of his vessel—he’d ceded command and nothing gave him greater discordance within. He hated her as much as he loved her. Wanted her as much as he’d like to see her beg. Something beside him was growing. Someone he loved gone lost to be allowed this chance to see his home.

Ulysses was crying.

He’d not been to a place such as this—not in any of his times. The plateskin armor beneath his carapace leggings was loosening at the ease of his mind. Hex’s eviscerations of the imbeciles feeding back became less a focus. The place before him was a heaven. He’d needed Hex to find more velocity with the ripping and tearing of hide and flesh to lose hold on the truth of spirit before him.

It wasn’t working.

Shame would seem to be forsaking itself in Chiron’s atmosphere for purpose. Coward’s End was seeking to draw some lack of focus from the ever-pouring fleet storm of Elaria now fiending upon The Foundry’s timespace.

Horus was growing interested.

Far passed the strips of remaining light barrier ever assaulted by Lithia in her haven of a command center made of the Hope Spring’s epic chamber aboard Exile was a terror which would come to be known as he was—champion.

Lauren was fire and fury and wrath become to one name; he was the ender.

Synthesis found a mark and he’d not known. His time spent peering into the generator was watched back through Oculus. Countess Vysara had marked the fellow by signature of wavelength. She’d seen fit to reconstruct him in whole for that hair upon his head before taking his clone to hell by one stroke of thunder at a time.

He was battling her. She was holding her ground within his consciousness and the manhood he was becoming had nothing more to say about them as a person then what they were facing down.

Hitheroth needed a foe it would not understand. The way Lauren had been born would prove to confuse the mammoth god immersed in a poisonous sea of an underworld’s gaseous meta-liquid, now embodying their own understanding of what it was to be a man.

Lauren would defy a god to save what he knew of right heart. Boreál was a place of people who deserved a second chance and this voice torturing his consciousness and allowing himself to believe her a part would speak against his gut. He knew better and that voice would prove itself the other.

Challenge in this constant of his foe the demon queen would shower insight into the rightness of his own judgement. It had him find himself. Now he would see to end this scourge upon a people with a blow unseen. With a move unheard. With his weapon let loose. His speed would break the galaxy in three. Its velocity would pierce light and break into phase beyond—yet allow a trailing blade of his will to spear or slice or bash any body of mass Lauren saw fit.

Echo felt it coming and allowed a sway in her hips to change the notion a hair. Something would need to be allowed survival for the right course to be set.

He hadn’t liked it or known it from Echo at all, but Lauren found his own sense taking it in and bleeding it into action. He would leave Exile whole.

Opus would prove the shot in the arm needed. Ulysses battle-cruiser had become flecks of shard. The loss had spent the madmen sprawling—screaming—clawing. Lauren would see themself back once come to stop a near lightyear away. They’d return before the next thought had met this terrored man’s mind.

Hex was loose. It would react quicker than Lauren might have chance to anticipate or protect against.

“Rory, we’re fucked.” Echo knew herself speaking into the shattered woman’s ear within Monarch.

“Let yourself go.”

Two inside Rory were fighting like Lauren. They were herself made halves throughout the time lapse. Her split was righteous anger and burning hatred—one side of a coin made two by shortest distance of nuance. None would see the difference. Echo only felt it.

“Do the thing you know you need to. What I showed you.”

Monarch was making after Coward’s End in a ploy to teach of its escape route, drawing fools, allowing it to be seen as some mistake of surrendered mutiny. Rory hadn’t realized what was meant until it came over her. Remembrance of a song which echoed through her in reverberations of latent consciousness.

A tailspin would see Monarch twisting in gyroscopal transcendence—nose spinning and rotating up and right, before folding back over, while the entirety of its jet stream began pouring towards its former bearing. She’d collapse it all except the right-side wing which would prove its hold on space with thrusters clamping it by equally vicious counterforces made especially possible by those two unique portholes utilizing the power of Rory’s light to wield the thrust of three drive cores—her infusions within the craft and herself allowing the vise’s strength and the g-force beyond that which might be withstood by any but herself or Lauren to protect. The entire craft would show through its transformation on the return swing and make haste toward their enemy’s fleet as the warrior form so lauded within.

In the following breaths a thousand shots would be fired from the blaring of its cannons embedded along each of its four arms.

Every goonship would fall in the face of her change. That inspiration borne in all around. Every last Foundry warship had ended the fight a mech.

Hex saw fit to prepare in those seconds of wait. It spread itself to catch—intelligence anticipating all its own the soon to be commands of its still weeping dog. Ulysses long believed himself the maser of this being created by foolish whimsy of science. It owned him.

It knew the desires would prove equal. Every time the way it sought to act would be a need shared if not spoken. It would ‘rip this she-boy’ to shreds, as it knew his master-puppet would put it.

Lines had been crossed. Light barriers removed whole. Rory went black.

Boreál would be the only place that might hope to balance her by its light from within each heart—by its hope to see her free again—by those who’d known her smile. The Foundry’s fleet had utilized every utility within. Each robot of function driving the machines. Every intelligence latent within their workings. Warriors were out and fighting for their best.

Lauren needed to be free of Hex. Something would take it and no one expected the shot until they’d called it in moments after.

The field it became was read by everyone in their own way, pervading the notions of spectrum into a being of allness. Until it cracked. Something seen in each scope, read on every frequency, a channel which lit the heart of the fiend and made it realize a place again with Ecatosh its own. Hex faulted. It split. It became a dithering beast in time for Lauren’s return to shard it to glass of space.

Fear was known by every initiate made pilot along with their elders. Lauren had missed many with his channeled fin of pure emulsification to nothingness. The streak seen by few and played back by eternity would show its path a most divine and swerving impossibility. The Foundry had been its closest call.

As it threw into the dark past the outward arching and longest thrown and orbitally flung heading of Coward’s End which would see it back to The Foundry in time, was when Leopold’s voice came through.

“Echo’s gone again.”

Time Throws Fire | Part Five | Chapter Thirty-Five

the second novel in The Foundry series

Time Throws Fire

Part Five | Coward’s End

Chapter Thirty-Five

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