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
Content Warning: This is only a story.
Part Four | Wizard
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Three quickest blasts from Rory’s fists sent Echo sprawling onto the floor, coursing, blaring cracks of their knuckles reverberated throughout the woman’s skull to Rory’s chagrin, discovering Echo only laughing and egging her on, bleeding profusely; an unnoticed truth.
Echo’s pride was in truest form, posturing, that one playing as to believe herself most able of the task ahead; regained footing her bravest lie.
Rory took her by the collar, launching Echo sidelong into the mid-wall. Reminiscence of an old-favorite moment blooming inside that woman’s rattled sensory organs — some tainted perspiration to the clouds of Echo’s consciousness jarring them loose.
Sessions always seemed to lead right here.
Head-first would cease to be the mode of operation. Echo could feel that spot finally hit; her bell properly rung. An unknowably grounded thought in Echo would prove the task completed, hidden beneath those irrepressible notions so commonly spat—bearing presence through counted seconds of peacetime—as she’d shouted, “My queen!”
Muster hefting the grafted will for finishing Echo outright had then suffocated Rory’s desire for this to end. Head locked; beneath the pit of their arm, begging Echo for feet by their strength against their wrought brutality; flipping heel over head, pitching a crash wholesale and back-borne across the slatefoam hex-tile.
Bloodied teeth were shown at fright to her makeshift predator above, and they’d have spat upon her if they were the woman herself. While extended fights were part and parcel these days—this Echo was rightly spent.
Stranger by only herself throughout time’s change around The Foundry; odd evolutions of thought reached beyond mind’s grasp. That craft of unfound origin so recently bore wholly into Boreál—its glimmering shards, fragments of spotlit gaminerie—bringing such change to bear throughout people’s hearts and minds, a thing altogether differently forged in Echo by course of its residence.
Echo Béleaph was reformed by herself in those spans of time—as this newfound body of hidden chrome would prove. Despite cruel wavering between varying states of disembodiment, and perhaps, the smallest fleet of callously infiltrated polymotes, lobulated of spirit, flowing forth-and-fro within. Rory had solely helped bring her back to presence.
Leopold was in contact with the entity, passenger of cardinal flights—along with others throughout The Foundry’s communications network. It was none, inside himself alone, who seemed to be aware of what Echo now sensed in a heart; something beyond a thought-stream and mind.
The one Echo sought for help with this task had been Rory, and they’d provided an altogether different solution. Her many lusting evacuations of this weighted notion were altogether released from chest, at least, for that moment she’d been scrawled before her bed now aptly baptized, The Synapse Melder.
Relieved by worrisome infidelities of her body’s deepest tissue, it was Echo who came towards a burgeoning and undeniable truth of spirit, one recognized immediately previously unseen, an innate part of being’s fabric. She was rearing for an opportunity to get wrecked and release.
“It is what it is,” tattered glurps of sorrowful ecstasy had eked from beneath Echo’s breath by Rory’s witness, as they’d returned from washing the blood off their knuckles in the bathroom.
Rory proceeded straight to their water-bong, loading some leaf Echo purchased from The Foundry’s Mole Hole; its newfound herbal dispensary—some smallest blessings borne by acceptance of truth, and the many newfound ways of living amongst its entire populace enhanced, their institution would be committed to far more than war. Half the pilots were partaking ‘the ganja’ anyway, and approximately seventy-five percent of Foundry administration by Echo’s estimation.
There was Ekara, however, who’d not enjoy such delicacies of vaporous delight; unshackling notions within, beside, and above Echo. She’d still been debating her great plan of revenge upon that one; considering such workings which might prove reservation for their previously held hate alone by its end; planning to let it go, resurgences of older parcels in her consciousness thrusting forth to face Echo’s interior becoming.
The Foundry became a peace faring vessel inside while under shielding by Rory’s light—a fact at-last known throughout the populace of its fleet, many pilots returning themselves; voyages programed to flight before the fighting in Boreál began—seeking for that home—casting to dark beyond its reaches— finding their curling to now lead home.
Changing tides of freedom aboard the great vessel would be felt and shared along those journeys through inter-system communications. Only as they returned, would they step inside the walls of this rebuilt palace to the stars, truly understanding through feeling the difference in its ways.
Rory’s journey had been meant to be as theirs— taking leave after The Foundry’s centennial Heart Burst celebration— casting for a jaunt of space’s blankest wilderness with Bliss, and Monarch. Expansive lengths of time spent integrated within a warship, absorbing cosmic scope previously unknown, bearing those sights to integration through spans of change; their gifts of expanded sense returned.
They’d been on one hell of a trip with this woman in taking down Auluré beside their shared love of heart and dearest friend, Iris. It shattered within a vitality, which Echo would find reminiscent of her own. One tuned in call of remaking the galaxy, twisting forces of those alike the fallen hegemony against themself. No matter how high corruption reached into the echelon’s of their mother-sprawl; Elaria, those transformative notions would graft change. Their family became hope itself, now personified around the power to generate a portal which would change humankind.
The Foundry reminded Echo of Rory—fluencies in their shared ways held dear to sight—pushing her seeking of all she might become—finding similarity stowed of light within, conceptions played to both heart and mind, those which she’d not find herself able to let go if. Projections of humanity’s truths were her weapon, and the hardest of which would prove Echo inhuman herself; some alien to their curses.
“I love you,” Echo told Rory as she’d climbed into bed beside them.
Fumes of the finest smoke had blossomed in form from Rory’s lips, exhaled by burst and shape, before she’d told her back in haunted reservation, “I love you too, Echo.”
Become with chance to acknowledge her newfound awareness of self, dawning by the steady grace of Boreál’s sun—as she’d seen in her future from Atreya’s shores—one her body always stowed, knew, only coming into clarity now by sight of Horus; that one who’d called himself, and sought so clearly through The Foundry’s long range scopes.
Echo was watching back, their plunging and rising—repetitive clamors of heart both near and far—diving and surging into Chiron’s atmosphere beside vastness of darkness and light. Spoken riddles echoed into her heart — they could feel him out there; it, her, or however Echo might choose to refer such an unknowable entity within a given time space.
They were her.
