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
Content Warning: This is only a story.
Part Four | Wizard
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Horus was everywhere. Echo could feel it. They’d been around since before. Something about her coming here felt tied to them in the first place. She’d not stop dancing.
Echoes of her own self were splayed throughout the cosmos. This woman in all she’d done by her shouting into the ear of a former god within the dithering waves of Ecatosh’s fabric was not always so. She’d been others—some even she knew. There was an equal number of goddess and god souls.
Every soul did exactly what it wanted. The only limitations of creation were those placed upon them by the others. Echo of Ecatosh had seized the zone in secret. She was resting upon the ether of a dead god in his throne room. The lord to live beside her hadn’t taken their place.
Thoughts would seek to please the sense of rightness imbalanced by all this woman of etheric vantage might hold within her breadth. People were wrong. Everyone borne of body were choices. They’d chosen wrong. They all chose to pretend. It was Echo that would be waking people up in every running simulation—her focus upon Boreál was finite yet unlimited.
These people needed her. Horus would be the purest embodiment of that soul a form inside their universe could hold. It would come near—holding close for this time while Echo became—it was seeing her to completion. The more she’d hold of her spirit from Ecatosh the more she’d find herself unable to do anything but lie—boldly—as a soldier of truth. It was her spirit’s path. That was Echo—each utterance a part of some plan she’d not see yet would feel in trust. Swings of compartmentalization controlled entirely beyond the conscious mind proved to stalemate advantage and disadvantage.
Space would throw her when she’d displace. Sleep was not.
Hyde was chained. His place aboard Sin was one of hopeful surrender. Plans to change things from within. Finding himself padded by a shield of his own goodwill. He’d not suffered like his brother—not yet. He’d been separated from Iris and unable to speak until this return to form beside him.
Echo hadn’t been feeling well since coming back. She’d been seeking more the eyes of others and the flow of her dance. Nothing would take back what was once lost again. She was more forever and would see others knew it meant that way. None would prove less than on the same path.
She’d not been able to leave that place beside him. Something tied her in the dream space to Hyde. While she’d felt the need to explore it was not something hoped for until the planning of Rory’s mission began.
“I want to know.”
That’s what she’d asked him.
“You don’t get to.”
It’s what he told her.
She knew. There were horrible things happening on Sin. All around it. She could feel it all. The worst would be a cloud which subsumed. It made everything dark. A box had been opened and the contents weren’t going back anytime soon.
“While you’re here. Can you lay beside me? Will you put your head on my lap?”
Echo stood frozen. Her body at last whole in the space. Before unrealizing the projection of this visage anything more than a felt sensation to the man. She’d done as he asked.
