Something in Yars was dark, and darker than most. Yet he was of light in many ways. Supportive and kind with an ear, a shoulder to lean on in need of recognition for his strength. Echo enjoyed the man and he her. They’d found a tender place to be themselves around each other.

The same was being found with Cal Jones upon Sin and it had been a pleasure to return for topping her score on his clit each time. He’d rail her to oblivion for her work—provide her some absence of mind most needed—and it wouldn’t stop there. Cal liked the whole meal, although he would find himself having to wipe his nose entirely less often than Echo.

They’d not be one seen like through her eyes to the masses. The way they wore their gender was gorgeous and stunning and perplexing to people unknowing a boy and man of humanity when they saw one in glee of self-realization.

Gripping tears of her hair in gentle tugs from the back of her head would see her mind free—allow her to collapse into him and onto his chest. There was nothing violent about it. She’d feel at home in his arms. He was part of her family and that would be a known quantity upon these findings of another so right and that would not be lost on the woman.

Echo had found herself fantasizing. Projecting upon Rory. Thinking of making them matriarch of some terrifyingly hot reformation of polygamy gone terribly right. She was a polyamorous woman at heart but would seek to remake the way that would be held within the masses. People didn’t do it correctly—to her estimation—as with most things.

She’d sought to change incorrectness within herself, at first by subconscious drive and then willful admittance to the correctness of its tellings. Suppliance to its demands in regard to her surgery performed on Why Stay Hollow were bringing bounty of lightful presence unreachable before—fearlessness and quiet of mind redefined. It was done for nothing but herself and that vision of Ecatosh she’d feel most right to embody.

There was a need for anarchy. A need for broken boundaries of hierarchy, for true freedom of possession and redistribution of social recognition of spirit. Echo loved boys that smelled really nice like Cal. She would see one beside her in form of some fashion in the family she was meant to create.

Her deepest needs of love would always be known. They’d always been blown true through time. She wanted to make home with a woman and that would be the truth. The private space she’d feel most at peace would be a coven of two in nature which saw her to freedom. She’d want it with whomever made the many notions of her need sing loudest and longest and would want the same in return.

Even if it was farthest off—she’d hold for her dream of feeling.

Rory had been the visage of her searching, rebounding and entwining and fighting and learning to love again the ways of that woman at The Foundry. No other would step up from the blatant intimidation of a history so great and known and broadcast widely. Their simulations would be seen as both more and less than what they were.

Confusing impossibilities of fate and consequence would prove infertility towards the controlling births upon the flow and nature’s path towards hope. Echo would ride it and fail to control intuition, sensing and twisting through unknowings of Semblance, still of trust to those things she knew true and drew back.

Hurt would stow and maim those visions of future, but family was family and she’d not fail to forgive over end for one she knew deserved the chance at place.

“You’re doing this to yourself.”

That’s what Rory had spoken first.

“You need to calm down. You need to slow down.”

“You don’t understand what’s happening.” Echo snapped back with hips lunging as she’d ducked to the flow in tow.

“You’re just dumb, dude.”

Rory was shaking her head and crossing her arms, resisting the urge to tap her foot like a mediocre mother.

“You’re just like a stupid, lazy boy. You’re like a fat frog man.”

She was tearing through her laundry pile—collapsed from its stowing keep—hoping for something in the half of clean to be unwrinkled miraculously, ever disappointed to find that not the case.

“Can you just explain why you’re doing this?” Rory begged.

“Why can’t you just be cool?”

Echo and Rory had only gotten back. Ryker had Logan tucked in and there was a fire set outward by Hatchet in the protection of this palace which bore thought of revenge within Elliot Harper. He’d want his boy.

“You need to see what’s happening. This could all be over, dude. You haven’t felt it from where I have. This could be over any second and fate is not fucking written. They’re coming for us. They aren’t going to let anyone be free. They already have us—and I’m doing it for Logan.”

Echo found the blouse with ripples which obscured the most of its tattering due to her negligence, “I’m not kidding. You’re being a part of this right now. We need to fight.”

“I need an ally, dude, and you’re being a coward.”

When Echo found Rory’s eyes a stillness would always prove to slow her into becoming more reasoned with consideration of her words.

“You taught me how—and I figured out why—but everything is genuinely fucked and going to hell and I’m going to change it—for my daughter.”

The Great Generator was fed in tandems of direction from its base and through structures of The Foundry to its lowest reaches where all conduits rejoined. Power was a force of Psyon—the sun of blue and gold and violet unwitnessed to all in its technological making but its forebearers. The design was in purpose of three.

First would be the sound this configuration prevented.

Aeronauticus was the perfection of vision and auditory hallucination which would immerse all who witnessed the glory of its sometimes divine positioning in balance and sight of both Chiron’s loom and Atreya—that most unique planetary moon in synchronous orbit of Boreál’s sun—locked by means beyond explanation—legends of Onokai speaking to point for the only understanding of a way it held within this mighty giant’s cradle while in constant pirouette. The arena’s venue was too important to jeopardize with ruptures of faulty blurts and machinery which proved too powerful to dull.

The generator was also a mirror for energy that would show Psyon’s second purpose. It required much to fuel its enormity of gyroscopic and circulate rings. Between them would be the pilots and the administrators and all which was known as The Foundry proper. The outer edges around the dome were ports and jetties of purposes multifold. Lower rings were of viewing portals and warfaring devices. Launch tubes and docks and the hangar itself were cut around this descended and tiered webbing of understructure. People needed power and Psyon’s generation would prove infinite in league with that of god’s design rotating above.

Its founding feature of war—the hangar itself—was a bay which encompassed a quarter turn of the great vessel with ten enormous blast doors shrouding separated chambers of warship collection.

Those lowest reaches; the bowels. They’d hold secrets and the third answer, somewhere beyond final landing of the grand staircase and the fleet of elevators which led up and down the central hub, so near engineering warehouses seen by all who’d be required to know of their inner workings. Every pilot would train with the mechanics—every administrator would spend time in shifts overseeing or assisting those who’d find this their duty in some way.

Orator Coriseau was a wholesome notion of health beyond the ordinary. They’d seen to lobby for change which would give all opportunity to speak in council or land place as an initiate by force of justified will.

Echo would see herself here often and fight for the balance needed interpersonally between all. She was a renegade to the systems which saw people as less than human and these levels of workforce would have the hardest time feeling beyond oppression no matter the workings to make them a part of all. They needed windows.

Semblance made it happen—Echo took the credit—simulative visions worked to prove a truth of experience in the one who consumed them. Living something immersively proved of same difference to a brain chemistry’s forging of pathways. Forests would surround them all—Chiron in places for those who found it comforting as would herself—Atreya’s seas a most common sight.

The current Echo’s journey towards the hangar was a rough one on her body. Passage through the portal from Rhienmasst was brutal and she’d needed nothing more than rest and reconciliation for all that happened.

Echo would not slow for the weary. A true apocalypse had met the tides of Atlantis in lore of Earth—she saw that here in Boreál to come. While the death of Atreya’s future would seem undone, survival of her family into the future was uncertain.

“I am not going to say this to you all again.”

His familiar voice was low and unforgiving and petulantly hopeful of its own intimidation factor while showing through some innate insecurity in the way Elliot Harper would trail off at the tail.

“I want—my boy.”

He’d cut the line and all knew some response was coming in action.

Skarlet; the scribing alteration of namesake Echo had taken to bestow upon her newfound beast to ride within—the one she’d only begun rebuilding after her reawakening and before her departure in physical, completed by time-space projected simulation from Hardline—would find means to cut that short.

“How bout your girl?” She’d delivered through the suite of electronic warfare in her new ride.

Remaking Skarlet to this newest and to be galaxy renown vision would fly in tightness of wrought g-force unheard of. Nothing would seek to try and match its bountiful movement—nothing made by human intelligence—nothing bearing a human pilot.

Something in the dark of space was stirring in the belly of Echo as she felt fire back from heart of her message’s recipient. She’d reflect this back from Semblance but hold it as what it was—something both true and untrue—an anticipation of reaction from her subconscious’s best estimate of who Elliot Harper was and what her words might wring from their mind and heart. She was a witness in the delivery of her speaking and a fearless one at that.

“Elliot, I see you and you’re a fucking coward. You’re less a man than me.”

She wondered how that one would go over for a moment until the heat inside burned red—recognizing the way it had no matter of her wholesale conscious and focus attention shifted into all of Skarlet for allowing its rotational slingshot of Exile, turning her favorite blaring cannon on their target while keeping it entirely stealth to means of detection—the whole bounty of them.

Sumptuous feeling of other proved beyond a boy. Phase space lifted a veil. Some dastardly darkness of similarity to Skarlet in speed and agility would flit and spark in blips of sight and sense. Something which moved through all of time was helping—phasing.

It was going to do well here. Horus was pleased.

Drones were released in witness to all senses—seeker swarms from Exile would chase them. It came from the dark. They’d come from some friend of a fiend. It was more exceptional than anything which would ever seek to find velocity or victory in this timespace. Those drone’s sovereign over again once revealed would show itself infallible. It wouldn’t let up for a second in the battle to come—the largest and longest and most loss stricken Boreál would ever see.

Echo found it pleasant to hear that voice of a boy in Exile take to name calling after what he thought the source of her voice—drawing away attention as she’d placed her thumb on a trigger within her mind.

Elliot Harper was obviously crying.

“I hate you, asshole! I hate you! Why are you doing this? Why won’t you just die?”

There was chance to blare a voice of shout in return. Echo chose well. She’d not lose the opportunity but would also fail to ruin it as well.

“I love you, Elliot. I can feel you and you’re a sweetheart. But you’ll never see Lojack again.”

“What?” He’d cried out to all of Boreál.

“Why, dude?”

Echo felt a rumble in her tummy—the need to leave it unsaid. She would recognize this as what it was—fear. She’d reject that.

“Because he was never yours to begin with, honey. Nobody owns anything—especially something intelligent. He deserves better. He doesn’t even like you.”

She’d released the phase-shell into its particle chamber and felt its burning light-womb—shattering a sphere in time which would see her back to the beginning of this entire engagement alone, placing a mark for arrival with a post-set, and erosively intrusive blast to the side of Exile.

That mark she’d hit once the shell stopped, right where she’d wanted it, would prove her landing in time’s past once arrived. Skarlet itself would remain dematerialized while she was departed, as planned in this instance knowing she would find herself aboard Exile; her weapon’s phasing force locked to the matter and not the space in time.

All of her and her warcraft would return in microseconds then proving to change it all forward. The journey of twicefold living would only be experienced by Echo as they made the voyage back and then forward again.

Something new was happening inside her as she’d loosed the shot and cast prayer for safe voyage through this passage. For a first time in Echo Béleaph’s lifetime she’d wished she had just been able to rest.

For Logan

The reason I fight

Time Throws Fire | Part Ten | Chapter Fifty-Six

the second novel in The Foundry series

Time Throws Fire

Part Ten | Time Throws Fire

Chapter Fifty-Six

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