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.
Chapter Fourteen
Riptide was thunder—nether blended insight to forthright beacons of jealous knowing—War Cry threw fire.
Nothing coasted—everything floored—sycophants would meet force here in system they’d come to challenge—Undroth was free—Oblivion wasn’t allowing this end to befall the newly arriving force she’d witch to subsume—Monarch’s signals were weak—some ghost—flickering shouts through radio wave—tantric extensions of sense to that one.
Echo was beyond simulation entirely—this wouldn’t be about what any others wanted.
Dash was a flitting explosion in the atmosphere of Chiron. Carly was gone.
“My dudes!” Elliot Harper was flying shotgun with a stick between his legs at last. Open fuel-lines cut to synchronous jet fire. Throttle was rediscovered in movement.
“I will not be showing you mercy. This is not a warning shot. This is your end.”
He cut the line.
Iris Lirafleur’s destruction had been stopped short by Ryker first. A daring escapade that left his brother in arms breathless. The Sisters Two had swallowed them into their hold as three and ported back through timesmithing magic borne of fair Oria’s blathering cunt muscles—Persephone’s plan complete.
That shot would not find home in space or time. Exile heard back from Elliot’s co-pilot Lojack in the Thrust Forcer.
Subconscious rhythms would prove a projection in the cosmos. The android built by Elliot himself was a construction of astute design. Triplicates of beeping twirls took him to the conclusion previously demanded of his Omnitron—the best friend he’d ever had.
“Three grand-cycles.” Answer proving calculations completed on a presence most noted through viewing portals around the Glowing Tree.
Echo’s time back from extended travel to Roice and back between her stays at The Foundry was a needed boon to her growth. Always the cutting velocity of flight would bring the best from the woman. Expanded scope of breadth was not an intimidation but an inspiration.
Something gasped in the darkness of Chiron’s shadow on Scarlet’s port-side scanners and it was a laser sight bearing through the vast. Behind it was a beast. They’d been unseen beyond it all. Some grasping horror of plunging remembrance seeking the one now thrusting themself into the system most boldly.
Ulysses would not be seen any other way. He would only be known deep within Echo’s heart. Riptide was lost to a swallowed hole of etheric nothing. Nether alongside. The Foundry had many but at this rate it would not last.
War Cry found itself between it all—Chiron’s wall of hearth the bearing of every soul’s consciousness who opened to it. She’d been exposing herself and it was changing her and nothing stoked hate like the sight of terror upon a heart unearning in Poe.
Smote would rise through foresight and it was aimed out. Scarlet saw a shot and would take it. Rory was felt throughout. Echo spoke it inside the rotating chamber of her hardshell and Fox heard the emphasis of a rarest spoken word echoing so negligibly. “Do it, bitch.”
Void shells clashed in microscopic collision and launched the viscera of its outpouring in a cosmic flash of thrust which bore upon the Sisters Two’s closing porthole. It would be a speck of chance to catch the long-gone craft in its wake but they’d left it open too long.
Drones were everywhere, surveying the whole system, pouring everything back to Leopold, “Everybody come home!” He’d shouted to every Foundry warship on mission throughout system.
Scarlet had gone far.
Echo within felt it coming now. Rory was with her. She wanted something and they wanted it to. She’d see it in her mind as a fear to pursue but there’d be a chance at the end for more than Echo’s dreams might surrender.
Flits—peeps—specks on radar and scanning across the system had converged. Every signature narrowing. Echo hadn’t thought a moment of this course through. When the cutting blade of Monarch’s materializing wing—shrouded in lightform protecting its birth in Boreal— made hasteful surrender to its fateful return; it’d taken Scarlet apart and split Echo’s at the waist.
