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 Three | The Feather
Chapter Twenty-One
Eyes widened as streaming shots and drips of blood splattered the wall. Rory Tyrell was far from home. Visages bore into the spaces about and around had shown her. They’d flicker into lost grasping perception. She wasn’t human any longer. The place had entombed and been consumed within a woman of evil’s final residence. Beatrice Undroth had overtaken Sanctuary completely.
Repetitive timestamps—sevens and ones—they told of a true start and a plan to end. Together they’d been unmade. Each part of these two now intermingled was inside and about each other—Echo and Rory—a joint effort of specifically divine synchronicity. Foolhardy and callous fate had wrapped them together.
Many faces would show which became something more than themselves proving need of cutting down. Friends of new and lovers past. The hoard was thinning. She knew. Nothing but a simulacrum of corporality remained—attachments at Sanctuary needed cleansing. Facilities here had been haunted from the day it was created forward by Alan Undroth’s disembodied soul. His death had been a shattering itself. He’d thought of only one thing in his final moments, and that was Echo Béleaph.
Unbreathing he would utter a curse unknowing—one for what he’d stolen—those hopes he’d dashed within her—the way his makings were the architecture of her downfall. His death echoed back but not forward, and his evil was too strong to withhold a final moment of darkest proclamation.
Not everything Rory saw was living—always true but repressed—compartmentalized—fear stoked knowing would prove it unknown; she’d one day control it in whole.
Goddess spoke through and even at this distance she supported and uplifted and that other would prove the same. Alan’s spirit cursing Sanctuary was one she’d lift—others had been seen to since remergence. The place would be saved outright. An error in accounting would be fixed. Messages relayed. Graduations of understanding would change the tide.
Beasts entrained to slump and crawl by wrath would bleed. Conflations of soul had landed in the woman and she was more than one. Training of mind had separated a two of similar ilk which stacked atop. Both were crucial for the undoing of wickedness—divinity found in the balance.
Rows of clamoring flesh would meet and protrude towards. They’d be cut down. Lightform was beyond space. Past was the edges of Monach’s field of control. Everything Rory could do was coming into focus as she made birth into the control center.
Nothing of form was left but the crawling husks of decimated unfinished corpses behind her. Ahead was seen a fate reclaimed. She would become what was meant and more.
Atonements would be made by the one who’d acted in such haste through this time of recovery to hold them together. Echo was everywhere in her own way and with Rory present in time there would be change. Synthesis was the path to evolution and ground within familiar hallways would complete them.
Cords from the scionic webbing—infinitesimal lights ripping from tears of space—served her sledge back into the pool. Alan’s etherism vanished at fright into nether.
Goading belches thundered alarm. Decompression twisted Rory’s guts before she’d sealed the chambers remaining atmosphere and fed it through portals grafted here nor there. Extensions of herself were effortless and the connection she had with her wife was latent. It had been and would be. Time had come upon itself. There was nothing but the call inside to feel herself again like this; in real.
Jonesing for it. Thirsting forward they’d last taken Beatrice Undroth their own. Held now within containment instead of becoming their presence as she’d entered this hellhole. Rory realized at last they were connected most deeply in some way of Ecatosh.
Sanctuary had been saved.
