Time Throws Fire | Volume Two | Chapter One
volume two of the second story in The Foundry series
Time Throws Fire | Volume Two
By Ophelia Everfall
Part One - Cosmonaut
Part Two - Holy Fire Priestess
Part Three - Get Guts
Part Four - Demon
Part Five - Synecdoche’s Synapse
Part Six - Viscera Rising
Part Seven - Exile
Part Eight - Semblance
Part Nine - Threnody of Lojack
Part Ten - Time Throws Fire
PART ONE | COSMONAUT
CHAPTER ONE
Folding dither and back in towards life found Echo Béleaph’s calling to feel a home falling forward into focus. She’d not need distraction from sinking her teeth around flesh of fowl bechanced off a tray left in the dining hall.
Nobody was around. Desolation of a dispersed party told itself of being recently left abandoned—some celebration of regale bechanced by plague of sorts. The stage was unsettled and a sound system feeding back. Some rumbling of the great ship’s hull beneath her feet was only noticed after much time.
Echo had come back too far.
Synecdoche was everywhere—connection to Semblance severed—all feeling towards those she’d known at The Foundry quite lost in the moment.
Nothing felt less appealing than to be as hungry for meat as Echo found herself after the transpositioning of her physical form through Skarlet’s time-charged missile of displacement’s landing deep in the underbelly of Exile.
To be on fleet of feet—to feel that connection within of the now dematerialized etheric intelligence to which she could not speak yet would know all around—Echo’s gratitude was stout by fact of Fox remaining beside her.
Skarlet’s intelligence was an own best friend and ally of the future. Though their words would not be read except through her own hand for times to come, or heard except in thoughts, she would appreciate their warmth raining nonetheless.
“We found it, Echo.”
She’d spun from studying the stagelit backdrop behind the sweat sopped microphone left behind so recently—Echo’s arrival seeming to have been the stir. Synecdoche was smiling wide.
They’d found it themself and shared the vision.
It roiled. The portal was whole. It wasn’t here nor there. It was below.
Echo found it in herself; something new. She’d smiled too.
They were in the room. It was loud. The force of energy was encompassing and complete to the psyche of Echo and Synecdoche alike. A choice had been made to hope.
Echo leapt—Synecdoche pushed her by mind but would never tell.
Synchopeshing microfibers broke her skin into the dematerial—to the bone—beneath flesh—all the good stuffing of heart and soul in mind would find itself behind and affronting Echo’s stature of spirit into encompassing disregard of all that wasn’t Ecatosh’s own.
“I don’t give a fuck!”
Ether itself heard her in its own vantage of witnessing. Echoes of that shout blasted far and wide.
Ecatosh approved. A bell was rung. God was Olmec.
Rory was missed in that way they might occlude witness and banish spirits Echo witnessed from her vantage beyond sight. She’d make it forward and despite lack of means to hold them back, amongst the changing populace of Exile through time, carrying waves of change to her makings.
She discovered Eliot Harper far from Captain of Exile—distant from life itself.
His grandfather was aboard and the captain of sorts, one she’d make. Repopulating physicality would be her specialty aboard and around Elaria’s premiere example of battlecruiser.
Skarlet’s weapon laid claim through time in ways which would prove beyond spectacle. Echo wouldn’t have concern for a thing except that chance to make it back to Logan. Upon full realization of herself beyond the portal, feeling connection to an ever-scouting visage of her own known as Synecdoche, heart would teach her child in good care.
Ryker found Echo first through his own brightness and answered the query of how.
His love towards Iris was something she’d seen and known to prove him of family. The sights in feeling she had through Logan while about the space around The Foundry’s own would prove him reliable. Her first reception back forward through such lengths felt absurd, of that man alone, smiling in a way which brought her into a first rebirthing of true purpose.
Demetrios Harper III was a stoic man—a failure—some grandfather in the making.
He’d not been able to carve place of honor for how he appeared disregarding of tradition. He saw himself a maverick. Echo found it admirable. In time to come she’d make him admiral.
First strokes of path would be another man’s last breath made real—some joy. She could sense the rightness to it. Echo felt. Something knew and told in whispers to heart then she’d lay it down from places without any mark for starting to decide. The bladeform of her rematerialized fist would sear in cindered, smoking blackness to cauterize on impact of man-flesh.
Elroy Dontaan had been something of a marvel themself if only for the way they held fast to tradition despite a conflicting rightness believed in mind. They held Demetrios down from blatant insecurity. They saw how that man beneath them in class had stamina beyond that touched by fate their own.
Echo lost him an arm. She’d taken his tongue. Something in it divine was proving her reborn again—a newfound and enhanced burdeness of fate. A solider of Ecatosh found way into Elaria’s space and would steer future of its empire toward her own path in Boreál—towards vicious change.
She would make Elliot Harper. She would be his guardian. His family would show him to that throne of captaincy so needed to seal Elaria’s fate as writ, choice after next made upon her instinct. She’d be brutal. Understanding for the why would come.
Elroy’s tongue had been stapled by nail to the wall from a gun found in the man’s tool-chest. His heart had been taken out after he’d fallen asleep with a jigsaw and Echo stole copy of his ID chip into her data cloud for utilizing ship systems throughout timespace forward and back.
Everything was changing in ripples. Coalescing of spirit into the woman would bring her back to truth of clarity. She’d take last his head in one clear swipe of her bladeformed fist.
Three steps forward and one back would find her before another poor soul. She’d be drowning them after taking precious tendons into grip—shifting to ether beyond—tearing them along with her and out from both heels. Their trust fall would prove unfounded as the pool behind them was their womb of early death.
One more would do it. Demetrios had been a man of enemies.
Leslie Epicurio left nothing to be desired in terms of her bountiful grotesquery of personality displayed always. She’d been a lover in the past for that man to be a captain first, then admiral in shortest order. She’d not been loyal. Leslie liked her men in numbers and wouldn’t speak it. Demetrios could tell but let it lie until that unknowably scarred his psyche.
He’d still not accepted it. The woman simply hadn’t liked him how he thought.
Nothing would be less acceptable to Demetrios than admitting that to himself as she’d been the one person he’d shared anything remotely close to feeling of romance with which was sought wholly through lifetimes. She wouldn’t return that but he knew it no less. For the woman to live aboard Exile would ruin his fate in time before them.
Echo wanted to take her easy. Something about her found the notion of tearing that woman those same ways she had the men a foul. She wouldn’t need to see that stain on her soul.
Fate threw her lengthwise and upward from intent to return back in force of spiteful acceptance. She’d pried into the woman’s jacket and removed a smallest encasement of micro-fuel from a private shuttled patrol of Exile’s surrounding fleet. Leslie was a scientist and the smuggling in bits of fuelant that could prove useful for illegal experimentation within her lab was apparent. Echo would understand their purposes in retrospect and release all guilt for what she was to do.
Leslie’s sleeping form would prove most easily manipulatable without waking. Something lucky was discovered in the depth of Leslie’s slumber. Echo couldn’t believe it when she’d been able to open their eyelid and drip the majority of that micro-fuel therein before they’d awoken in actuality.
Screaming was something people did in pain, howling a notion for beastly formations of biology, cawing some sound understood to fly afoul, and trusting the discovery to purpose in Echo borne from hearing those manifestations from a dreadful woman behind her.
They’d voided their belly. Their clawed at their sheets. The woman in agony slammed her head into the boarding of her mattress’s hold. Echo saw this not as she’d opened their freezer.
Sweet treats discovered were hoarded. Frozen swirls of fruitful boon were consumed by bite of bit. Ignorance was bliss. Sounds went unheard.
Across the ship there was a man residing in a cabin of lesser make. He’d find himself to meet a woman in time from this newfound position Echo would prove to have only just carved a path forward towards his claiming.
In the first time for grand-cycles on end, without a single inclination to the reason behind it—Demetrios Harper laughed.
Echo felt it too. She was going to make it home.
