Time Throws Fire | Volume Two | Chapter Eleven
volume two of the second story in The Foundry series
Time Throws Fire | Volume Two
By Ophelia Everfall
Part One - Cosmonaut | ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE
Part Two - Holy Fire Priestess | SIX | SEVEN | EIGHT | NINE | TEN
Part Three - Get the 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 THREE | GET THE GUTS
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Some change had taken hold deep inside Ryker Innerath.
Darkness was a force seen by subconsciousness-all for that way he’d glisten by pigment. Drying off saw the man to sort his wares. The cycle ahead was one he’d cherish.
Echo was alive, enough. His little family were the only people who believed it and thought that okay. It was more than okay. He’d never felt a greater experience of bliss than to know there’d still be chance to tell that woman, who’d been buried within the bowels of The Foundry—around but shrouded, to hide for herself most often to all—exactly how it was he’d always felt about Echo.
Ryker’s everydays would wait in the hamper of folded sweats. He wanted something better. Vikki was her name, and she’d not dressed as anyone else.
It reminded Ryker of that time he’d first seen Echo Béleaph for who she was, finally ensnared within the growing legend of her return, standing in that rearmost corner of the classroom, nearest an exit as always, to see her in that dress.
Whoever Vikki sought to be, they were changing ways people chose to generate clothing in the printers.
He’d made what Echo would refer to as blazer, and a turtle-neck sweater. Vikki would find him stunning. She’d see his intent. Some brave man to offer himself as a friend to fight beside would prove a healing awaited. For him to be that earnest for how he saw himself in her eyes would be a heart’s joy.
Vikki Blieth found herself free of Earth’s stain at longest last. Something inside would show her the truth—that heart she’d seek most purely beside—some soul uncast to hell she’d missed, who’s dreams she’d evade like plague—that one whom she murdered by barest hands out of fate-borne bloodlust—they’d been a masculine spirit to her eyes, and that’s what she’d liked the most.
Rory reminded her of the boy Echo had been, that lie. Their surface would show what Echo would want to become in her transformation, that type of warrior-woman she ventured to be made in whole, but below was a curtain which held so much back—she’d known that game well, if not sure what hid within—below, it wouldn’t be something she recognized, until seeing Ryker and feeling her heart’s swell.
Men were beautiful. They were gorgeous and stunning and precious.
He’d think her crying because she’d missed him so much. She was. Yet there was more, far beyond what Ryker would understand. She’d been healing her heart with that man inside herself who’d died the lie he was.
He’d gone boldly on Earth, heart blaring—bleeding, something clear; there were lessons to teach of his life before it happened. Then Echo was born. She’d never forgiven him. She hadn’t forgiven men for Earth. Even the one inside herself, all while having to struggle beside them and knowing it most unfair.
Young men in patriarchy throughout the galaxy were a unique mode of oppressed class—when they’d not have some enormous benefit of caste. They’d be unrecognized and demonized as visage for the culture itself. These children reared into a system they’d carry the weight of guilt for, by social prejudice, forcing spite, engraining hardened ideology of that make, and perpetuating systems of inequality for all. Women, others, and men everywhere were in battles for social and civilizational supremacy, unrealizing their sides a failure to begin with, regurgitating lies of ideology through actions based on sex-discrimination—failing transgender people at-large the most.
Misandry was often crueler in reverse ways of misogyny, and a specific make which would cause for malicious deception thrown back, as would the other. Misogynists seemed most able to project a field of constant awareness about their seeing of women and feminine-energy-containing-people as lesser, and force societal ignorance which enflamed the women, even themselves to suppress the realities of personality, as some blatant horror witnessed.
There was a rarest man that cared they were misogynistic. It would seem. Most would laugh about it. Truths hurt too badly to acknowledge. They felt left out by their women. They’d felt unloved for who they were—unseen for their virtues—made some fool for prejudices of the past by women who utilized every means of manipulation against them as some enemy while they smiled. Women told men they loved them and knew better for them but blamed them for everything about the world. Even their brothers. Even their younger brothers.
Women would view men as tools, objects of sex, petty lessers of physicality, toadstools, laughingstocks, try-hards, cuties, and studs alike. Their intellectual gifts were shirked—dismayed. Women were blind to how they’d been the seed planters of sexisms perpetration. Women were nurturers. They’d nurtured their men to hate, oppress, and own them civilizationally as they’d desired—some at least, on levels—then blamed them for the way they’d turned into nomadic male-pack animals which treated women like their enemy.
Many on each side of this dichotomy, upon Echo’s Earth, would deny all culpability—the greatest failure.
People like Echo would own the bulk of both at once and bear that burden of unseeing upon it all, by most. Alan Undroth had been her one hope to understand the other side of that coin, and he’d let her down more than any. Staining ideas of what transgender men were, even at The Foundry, reminding her of the few she’d met on Earth—even obscured as they were—those men who’d been born into female bodies she knew had let her down.
They’d all made her feel less than any other in some crucial way.
They’d not wanted her reflection for some reason.
They’d not like to see her, and she’d loved seeing them.
Echo was too brave. She didn’t care enough about what would be accepted most; superficiality—she’d not even learned to actively-work her throat muscles into tighter constriction for simulations of that higher-pitched speaking alike cisgendered women.
“You’re such a girl.” Alan said most often. He’d laugh.
Vikki needed that validation. To be seen as a woman by someone who could, and that would stick her to Alan because he’d not smelled like her traumas of the past. When she was Echo, she’d have held onto someone like him no matter the cost, just for the chance, just for the hope, just because there were so few capable to fill her place of need.
Ryker’s eyes had some quiver. The sight had Vikki hoping Poe knew their agreement was between the two of them alone, and immediately, but deep down. When he’d hugged her—when his scent hit her nostrils, it was an oddest thing.
He smelled sweet.
Vikki was playing it cool as she’d accepted Ryker’s invitation. Poe had been setting up others with the opportunity to talk one-on-one in her cabin. Ryker got first shot, Vikki’s decision, and that would prove a last as well. She’d not be doing it again after her trips about.
There was another private chamber to which he would first lead her.
Incense burned, music played constantly, there were more pillows on that bed than anyone might allow but its occupant. Ryker had been there before, but not like this, not to witness such a miracle.
Oria Belfour was overseeing her cabin.
It was Vikki and Logan’s show. They’d feel themselves to be alone when together. There was some time the growing child, now entering school-age proper, near the budding of breast, had found themself standoffish with that woman so alike their mother, but not.
Vikki was strange but warmest, and Logan’s ice melted quickly.
The hug they shared was a miracle. The length some grace-led moment of transfiguration in hearts of Ryker and Oria both. Such time they’d shepherded the safe growing space of Logan with fostering reconnection as hope of their holding. To have lost that belief of achieving it, living for length believing the child would never again know her mother, then get it all back would be some gift. She didn’t have to tell them who she was after they’d seen. They would be the two to know, apart from Poe, of who Vikki truly was.
Holding pretense of that gathering beneath the screeching tears of dreadful scream, furious borings of shake by the great and seemingly ever-rupturing generator would be some lie to their fears. All except the two whom it was for.
Cal Jones death had been no loss to Vikki Blieth. She’d been the one he took on Sin, in his way. He’d not been true once. They would be remembered as they were and nothing more—someone who’d corrupt her visage of love towards community.
His abduction into the generator from Aeronauticus’ floor would be a zap of fate, some singularity.
Only one had shared Rory’s truth of disappearance, and they’d shared it with Semblance. Vikki would hold it there and out, only one hope when she’d heard of the boy-child Cal’s death had been conjured. She hoped he’d never come back.
Ruptures would take and break structural constructs of The Foundry quite solid. The Demon was—its selves were—of constant presence, protecting space around, encouraging wholly for Exile to remain as its namesake from Atreya, Chiron, and The Foundry alike.
Each step forward had been made at breakneck pace, apart from those of the lucky few who’d find a moment to connect with that one they were all thinking of. Vikki had to choose carefully. She wasn’t fit to be kind.
“I bet some part of Cal is still lingering there on the portal’s precipice forever. They probably never die.” She’d remarked it to Leopold after Ryker led her to the site.
Everyone there cleared paths. She’d stepped up closer than any would after her briefest and oddest greeting to Leopold alone, climbing the gantry, shrinking herself by juxtaposition to onlookers below the reticular swirling of hardened death-force made by Galleleus’ rings. Nobody else seemed to matter for Vikki. What she’d screamed towards it was heard by none but Ryker, who’d followed closer than any other in his constantly ignored protestations.
“I hope you fucking suffer for all of eternity for what you did to me—you rotten cunt!” Is what she screamed towards the portal.
Later she’d been laughing with Ryker and Leopold despite their enflamed stress responses and the screeching of the generator behind her. Also ignoring another hapless person she’d not recognized, but knew a liar, being sucked into that portal Vikki believed herself to personally understand by proofs of her displayed mood.
She’d finally just told Leopold what was on her mind.
“Give it some juice, dude! It’ll be fine!”
He’d looked at her puzzled.
“Give everything you’ve got, my boy!”
People nearby were feeling rejected by the hopes they might again know Echo Béleaph seeming to have passed, while noticing themself pleased she wouldn’t be around, at least, not how she’d been before. What they had was different, and it was clearly, strangely better and worse but yet unquantifiable.
Some flash of seeing—witnessed—portrayed in Lepold’s facial expressions—betraying wholesale his support of her rightness—bore hatred into Vikki’s heart.
“Leopold! Stop being a big pussy because your daddy died! Flood this bitch with all the power we have—right now!”
Ryker exhaled with a sorrowful groan. Some echoes of laughter emerged through the interested few who’d lingered around Vikki’s clearly intentioned return to the control center, of their scientific-study operation, from her jonesing for a curse-throwing.
Leopold saw something others didn’t. She’d been like this a long time when unmasked. He’d always abided that kind of talk. Never before had it been so brutally extreme though, or pointed, or cruel, some change had been made. It was but it wasn’t Echo Béleaph. He was okay with that.
He’d gone slowly at first. People didn’t believe him trying.
“Thank you!” Vikki shouted as she began walking away, bearing another tear in eardrums, towards becoming forceful audience of some spacetime-breaking force trying to allow itself set-loose.
Each pulse of leverage onto the slider assigned for their foundational generator’s feed into Galleleus had been sign-bearer of the unexpected. They’d been letting it down. Galleleus needed more with what happened to it. Vikki was right. The portal could be stable with more power—they could all be safe.
Leopold gave it everything he had.
Mistakes were something which happened at The Foundry. That one would be great. Leopold had gone to be with silence.
Their generator was stable, but all the change it became in its new state would prove Areonauticus off-limits. They’d found that out too late. Vikki hadn’t known. She thought they’d all be fine—she only believed that it led to something bright of heart.
Many had gone, and again it struck her how things worked; why it was she’d been so stricken through all visages to fail, some difference in the way things were to how she’d think them.
Every making Echo hoped for was absent upon resulting of intention acted upon. Each belief she’d make some change only changed herself. That was a boon but a curse. To know she’d made some good would go unseen for that woman left—the one who’d gone—Vikki found that tragic.
Echo of The Foundry was who she’d been, who she still was, almost, then everything shifted. Vikki had been made to find such reality beyond anything of her previous visage, their past leader of self, and all they’d taken with them in complete lack of clarity to their grave.
Echo of Ecatosh was a goddess of etheric vantage who knew time better than most. That was her soul. She’d felt timings and clockworks from the inside out. Spacetime was her fabric to weave. It would challenge and lead her towards living many lifetimes beyond that of base-human capability.
Echoes would try to understand what or who they were, and how it was they knew that, but most importantly—why it was they felt so deeply.
They’d learn. Every one of them, their marks known completely throughout all of space. Every last visage to feel the uncovered notion in their bones, their heart, their aura, and repeat it in their entire field of consciousness, throughout every reflection of existence; a mind’s greatest truth, their fear’s boldest mantra, some heaven’s brightest lights of hope, and her hell’s hottest furnaces of fact.
Time throws fire.
