Time Throws Fire | Volume Two | Chapter Twelve
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 | ELEVEN |
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 TWELVE
“I’ve felt this before.”
Poe wasn’t scrambling force at Vikki’s repetitions. They hadn’t understood. There’d been no time to count losses. There was not chance for sleep.
Kaleidoscopic timelines were a vision to the knowing heart of Vikki Blieth.
They’d all be false. Her choice would still matter. Something deep within each was a gem. Every chance to grab was an axe of change. She’d drop them all when that bell rang true and pure, however far that pushed her body, no matter where it had her seeking, cantilevering wouldn’t be shirked from, strapping-in beforehand some call to realize again herself to form of flight, in taking with Silence had been the choice of a wisest woman within.
Vikki and Poe had been eating, then watched a holo-drama from Atreya which proved some menace of peace. Each word spoken was course and of explanation beyond the realms of believability in plausible speech.
“It’s like they’re not even half-real people, dude.” Vikki couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t the best to watch a show with.
Talking about Leopold wasn’t forbidden, simply avoided. To get that call then see Poe react with nothing but confusion set Vikki into a state. She’d known what to do. She knew how to act. Silence would be hers to fly, with or without an intelligence. Vikki wouldn’t speak of him either.
Nobody knew what to do without Leopold. To lose him wasn’t something anyone had allowed their minds to consider. There wasn’t some replacement ready to fill any of the thousand-fold tasks he’d subsumed by purest competence and the recognition thereof. That’s why Vikki would forgive whoever was at the helm for not disabling Monarch outright upon its exit from the hangar. Nothing was flying it, and something strange and familiar felt as if on the air—space around odd.
It was everywhere, whatever it was, and Monarch had blended straight to nether.
Silence knew space better than most. Hatchet joined Vikki right off and informed her its presence wasn’t an option—that she’d be glad for it.
Yars was crafting the bugger to create havoc unseen, able to access anything. He knew The Foundry to be infected by corruption and trusted no one fully. Until Vikki got into Silence, and because she clearly felt what it had.
Hatchet told him of their coming. That woman-demon returned through means its intelligence platform was working to decode—enlisting every raw process it could for efficiency bought corruptly. Each device in The Foundry was processing beyond means the people who used them would be able to detect.
He’d only left out Leopold’s processing-latent tools at Hatchet’s instruction, previously, knowing he would’ve detected their usage of his technology immediately.
Think of where you want to go and I’ll take you there.
Hatchet’s voice was soft, sweet, unlike Yars in every way but somehow of the man’s spirit, androgynous, beautiful, and within her mind entirely.
“Where are they coming? Can you sense a gathering point?” Vikki demanded inside the auto-rotating hardshell while carving a crater into the gravity well of Chiron.
She’d felt herself in its storms, and more than ever that moment. Some change in the way Chiron spoke to her was proving a boon to the spirit of a woman reborn. The thought came then—before Silence’s hull began to crinkle and wither to dust—Hatchet heard it too and took them into darkness directly-out from the topside of Exile’s behemoth girth.
Tell me why.
Vikki liked Hatchet immediately. Those were the kinds of questions she’d need right after acting from her heart so boldly, demands to know. Her words of response would tell the tale.
“She’s coming. Something is different.”
How do you know?
“I dreamt it, Hatchet. She’s not the same. She was never who we thought.”
It won’t be here.
Silence folded into and out of darkness itself; blithering squalls of nearest-instantaneous dissolution and reformation across spacetime its bounty.
Someone wants to talk with you, Echo.
Vikki gritted her teeth. She’d told people what to call her. Everyone abided for the change they saw was profound and recognized some worth it borne into resolving use of a disparate qualifier in personhood-nomenclature. For Hatchet to not was strange. It felt a sign towards her heart of who might speak.
‘You’re still you, honey. Inside. Remember that.”
Steel had broken at the sound of her old voice received so clearly within.
Echo of The Foundry saw what Vikki needed to hear. They were inside their systems and had been since she’d been plugged in upon near-death, and Vikki was aware, still, she’d not thought they would ever speak or be of such personhood. To know how they might utilize that own grift of wording against her was a pleasure.
Alright Vikki Blieth—it’s coalescing how it did before—right where they came last time—where Monarch took your lower half clean off.
Hatchet had a choir inform its words and Vikki would appreciate that. She’d felt her furnace of flame igniting. That queue had proven to be some sign. Her heart was a beacon and what Yars did on Hatchet’s behalf was graft a plan their own.
War Cry launched from The Foundry’s hangar and everything was some song inside Vikki’s spirit. She’d felt at home despite whatever challenge lie ahead. She knew herself supported by an angel.
Poe Halroth was all anyone here would ever need to lead by her pointing of rightness. She was a warrior priestess of that fire Vikki long realized her own. That same she’d mistaken once in another. The kind she’d use to snuff out their stench in Boreál.
Burgeoning preeminence of a second return was as the first except for excitement—the foolishness Echo had—that need she’d carried forth to be protected and supported but never find achieved until beyond her death. Vikki would see the devil to bend or break. She would mush Rory into some visage of the truth they were.
Love was everything. Love was everywhere.
Rory Tyrell was a nobody.
Frustration turned to exultation, then joy, as War Cry’s extended timetable of reaching that precipice for arrival in system so near The Foundry by wholistic scale, proving a journey, to arrive in nearness beside manifested Silence at last.
Poe couldn’t believe it when Hyde in Carver, and Ryker in Venom, came loose from within the hangar as well. They’d cover the ground quickly to catch up.
Positions taken would hold that precipice of arrival by coverage. Visuals proved of lightning-form in balled whiteness bore into vacuum. They were shaking spacetime by Hatchet’s estimation. Vikki couldn’t close her eyes without seeing blatant color streams clearly directed from their source, perceivable in whichever direction her mind-blank perception was facing, pouring over and past, moving through and around.
Scopes would be more trained upon Chiron for Silence in the era to come, far beyond what any other warcraft’s data would prove their pilot willing to muster into strength by its lensing.
Vikki wanted another dip.
She took it in a pair of flashes through time-space into Chrion’s hold and back to effortless freedom, something speaking within: nothing but jealousy had ever struck her echo when witnessing Silence.
To have glimpse of them above the Aeronauticus’ Dome upon first return to The Foundry had felt too sweet and she now understood. Silence was a home in her future now found.
She’d make it right quickly.
“Give me Leopold, Hatchet, I know you’ve got him.”
Aye-aye, maam, it’s been my pleasure. I’m always around.
Dampness would grace the inner-connection points between Vikki’s visor and her cheeks. There was simply too much love and she hadn’t known it ever hers to find. They were all supporting her. Hatchet was helping. It tapped into the cosmic intelligence steering her but more cleanly. Things would be good again and that was known.
She could feel it in her heart.
‘Honey, I love you. I’m so glad this isn’t creeping you out.’ Leopold’s voice rang true-to-conscious remembrance as Vikki sent text to Ryker and Hyde for hurrying themselves.
‘I need somebody to talk to. It’s weird here.’ Leopold’s stowed consciousness streamed.
Rory was close, and scopes made it clearest that moment of reconnection would be the same, a visceral shredding of self into form of reality. Echo knew what to say to her friend.
“I know. I remember. Get over it, dude, we’ll make it better in there.”
‘Yeah, I know hon. You—uh—Echo is already working on that. Hatchet too.’
“It seems pretty cool, like pretty cool dude. How far back are you from?”
Great pause had been levied—punishment—before Leopold’s voice gave her the relief she was seeking.
‘That morning, hon. I was working on the generator. I’m not an idiot.’
Nether blended to spacetime-proper, a materialization of a place unseen, unwitnessed, etheric-inverse of density unknowable by human form. Olmec’s return in that place of before had been some fraud. The game they’d run on Satan within their home proving them to remake each time how they’d wish, more ability for renewing life than any, a goddess of petulance and rebirth, death and dismembering of soul to body, Rory Tyrell simply chose to show how they wished.
They’d become in the backrooms of Exile, every faux form of electric becoming vanishing back to that place of their soulful home. Rory was they—he—it—she—whatever one might chose to bestow by right of that power they’d claim theirs by sighting; all power.
She would take The Empress first.
