COMPENDIUM 2020 - STORY 13: AEONA - THE HEART OF TIME

AEONA

THE HEART OF TIME

Compendium 2020 – Story 13

By Andrew Hawnt

Author's note: This story follows on from story number 7, Aeona – The Wake of Time. You don't need to read it in order to enjoy this one, but it may be fun to get up to speed first.

A flash of light changed everything.

She tried to scream, tried to fight against the force pulling her way from the journey she was halfway through. Blazing agony erupted through her body and mind as the unnatural energies tugged at her.

Aeona, time traveller, adventurer, eccentric redhead, was being denied the one thing she valued most. Her freedom.

As she was dragged through eddying waves of liquid time amidst the howling madness of the vortex known as the Chronodream, she screamed not in fear but in rage.

Whoever was responsible for this would pay dearly.

The blur of images, timelines and infinite lives came to a shuddering halt as her body was torn from the vortex and dumped heavily on a cold surface. Despite the pain in her limbs and the chaos in her head as her brain caught up with the effects of temporal displacement, Aeona stood. Somewhere in her hazy consciousness, she was aware that the surface she stood on wasn't flat. It was concave. She reached out in a flail, her limbs not quite in this period yet, and touched a rounded surface around her.

A sphere. She shook the haze away from her senses a bit and tried to fathom where she had wound up. The sphere was alive with crackles of light that arced against her body and fizzed away against the sphere's inner wall. Aeona pulled her brass-rimmed goggles from her eyes and settled them over the brim of her chestnut coloured top hat. Her eyes stung, but she focussed them on whatever she could see beyond the sphere.

Her vision was blurred through it, but she could make out four figures in dark clothes at upright terminals, and one stood closer, without a terminal. That one reached out to touch the exterior of the sphere as though it was the hutch of a small, furry creature.

“You ain't caging me, buster,” she said to the shape outside the sphere. She concentrated, trying to generate a portal. Cog-shaped lights danced before here and then winked out. “Buggery bollocks,” Aeona grumbled. Her arrival here had confused the energies flowing through her that allowed her to create her doorways. She sighed, dropped to the base of the sphere and sat cross-legged with her arms folded like an angry child, staring intently at the figure that had imprisoned her.

She poked her tongue out. Someone was going to get a kicking.

*

“We have her, Caretaker. The Chronosphere is stable.”

Gria's voice echoed in the expanse of the church. The glow from the machinery surrounding the sphere was powerful and would have illuminated the forgotten place of worship on its own, but the halo of white that was growing more intense around the sphere itself was like a young sun. Within it, they could see her. Sitting.

“What's she doing?” Gria asked.

The Caretaker straightened the brass monocle he wore and grinned at his treasure. “Seething, most likely. She is working out how to get out of there and make us pay for our crimes.”

The four operators around the machine glanced amongst themselves, then all eyes fell on Gria. The other three were too afraid to speak up in the presence of the Caretaker, but he did favour the grey-skinned young Tekarian scientist. No doubt it was something to do with the way her slim frame filled her dark uniform. There was a twinkle in his monocled eye when he was around her.

“You've met her before?” she asked.

The Caretaker caressed the sphere. “Several times in battle but never face to face. In my days as a mercenary, I was hired as part of various groups tasked with killing her. She's a pest, and not just because she never shuts up.”

He moved to Gria's terminal, glowing atop a fold-out pedestal before her, and nodded for her to step aside. He swiftly manipulated the symbols that danced across the screen “But this isn't an execution. This... is an extraction.”

Siphon online, came the voice of the terminal,

The scream that rose from inside the sphere was every bit as loud as the roar from the machinery that surrounded it.

*

She felt like she was being turned inside out, over and over again. The energies that attacked her permeated every fibre of her being, scraping at her with incredible ferocity. Nausea rolled in her belly while light that burned like solar flares raged against her body. The force of this new attack lifted her off her feet. She hung in the centre of the orb and was lashed from all sides by wave upon wave of burning energy. Aeona could feel it moving through her, seeking out the hidden tendrils of time and space that had been woven through her over the course of centuries. The force found those tendrils and was trying to scrape them off her. Whatever her captors were doing, they knew what they were after.

Aeona screamed against the pain to focus her mind. A stream of time energy arced out of her chest and struck the surface of the sphere, shaking it. She reached out and physically grabbed the stream, willing it back into her body.

When the arc had met the surface, the sphere had fluctuated. Excellent. It was good, but it was struggling to deal with the mayhem of time travel weirdness that had coursed through her for so long.

She closed her eyes tight, desperately trying to focus on anything but the pain. If the strange forces that lay within her were stolen, they could be used to rewrite the multiverse.

One second. That's it.

She focussed the mental triggers in her head on moving one second into the future. She moved her hands up, fists tight, fighting against the drag of the sphere. She brought them together and moved them apart as if opening curtains and a cog shaped circle of searing cyan light came into being. She pushed everything the onslaught would allow her to muster into the effort. Thankfully as it was for such a short length of time, the energy she needed would be minimal.

Unfortunately, the effort wouldn't. An act that would ordinarily cause her almost no distress now felt like taking an atomic bomb to the face.

“One bloody second,” she said through gritted teeth. “Now!”

Her body was swallowed by the portal she had created, vanishing and appearing at the same time.

The sphere exploded as the conflicting time energies overloaded it. Aeona braced herself for the fall as the sphere's wall shattered around her. She dropped with it in a rain of jagged shards and unleashed temporal energy. As her sturdy boots found the floor, she cast a cog vortex around her, dragging the rogue time energies back into the endless swirling mass of the space between times. She snapped it shut again, straightened the goggles secured around her top hat, blew strands of her red hair away from her face and grinned.

“Right, hands up if you're the bad guys.”

The four scrawny aliens that were stood behind computer terminals on metallic pedestals stared wide-eyed at her. One of them raised her hand, confused.

“Put your hand down, Gria,” the Caretaker snapped. He looked to Aeona, astounded and furious at the same time. “Hello, Aeona Gardinier.”

Aeona smirked. “Why do you people always greet me with my full name? Does it make you feel taller or something?”

The Caretaker smiled. “We can all be friends here, Aeona. I am the Caretaker. These people are my associates. We wanted to... chat.”

“Well I'm convinced,” Aeona chuckled as she surveyed the huge machine the sphere had been part of. “This looks very... old school. Where are we?”

The Caretaker gestured to his team. They all drew sleek pistols from their uniforms. Aeona ignored them.

“Earth. South Yorkshire. 1842. It's a Wednesday,” the Caretaker sneered.

“Happy hump day!” Aeona chirped. “So. Temporal engines. A chronosphere generator. A stasis cell. You've done pretty well to make it all in this time period. Let me guess, you brought those control stations with you and some parts of this gear across from a couple of other dimensions. Stuck it all together with some old fashioned Sheffield steel and a hell of a lot of reclaimed iron. Looks natty. It fits my aesthetic.”

“Subdue her.”

Beams lanced around her and struck the machine in a burst of sparks. She recognised the smell of the burn as she ducked. Those beams wouldn't kill her, but they would paralyse her for hours. That would be bad. She broke into a run and sprinted for the church doors between the rows of tattered pews. She knew they were following her. Aeona dived at the doors with a heavy kick, splintering the lock and flinging open her gateway to the outside world.

Once outside, Aeona skidded to a halt.

“No,” she whispered, then span back to see the Caretaker and his followers were almost upon her. Their weapons were trained on her forehead. She paid them no heed, instead looking right at the Caretaker. “Why would you do this?”

She turned back to the horror that surrounded the church on all sides. People hung in the air as though they were icy corpses laid on invisible mortuary slabs. Aeona darted back and forth, quickly taking a tally. Thirty-one of them had been captured, the floating fractals of light over their foreheads telling Aeona these innocents had been put into temporal stasis. Their clothing, ages and visible states of health said there had been no discrimination in who these maniacs took.

“These people... let them go right bloody now!”

The Caretaker smiled at the crazy-eyed woman. He looked her up and down mockingly, sneering at her jaunty top hat and the goggles around it, her eccentric outfit of leather and wool and a heavy grey skirt that stopped at the knee. Her black leggings with gold cogs printed on them. The heavy boots. He settled on her pretty features, which were set in a desperate expression.

“They are alive. They are our bargaining chips and also our bounty, Aeona. If you refuse to cooperate, as you clearly seem to be doing, then they would die one at a time until you concede.”

Aeona's face darkened. “You don't threaten innocents when I'm around, lad. You mess with history like this and the future gets even more jumbled up. The lives these people need to live have to play out naturally. Same for everyone. If someone is messed with somewhere in the time stream, the rest of the continuum starts cracking. Judging by your equipment, weapons and overall demeanour, I'd say you lot already know that and you don't really care. Do I get bonus points?”

The Caretaker grinned. “Get back inside the church, Aeona. Now isn't the time for a daring escape or a fashionable comeback. Now is the time to do as we ask, or thirty-one people will very soon run out of life.”

“Considering you're called the Caretaker,” Aeona said bluntly, “you've been pretty careless. These people will surely be seen by others, who will bring others. Boom – instant divergent timeline. Before you know it, big chunks of other time periods start vanishing like matching socks.”

Aeona and the Caretaker stared each other down for a moment.

The Caretaker raised his own weapon and fired at the nearest comatose man hanging in the air before them. Aeona yelled, but there was nothing she could do. The bolt from the Caretaker's pistol hit the fractal over the man's head, and he screamed, violently thrashing in the air as the field holding him in place became a blaze of fire. His scream echoed away as his entire body was reduced to ashes, dropping like grey rain.

“Thirty left, Aeona.”

“Bastard,” Aeona sneered. “Every life lost is another tear in the eye of time. You'll pay for that.”

“Get inside, Aeona. Let us get on with our work. You're the final component.”

“Component?”

“You are the heart of time as far as we're concerned. You've been to times and places that we can't even dream of. Your DNA is coded with time's heartbeat. So much travel through the vortex has turned you into a nexus of all that time can offer. Give us your body and these people will be returned to their places of origin, never to be bothered again.”

“And the man you killed?”

The Caretaker wafted a hand before him. “He didn't matter.”

Aeona's eyes blazed. “Everyone matters. Everyone.”

*

She closed her eyes and listened to the hum of the machine around her. The shattered sphere had been replaced by hastily constructed tubes, pipes and strange black devices that would soon be ravaging her body again. She was held in place by shackles connected to the engine itself. Her hat and goggles were somewhere else. Her waistcoat, filled with secret gadgets, sweets and tools, was draped over a chair, far out of reach. Aeona could see from the construction of the thing and the way these temporal dissidents were operating it that there was an energy loop pulsing through it that, once activated, would be impossible to break. There was also a transmitter linked to its core. What would he need that for?

But she couldn't let those people die.

Even though the Caretaker clearly had no intention of freeing them. Aeona had met more than her fair share of tyrants across the ages she had visited, and this one was little different. Eyes on the prize rather than the journey getting to it.

Aeona was counting on that.

“Begin the broadcast,” said the Caretaker.

“Aye,” Gria nodded and activated a camera drone that rose up out of her terminal and bathed her boss in green light. “The feed is live, Caretaker. We are broadcasting across temporal and dimensional frequencies.”

Of course, Aeona nodded to herself. He wants everyone to watch his conquest. He wants to stake his claim to my death.

“I am the Caretaker,” came the smooth, practised words. “I have done what many have strived for and yet none have achieved. I have captured Aeona Gardinier, the being known to many as the Heart of Time.”

He gestured to the imprisoned woman behind him. “I want you to see. I want this message to be shared amongst the multiverse. I want you all to see who did what you could not. Aeona is alive with the energy of the Chronodream. She isn't just a traveller in time and space. She is time and space itself. She has moved through the madness of the between spaces so much for dozens of lifetimes that her very DNA is one with the vortex. In a moment I will strip that energy from her body and move it into my own. You are witnessing history, my friends. Today is the day Aeona Gardinier will die. And you? You will be given an opportunity. Follow me or be eliminated. Details for contacting me are encoded in this stream. Declare your allegiance.”

He stepped closer to Gria's terminal and the drone followed. Gria stepped aside.

“Now watch as I kill your worst enemy.”

He brought the engine to life. Mechanical rhythms rapidly built within its depths, the feedback loop raising along with it, ebbing and flowing like the heartbeat of dreams. The shock of its grinding, scraping energies burned through Aeona like no pain she had endured across her centuries of life. The process was agony, and she screamed as oceans of perverted time washed through her.

Her vision was replaced by the swirling insanity of the Chronodream. The space between moments. The infinite junction between times, dimensions, realities, minds, dreams, nightmares and all that is, was an will be. She felt the engine pulling at the influence of the Chronodream in her every cell. It sought to pull the secrets free.

Beyond the engine, eyes across several universes watched the heart of time take her final breaths.

Within it, the eddying forces that raged through her had grown around her in a corona of swimming light, and within that light she could feel the ages. Moment upon moment upon moment that made up linear time laid out as it truly was, an ever-present now. All of time and space stretched out in her mind, and at the edges, she could see the machine eating her life force. Soon it would consume all of her.

Aeona let it flow. She let is get closer to killing her. Closer to stripping her bare of the energies that had changed her so much. She let herself be drawn closer to the edge of death. Closer to the veil. Closer and closer, until she was able to commune with the multiverse itself.

Let me move to then and now, she called out to time itself.

Somewhere in the infinite, time nodded.

Take them home. Please.

Time breathed.

Aeona vanished for a split second. Then appeared again, but this time she appeared twice.

Using her intensified connection to the vortex of the Chronodream, she had moved herself both forwards and backwards in time at once, aiming herself at the same moment. For one impossible second, two versions of Aeona existed at the same point in time.

The engine didn't know which to kill. The feedback loop turned on itself.

Aeona, trapped in the heart of the cataclysm, felt euphoria wash over her. The engine exploded, a sphere of chaos erupting from her as time realigned itself. Machinery rained down in a blaze of fire, smoke, sparks and fumes. The chaos swallowed the Caretaker, his eyes locking onto Aeona's as his body was scattered through infinite realities. He didn't scream. He didn't fight it. Aeona could see that he accepted this, that somehow he had always known this would be the way of things. He vanished. His followers were similarly swept away.

Walls exploded outwards, the steeple collapsing into rubble around her. Stained glass shattered and masonry fell as the church was destroyed in its entirety, but that didn't matter.

Aeona knew those innocent people were long gone.

Time was sentimental.

*

“Well, I couldn't just leave you behind here, could I?”

Aeona wiped the sweat off her forehead with her sleeve for about the thousandth time. Two weeks had gone by in a blur after the attempt on her life by the Caretaker. Two weeks in which she had gathered the debris of that horrific engine and repurposed it with tools from the surrounding area. Money, gold and diamonds she had retrieved from stashes throughout the surrounding decades had seen to it that she wouldn't be disturbed by curious parties or the authorities of the time. She had seen to it that this would be left out of the history books.

Two weeks of hard labour had also seen to it that she would no longer need to traverse time and space with nothing but her wits and a top hat.

Aeona grinned, a wrench resting on one shoulder.

Her creation was ugly as sin, looking for all the world like a cross between a steam train, a submarine and an industrial boat, but to her it was beautiful. It was lined with pipes and cables and hunks of machinery. The cabins atop it were furnished with repurposed pews and whatever she could find in the ruins of the church. Its bridge was alive with tech that should not have been in that time period at all, the salvaged terminals of the Caretaker's staff now given a new lease of life.

She dropped the wrench into her toolbox, surveyed her work with a grin and carried the box up the ladder on the side of the monstrosity she had created. Its windows were of a substance she had found a galaxy away, and she rubbed grease off the main door's window as she entered. She set the tools down and hurried over to the iron chair she had fashioned by the control array, its surface furnished in deep red cushions.

Aeona touched the terminals, and her new vehicle, her new home, came to life, powered by her, the heart of time herself. On roaring engines, it rose up from the ruins. A cog-shaped portal came into being before it, the wonders of the vortex visible through the huge doorway.

On board, Aeona pulled her goggles down from the brim of her top hat and placed them over her eyes.

“Chop chop, Winnifred,” she said with glee to her ship. “Let's not be late for whatever's next.”

With a groaning howl, the ship now known as Winnifred hurtled through the cog portal.

The portal vanished.

Somewhere else, somewhere incredible, a woman was laughing at the helm of her new toy, ready for the next destination.

The End

Aeona will return

© Andrew Hawnt 2020

About Compendium 2020:

Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt and consists of 52 weekly stories encompassing science fiction, fantasy and horror. They are a mix of short stories and flash fiction, 100% original and written throughout 2020. Why is he doing this? To keep the words flowing. To keep the ideas coming. To dance in worlds that are his and his alone. To prove that he can.

About Andrew Hawnt:

You can find Andrew on Facebook at facebook.com/andrewhawntauthor and on Twitter and Instagram as @andrewhawnt. Formerly a musician and DJ, Andrew is known for his books, comic book writing, music journalism and more, including fiction in Doctor Who Adventures, the Judge Dredd Megazine and others. Look out for his film work soon.