Author's note: This story concludes the first arc for the Aeona character, who has appeared throughout the Compendium 2020 project. This story can be read on its own, but for the full experience and to find out what brought Aeona to this point, her previous stories are linked below.
Now read on – it's time.
Aeona: The Daughter of Time
Compendium 2020 – Story 41
By Andrew Hawnt
Her ship, Winnifred, may have looked like a junkyard hammered together in the vague semblance of an old train, but it had taken Aeona Gardinier further than she had ever been before in time or space.
The end of time was ugly. With the multiverse contorting in a state of astonishing decay around the ship, the sight of the junk ship was only marginally less unlikely than the massive iron clock face that hung in the dying space before it. The structure was easily a hundred times the size of Winnifred, and loomed before Aeona's tiny ship as though it would consume her.
The gigantic clock construct wasn't the most ominous thing at the end of time, though. That honour fell to the ring of small ships surrounding it. Dozens of them. All of them identical to Aeona's unique jumble of metal and reclaimed tech that she called her home.
Sat on her velvet-covered armchair, an ancient Xbox controller in her hands and her top hat leaning at an even more jaunty angle than usual, Aeona moved around the holographic image that filled the golden picture frame she had modified into a viewscreen. She moved the view from the central clock to the multiple copies of Winnifred and back again.
“Arse,” she said to the empty room. “Arsing arses.”
She opened a channel. “Okay, Aeona here. Time travel, mischief and top hats a speciality,. You've got me curious now. Can we cut straight to the bad guy speech? I've got a Friends box set I haven't watched in ages and I'd like to get back to it. Looking at your big space clock, I'm guessing you're more of a Seinfeld or Frasier person, Am I right?”
A new voice boomed through Winnifred's bridge in response. “Hello. Shut up.”
Aeona was taken back by this. “Oi, rude,” she said. “Go on, why did you lure me here, and why did you try to have me killed?”
“Come aboard,” said the voice.
“The signal that brought me across time to this horrible moment had my DNA coded into it. I know there's an older version of me in that great big daft clock. Why should I?”
“Because if you don't, then nothing will ever have existed. The Multiverse is dying. It's being consumed, Aeona, and I can't save it alone.”
Aeona said nothing else. She cut the link, set Winnifred on a course for the clock's docking bay (situated in the '6', according to her scan), took her gauntlet off the charge station and donned a jacket that was an even louder red than her hair.
The voice was indeed her own, and she had heard the secret in its tone. The secret she always hid from the universe.
She was scared.
*
Smoke hung in the air, giving the core of the massive station a ghostly fog that only amplified the orbs of light that span around the hunched figure on the raised iron platform at its heart.
Aeona rushed in and skidded to a halt, taking in the situation before going any further.
The circular heart of the clock ship seemed to be hollow apart from the sturdy platform of wrought iron and heavy bolts. An iron staircase twisted down from it, the base of it invisible amid the thick air. The orbs that span, swam, dived and crackled around the platform were connected by arcing energy of myriad colours, breathtaking to behold but utterly lethal.
Whenever the orbs grew too close, the energies between them would intensify. The aged, twisted woman on the platform raised her hands and sent waves of force at the huge orbs, pushing them apart. The force manifested as ribbons of pink and blue light. She looked like a powerful witch casting spells to keep danger at bay, but Aeona knew she wasn't using magic.
She was using her own life force.
Aeona ran to the staircase and thundered up to the platform's square expanse.
“Stay back!” the old woman screamed. “If you get too close to me, the orbs will converge on us and all hope will be gone.”
Aeona remained where she was, gazing in wonder at the person she could one day become. The older Aeona wore dark trousers and sturdy boots, her torso wrapped in a dark red tunic. The white hair that hung in long waves from her head still carried streaks of Aeona's red. She ignored Aeona, instead focusing on using her own existence to hold back the orbs.
“You're literally holding back the death of the Multiverse with your bare hands,” Aeona said in awe. “That's very me. What can I do to help?”
“You must die,” said her future self. “The wave that is tearing existence apart originated with you. You, Aeona Gardinier, brought about a cataclysm that shook everything to its core. Universes began to fold in on themselves. Worlds vanished and had never existed. Infinite lives were erased. All I could do was come here, to the final moments, and hold back the tides. Nobody else existed who could do it.”
She fought back more orbs, a red and a blue, the two strange bodies raging with primal lightning as she did so. The effort sent her to her knees, and she cried out in pain.
“My grip is failing!” she bellowed over the deafening time storm around her.
“Then let me help! Surely there is something I can do!”
“It's too dangerous! No!”
But as was her character, Aeona paid the warning no heed and ran to the centre of the platform. One of the orbs hurtled right at her, its light blazing brighter, and it struck her with an onslaught of its strange temporal lightning. She screamed, but was much stronger than her aged self, and stood again. She fumbled with her gauntlet, not sure if its temporal or spatial effects would work amongst this Hell, but she activated it anyway. A cog shaped portal opened, and she aimed it between two of the orbs. As she did, she cast more portals, each of them erupting into life between the crackling spheres. The lightning, time and space itself, raged through the portals, in turn emerging from them at the wrong points. The effect was that the storm around her seemingly ancient future self redirected its power against itself, creating a strange, ethereal stalemate.
The attacks ceased, and the older Aeona collapsed to the cold iron platform, gasping, her clothes smouldering. She stared at her hands as wisps of her essence danced away.
“It won't last. The portals will degrade with so much force going through them. The only way,” she fought for breath, “The only way this can be corrected, is with your, our, death.”
Aeona helped the old lady upright into a sitting position, and the two of them sat, staring at the impossible circuit that Aeona had created over them.
“Tell me how I started this,” Aeona said, all trace of her usual bluster gone. There was no point being quirky when you were talking to yourself. “Then I can stop it without anyone else dying.”
“You destroyed the Eight, our council, our founders. Their absence from the cosmos allowed a rift to open up, and realities started falling through bit until it started to literally ingest all that exists in time and space.”
Aeona was taken aback at the mention of the liars and criminals she had destroyed. It had been three misadventures ago, or was it four? She couldn't remember.
“I've done so many things, how come stopping the Eight has caused all of this?”
“The death of the Eight was felt throughout reality, as was your experience when those criminals tried to pull the time out of you, or when you helped that man break the time loop his ship was caught in. Actions have their consequences, Aeona.”
Aeona looked around the vastness of the clock station's empty space. “What is this, anyway?”
“I built it from each version of Winnifred that I could find. As realities and times collided here at the end of everything, I salvaged the Winnifreds and made a focal point where I could hold back the final moments.”
Aeona nodded upwards. “And what about those floating orb things?”
The older Aeona sighed. “They are the amassed energies of entire universes, eager to become dominant over one another, but if any of them does, then all will collapse in on itself and nothing, literally nothing, will be left.”
Aeona thought about this for a moment, then stared herself in the eyes. “But how does little old me – no offence – physically hold back time with her life force? I know I have a link to time, the Chronodream, in my DNA, but I'm just a girl in a funny hat who goes around annoying baddies. What you're doing is pretty much like you're a god.”
Her older self returned the gaze, although the eyes were sadder and wetter. “All gods are born somewhere and somehow, Aeona Gardinier. I had to hold back the wake of time and send for you to be killed. The ripple would take me too, but the balance would be restored. Your parentage, your truth, my dear, is that you were born of time itself.”
Aeona stared on, desperate to shout out but knowing that this was the truth. Her parents had carried her abilities, but they had never held them to the same extent. “Mum and dad, back at the palace, they were always so kind, so supportive. I can't imagine what they've thought of me since I've been running around the universe like a kid with a shiny toy. And now my own self tells me that they weren't my parents. What am I, then?”
The wet eyes of her older self said it all. Some words were better left unsaid.
Aeona straightened her top hat. “This is really real, isn't it? You mean that, this, right here and right now, is what I was born for?”
Her aged visage nodded sagely. “Destiny seldom arrives when expected.”
Aeona stood, gazing at the expanse of the base. “I'll do it. I have to. So what do I need -”
Her words were cut off by a terrible violence. A column of lightning, blue and green in hue, struck the aged Aeona through the chest. The blast tore through her, lifting her body into the air over the platform as other colours of lightning burst from nothing and attacked her. As she was dragged into the air, the glowing spheres broke free of their temporal loop, the cog portals disintegrating as each orb broke free of their grasp.
Aeona screamed as she watched herself die. Her future self was immolated by the raging energies, the frail form vanishing into ashes as those colliding universes battled against one another anew. As the body vanished, a shockwave of colour burst forth, passing through Aeona and knocking her onto her back.
The wave told her everything. In the moment between it striking her and her stunned body hitting the iron floor of the platform, the energies that had been hidden in her ancient counterpart shared their knowledge with her.
She saw her childhood again. And another childhood. And another. Memories that were hers mixed with those of others, and as those memories flashed through young lives, she saw that each and every one of those different people eventually put on a top hat and a time gauntlet and jumped through cog shaped portals to adventure.
Aeona stepped to the centre of the platform, now the only version of herself there. “I see it now,” she said to the warring power over her. “The universes are dying, and I am the last Aeona that exists. The souls, the memories of all of those other versions of me are converging here as well. If only they hadn't been swallowed by entropy, I could have connected with them across realities from this nexus and realigned them. They're gone, so..”
She slumped to her knees, tears filling her eyes as she watched the orbs becoming more and more powerful. Thunderous growls grew all around her, as though those other universes were laughing at her.
“...you win,” she said sadly.
Those impossibly dense spheres of cosmic energy converged on the daughter of time, the one known as Aeona Gardinier, and they consumed her just as they had consumed her future self.
Within the temporal conflagration, Aeona's essence saw that the aged version of herself had not been her herself, but from one dimension over. Her, but not. Aeona's soul saw that the death she had witnessed was not a fixed point in time, Not for her.
The Chronodream yawned open before her, welcoming her. Time reeled in horror as it sensed the agony of its daughter.
The others cannot come to help you as they did with the Eight, boomed the sensation of voice that Time communicated with. They are gone. Yet you are not. Aeona, my true daughter, there is a way.
The Chronodream took hold of Aeona's essence before it was completely lost. She felt the eddying waves of power from those raging spheres mix with the sheer fury of time itself.
You are not one, Aeona, you are all, said the Chronodream.
Aeona's mind called the waves of time into the shape of a cog, and that huge, glowing mechanism span in every direction and through every moment the Chronodream had touched. Aeona bypassed the universes, bypassed the dead realities, and through her portal was able to simultaneously exist in all times and places as herself for one single moment.
In that moment, all versions of Aeona, which in some ways were all the same Aeona, called forth a cog portal.
The furious, terrifying spheres broke away from their circuit, pulled back through time to their points of origin. Their forms exploded into form and shape and being as they collided with their past selves in a symphony of twisted moments. Matter and void erupted forth from the ruptured spheres, and with impossible speed they rampaged across the nothing to rebuild all that had been.
Lost in this time storm, Aeona felt the wounds she had torn in time being repaired as though stitched shut by the cosmos itself. They just needed that flash, that single moment of existence. Of belonging. Of ultimate destiny.
Aeona felt a scream burst forth from her as her physical form returned. She landed on the platform hard. The rupture in the Chronodream seemed to scream, and then was sealed.
Silence arrived like a punch. Sudden and shocking.
Aeona trembled, weeping, her mind in utter chaos thanks to the sheer amount of knowledge it had to keep.
Deep in the innards of the station, came the sound of clockwork moving again. The structure struck twelve with a thunderous sound.
Aeona smiled, rose and danced to the rhythm that pulsed through her and the universe itself.
As the final gong sounded, Aeona grabbed her fallen top hat and popped it back on. She sighed with relief and newfound optimism.
“Thank you,” she whispered to the Chronodream.
© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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About Compendium 2020:
Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt that consists of 52 original short stories, flash fiction stories and vignettes given away for FREE in 2020. Featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror and more, this began as a personal quest and due to the weirdness of 2020 has become an ambition to provide free distractions for anyone who needs them.
About Andrew Hawnt:
Andrew is based in Nottingham, England. Known for his music journalism career, comics writing and film critique work, Andrew is a prolific writer and is the author of a growing stack of books, including the cult hit VHS Ate My Brain. He made the movies The Demon And I and The Demon And I: Birthrite completely in lockdown with cast members filming their scenes remotely, and new films are coming.
Andrew is also the creator and presenter of the YouTube shows Planet Hex, Turn One Shock and the VHS Ate My Brain series as well as the video versions of the Compendium stories.
Follow Andrew: YouTube Mixcloud Facebook Instagram Twitter
© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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