Compassionate, caring,
sensitive, and nurturing
There was no sensation of motion.
No acceleration. No passage. No sense of arrival.
The universe simply opened.
Isis felt it before she saw it—the way one recognizes a memory before recalling its details. A deep loosening spread through her awareness, as if something ancient had exhaled. The darkness ahead of them did not retreat; it unfolded, resolving itself into structure, then into light.
Stars did not ignite.
They condensed.
Threads of radiance braided themselves out of nothingness, coalescing into spirals that rotated with deliberate slowness. Vast clouds cooled and collapsed under their own inevitability. Time did not begin here—it organized itself.
Isis did not count the years. She did not need to.
She watched galaxies learn how to exist.
Great lights bloomed and died, seeding the void with heavier elements. New stars formed from the remnants of the old. Planets accreted patiently, sculpted by gravity and chance. Some were torn apart before they could cool. Others endured.
This was not spectacle.
It was remembrance.
Oceans condensed. Continents fractured. Atmospheres thickened, thinned, poisoned themselves, and recovered. Chemistry flirted with order, retreated, then tried again—until one improbable configuration held.
Life did not arrive triumphantly.
It crept.
Single-celled persistence spread across warm shallows. Complexity followed hesitation, then audacity. Extinction swept clean what failed, and innovation filled the vacuum again and again.
When intelligence finally stirred, Isis smiled.
Not because it was new.
But because it was familiar.
Beside her, Jim said nothing. He understood instinctively that this was not his moment to explain. Genie held the field in flawless stasis. Idiot mapped, recalculated, and discarded entire universes of lethal branches each second. Neither intruded.
Billions of years passed outside the field. Inside, Isis felt only the quiet satisfaction of a truth long known and rarely witnessed so clearly.
At last, she turned to Jim.
“You were right,” she said softly. “Time does not need to be conquered.”
“No,” he replied. “Only entered at the right angle.”
She took his hand—not as a queen, not as a goddess, but as something older.
A mother who remembered how worlds were made.
“You are going to show the children this as well,” Isis said. “They must come to us. They are fully grown now—not as you last saw them.”
The children aboard the Pegasus were not yet aware of Qblh’s presence, and Isis intended to keep it that way. She did not wish her people to know he had rescued her. Jim understood and did not interfere.
“Stay here,” she commanded gently. “My watcher will monitor you. Be good.”
She placed a crystal on the table. “I hope you don’t mind, my love.”
Jim minded—but diplomacy had its season. He was eager to see Xiang again, and curious how much like her mother Xuang had become. Once mature, their kind aged slowly. Isis and Aphrodite could still pass for twins; John and Jim likewise.
Within minutes he heard their approach.
Isis had not yet told the children he was present. Jim caught her voice outside the chamber, instructing them to wait. When she returned, her smile carried unmistakable satisfaction.
“Are you ready to see how your son has grown?”
She dressed Jim to her taste and took him by the hand.
“Guess who brought Genie back to us?”
“Father!”
They rushed him at once. Jim blushed despite himself and seated them beside him. Isis watched from across the room—not merely the reunion, but what it revealed.
“Your father is taking us back to Artemis,” she said evenly. “And then he will leave again.”
Predictably, Xiang reacted first. “Take me with you.”
“Not yet,” Jim replied.
Isis smiled. She knew better.
Xiang was no longer a child. Jim did not yet know what his son had endured on Earth, but a thousand years of human history had already shaped him under Isis’s guidance. Xuang’s education had been no less formidable.
“I’ve waited all this time to experience Merkabah travel,” Xiang said. “I understand the theory. I only lack practice. You and Grandfather have the only working units.”
“You are meant to build your own,” Jim said.
“Or make another arrangement,” Xiang replied carefully.
Jim raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”
“Never mind, Father. I will return to Artemis as Mother wishes.”
“Your mother tells me you were… successful in China.”
It was in this context that Jim studied Xuang more closely.
“Dragon Lady,” he said at last. “You are the spitting image of your mother. How did you maintain such a low profile? Genie’s records list you both as brothers.”
Xuang met his gaze without hesitation.
“We governed through our sons,” she replied. “They served as field ministers—visible, trusted, and expendable when necessary. Each was paired with an officer of our own race to ensure continuity. When I circulated among the people, it was simpler to do so as a man.”
She paused, considering how much truth required explanation.
“Among those cultures, physical strength commanded loyalty. I could not allow them to believe a woman possessed greater strength than any man—they would have collapsed into resentment rather than obedience. My strength exceeded that of twenty men. It inspired my armies. They sought to emulate it.”
Her voice remained level.
“At times, authority required brutality. I shredded opponents publicly to establish finality. No challenger survived twice. As long as they believed I was male, no one sought my favor, nor questioned my right to rule. When it served my purposes, I shed the disguise—enticing certain powerful men to their doom to secure children or political advantage.”
“I conceded territory to my brother only because Mother required balance. Otherwise, my holdings would have dwarfed his. We ruled as equals, so I honored that constraint.”
Jim shook his head slightly. “Do not apologize. Your father has acquired precisely zero territory. Were it left to him alone, Venetia would dissolve into anarchy.”
Xuang glanced at Isis.
Her mother’s smile confirmed everything.
Xiang nodded. “If that is what one calls it. The Yellow Valley prospered. I was respected as their Yellow Emperor. Xuang ruled very well. Her methods differed.”
Xuang smiled faintly. “Your reign was eased by the foundations I laid.”
“You ruled first because you are a she,” Xiang snapped, “and Mother trusts your kind more than mine.”
Isis intervened at once. “Enough. You are both to be commended. Xiang coordinated the dragon while searching for a way home. Xuang stabilized rule when there was none. Each of you carried what the other could not.”
Jim frowned. “Marooned?”
“Yes,” Xiang said quietly. “We were cast through a wormhole without the means to return. Mother did what she could. We need you.”
He hesitated. “I even devised a solution. All I require is a Merkabah unit. I can program Genie myself.”
Jim smiled. “Propose it to Genie. It will correct your mistakes. If any.”
“And if it does not?”
“We will see.”
It was impossible to separate their rule from the presence of the Pegasus.
To the people of the Yellow Valley, it was not a vessel. It was a dragon—ancient, sentient, and terrifyingly precise. When it descended, its passage scarred the sky with white vapor trails that lingered like celestial script. When it rose, the sound alone could still armies.
Fire, when it came, was exact.
Enemies were not conquered so much as removed. Villages vanished in flashes of light bright enough to etch themselves into memory. The dragon did not rage. It corrected.
Xiang understood restraint. The Pegasus appeared rarely. Its absence was as powerful as its presence.
Xuang used it differently. She allowed it to hover over fields, trace coastlines, rise silently at dusk. The people learned to associate its shadow not with destruction, but with continuity.
Together, the twins built a civilization that absorbed catastrophe rather than denying it.
In the west, memory of these upheavals hardened into a different tradition.
Along the rivers of Sumer and beyond, stories persisted of a singular flood—one that erased cities, reordered bloodlines, and left behind a chosen remnant. Whether this catastrophe was born of rain, river, or sea was never agreed upon. Some later scholars would speculate that the sudden filling of the Black Sea basin—long after the first great oceanic devastation—provided the physical basis for these accounts. To those who survived, distinctions of mechanism mattered little. The world had drowned, and then it had not.
Xiang and Xuang did not contradict such stories. They allowed them to stand.
Myth, once established, proved more durable than fact.
Xuang’s own methods found precedent closer to home. Long before historians would struggle to reconcile record with image, rulers such as Hatshepsut adopted male regalia, titles, and iconography to govern cultures unprepared to accept female authority in its naked form. Power, Xuang understood, was not diminished by disguise—it was preserved by it.
Long after the great Indian Ocean devastation, waters surged northward into a low inland basin. Forests drowned. Settlements vanished. To those who survived, the world had ended again.
Xiang and Xuang guided the displaced inland. Trade routes shifted. Memory hardened into myth.
Xiang turned inward. Their greatest weakness was biological. Their children could not be safely borne by human women. Again and again he searched for a solution—compounds, sequences, antibodies.
He failed.
But his work laid foundations that would echo through medicine and chemistry for millennia.
Their empire quietly rivaled the western project shaped by Semiramis and her allies. Trade flowed. Knowledge spread. Symbols differed. The impulse was the same.
When the twins withdrew, there was no collapse. The dragon vanished. Systems held.
Only aboard the Pegasus could the truth be spoken.
“Dragon Lady,” Jim said again, smiling at Xuang.
She met his gaze without apology.
Jim looked to Isis. She smiled with unmistakable pride.
“Your mother wishes my presence to remain secret,” Jim said. “Is that understood?”
“Understood,” they answered together.
Xiang glared at his sister.
“Don’t be angry,” Xuang said. “Mother is equally irritating.”
Xiang laughed despite himself.
