Ace of Wands
Fire over Fire
The Root of the Power of Fire
Creativity, inspiration,
and new opportunities.
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Chapter Twenty-Three
Extreme Homeomorphism
Here we go back in time,
But as a result,
QBLH will encounters mortal injury.
He will not notice,
As it will slowly infect,
And with time indeterminate,
So is unknown
The time till his death.
The abyss swallowed them whole. The event horizon, a razor's edge, severed consciousness as if plucking strings. A breath, a heartbeat, and Jim gasped awake. He sensed not the sterile void of the ship, but the rough-hewn timbers of a merchant vessel, salt spray stinging his nostrils, the creak of wood a brutal symphony. "We've partially arrived," Idiot’s metallic voice, a chillingly calm counterpoint to the chaos, rasped in his mind.
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Below, the Flying Dutchman was a fever dream of opulence. Venetian silks draped from impossibly high ceilings, the scent of exotic spices and rich, dark wood hung heavy in the air, a stark contrast to the gnawing emptiness in Jim's gut. Idiot, a master illusionist of reality, had woven this haven, maintaining gravitational manifolds that defied physics, harboring antimatter reserves that could unravel stars. Their current charge would have flung Jim back to Cygnus, then Artemis, a phantom in his home time, were it not for the titanic, insidious force that had snagged them. Antiope and Helen, their minds still adrift in the gentle currents of sleep, were oblivious. Only Jim and Idiot, two disparate intelligences, stood on the precipice of true understanding
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"I have sensed some unusual force, Idiot," Jim’s voice was a low growl, laced with a primal fear. "Keep this… this intrusive force unknown from the others. It isn't John, is it?"
"Negative, Jim. John's signature is a crude scar; this is… something else. A power field of immense, unfathomable magnitude, yet utterly alien to my records. It pulses with a temporal urgency, Jim, it *breathes*. I am a machine, Jim. This is… it appears to be a living, sentient entity."
"Sentient?" Jim's breath hitched. A wild, exhilarating terror surged through him. "Then perhaps… perhaps I will find who I seek."
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"And who is that, Jim?" Idiot's query was not mere curiosity, but a stark demand for data.
"You would never grasp it, Idiot."
"Perhaps neither of us truly grasps the scope of this encounter," Idiot countered, its logic a cold comfort. "You seek to sate the gnawing hunger in your soul. I need to comprehend to ensure your survival. The women… they are here to bear witness, Jim. To the unfolding of destiny."
"You said this power source is alive, intelligent," Jim pressed, the salt air suddenly seeming to carry whispers. "Are you receiving… transmissions? Anything you can translate?"
"Affirmative, Jim. However, my very nature as a construct denies me direct communion. I am a conduit, not a participant. But *you*, Jim… are you not also privy to this exchange? I detect a profound resonance. You are, in essence, *communicating* with this entity."
Jim’s mind reeled. He closed his eyes, the rough timber beneath his hand a grounding sensation. "So it is He!" The realization struck him with the force of a celestial hammer. He felt stripped bare, his very consciousness a naked offering before the divine, before Qblh. A profound, almost unbearable embarrassment washed over him, as if he, like Enoch, had been summoned into the very presence of creation, utterly unprepared. The women, he realized with a sudden, desperate clarity, were not ready. Not yet. Their devotion to their queen, their mistress, was too strong. He would have to break something, shatter the very fabric of their reality, to create a paradox that would finally set them free. His link to this unknown force, this god-like intelligence, was a storm of fleeting, shattering connections, each one a searing brand upon his soul. Intense. Brief. Utterly consuming.ns?
"You have been afflicted by me," a searing whisper clawed into Jim’s consciousness, a violation more profound than any physical blow. Isis's psychic assaults, once a storm he could weather with gritted teeth and sheer grit, felt like a mere breeze compared to this new, overwhelming intelligence. It surged through him, an alien tide, drowning his sense of self, reducing him to a trembling, insignificant mote. He felt like an intruder in his own mind, a flea on the back of a god. Even the formidable power of his Box, his sanctuary, his lifeline, was now a quivering captive, its metallic heart pulsing with borrowed, terrifying energy. And the entity piloting it, this "Idiot" as Jim’s fractured thoughts labeled it, was oblivious, a puppet dancing to an unseen maestro’s tune, manipulated as carelessly as he himself had once toyed with the nascent digital whispers of early 21st-century Earth.
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"Jim," a voice, frayed and distant, echoed from the depths of his trapped mind, a desperate plea laced with a cosmic chill. "We are only… quasi-stable, occupying multiple time fields partiallyin a ghost mode in this region. My grip on Earth’s gravitational tapestry is tenuous. We aren’t fully… *manifested*." The words tasted of ozone and the cold vacuum of space.
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"We cannot surrender our mass reserves, Idiot! Maintain… *position*!" Jim’s own mental voice roared back, a desperate anchor against the swirling chaos, a desperate attempt to forge a path through the encroaching void. Once his being was solidified, once he was truly *grounded*, he would act. But now, as the mental storm raged, he felt himself slipping, the edges of his awareness blurring, his consciousness dissolving into a **dream-like abyss**.
Visions tore through his mind’s eye, jagged shards of a **mass Exodus**. He was on a precipice, a wind-scoured mountain peak, staring down at an ancient man, his face etched with a terror that mirrored Jim's own burgeoning dread. "Bear witness!" the Voice commanded, a thunderclap that shook Jim’s very soul. The old man, blind to Jim, deaf to the spectral presence, could only feel the crushing weight of the Power, the same Power that now held Jim captive. Awe and primal fear, raw and visceral, pulsed between the man and the unseen entity.
Jim's consciousness snapped back with a violent jolt, the mountain summit dissolving, leaving him once again adrift on the ghostly deck of the Dutchman. "Jim," the voice of the pilot, now a whisper of pure relief, a fragile butterfly emerging from a chrysalis of terror, "I… I have managed stabilization. We… we got lucky. The solution… it involved the simultaneous equalization of a triple set of twelfth-order gravigeometrecal tensor transformation matrices, all while maintaining a null geodesic. It’s the first time I’ve ever *solved* it. The homeomorphic transformation… it seems I’ve learned something new. We’ve crossed the event horizon. No damage. And we are… we are 3,680 years earlier than we were ten minutes ago."
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A wave of profound gratitude, so potent it brought tears to Jim's eyes, washed over him. He had been granted a reprieve, a miraculous escape. He had been given permission to land. He was *elated*. He had been accepted by the Hebrew God, a revelation that resonated deep within his bones. But he understood, with a clarity that pierced through his elation, that his role was not to be the harbinger of this divine presence to the people of this nascent age. That role belonged to another. He felt no doubt; the great exodus would soon unfurl, a monumental wave of destiny. Like Noah, he would stand apart, an observer, a silent sentinel, unless the currents of fate **forced his hand**. The image of the old man on the mountain, stunned and eternally marked, still burned in his mind. He knew then, with an unshakeable certainty, that the man had been the immediate gravitational stabilization, the solidified echo of Jim’s own perilous journey. For indeed, homeomorphic transformations into the past were not merely events, but etchings, solidifications of resultant images, captured by the light itself, tracing its journey backward through time to the very moment of its inception, leaving the observer as nothing more than a receiver of ancient, radiant whispers.Beyond the ragged tear of the horizon, a monstrous plume of smoke clawed at the heavens, a viscous, venomous breath seeping from a titan slumbering beneath the earth's crust. A volcano, restless in its ancient sleep. He steered north, a calculated gamble, a swift excision of Egypt from his path, a desperate plunge towards straits whose names had been scoured from memory by the relentless tide of ages. The echo of his arrival on twenty-first century Earth, a phantom limb of memory, pulsed through him. He was, once more, a wraith in a foreign realm, burdened with the terrible knowledge of what was to come, bound by an oath of non-interference. Yet, the vow to face and fell the Minotaur, a beast of myth and blood, screamed defiance at the very concept of passive observation.
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His mandate: to dissect the frail, flickering ember of democracy against the incandescent inferno of kingly tyranny. The air itself tasted of sacrifice, a chilling symphony of pleas and agony expected by pantheons demanding blood. Jim’s mind, a tempest of images, conjured the echoing screams from the Pleasure Dome, the desperate ritual of Amazonian perpetuation, men offered as grim tribute. The Hebrews, still unchoked by the lash of slavery, unkissed by the fire of liberation, were yet to hear Moses' thunderous decree forbidding such abominations. The very name of Isis, he knew with a visceral certainty, would be ripped from the tapestry of human history, a forgotten god after the old man, Moses, had spoken. A cold dread, sharp as a shard of obsidian, settled in his gut. To be an Artemis official on this nascent Earth? A grotesque jest. He hurled his silent, desperate plea into the cosmic void, praying the alien minds that had ensnared him would tear through the labyrinth of his thoughts, that they might understand his terror of becoming his sister's consort, her Qblh. "You are male and female!" – a primal cry, raw and fractured, the only truth he could articulate. Yet, even then, a chilling dissonance: human sacrifice, forbidden by any earthly authority, a prohibition that surely encompassed the grim offerings to his own debased sanctuary.
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The Mediterranean, a vast, indifferent canvas, offered him stolen moments for his fractured contemplation. He was, for this fleeting breath, unbound. Antiope and Helen stirred, their eyes alight with a curious fascination at the Dutchman’s transformed visage. Helen, ever the pragmatist, recoiled with a shudder, her delicate nostrils flaring against the insidious, sulfurous tang that now tainted the sea breeze. Their complaints, however, were mere ripples on the surface of Jim's storm. He granted them their freedom, a tethered liberty to roam the decks at will, their vessel propelled by the capricious whims of the wind alone. No arcane propulsion from the Genie would sully their journey, no hint of technologies that clawed at the fabric of time. The Amazons, cut from a similar cloth of restless spirit, embraced the challenge, their seafaring instincts humming with a familiar, exhilarating tension. Seeing their confident mastery, Jim retreated below, the weight of his own fragmented reality drawing him towards Idiot.
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He remained adrift in the wake of his recent ordeal, a soul gasping for air, desperate for the stillness to chart his next, uncertain move. A profound, unbidden connection had been forged, the Creator's silent tendrils weaving through his ship's comms, bypassing Idiot's awareness entirely. He was a child again, being guided with an insistent, overwhelming force. Visions of Moses, his future path laid bare before Jim’s eyes, flooded his consciousness, all without the need for any established surveillance. The idiot, a mere puppet tangled in the strings of Jim's own intricate programming, could only perceive the calculated dance of cause and effect. But Jim, he knew. He was in the suffocating presence of the Master of Creation, a force so immense it defied sight, yet its power pressed in, a palpable weight that stole the breath. The very air vibrated with ancient words, echoing in Jim's skull as if whispered directly into his soul, a divine pronouncement meant for him, for *him*.
A tremor of dread, a primal aversion, snaked through Jim. The notion of playing a pivotal role, of being the architect of change, felt like a crushing burden, an unasked-for responsibility to reshape the very fabric of existence. Where would he find the courage? The words? Perhaps this reluctance was merely a phantom echo of Moses' own desperate plea, a mirror reflecting his own profound inadequacy.
"I have never been eloquent," Moses' voice, now Jim's own, groaned against the cosmic silence, "neither in the past nor since You have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”
The Creator's voice, a thunderclap wrapped in velvet, ripped through the void.
“Who gave man his mouth?
Who makes him deaf or mute?
Who gives him sight or makes him blind?
Is it not I?
Now go;
I will help you speak
and I will teach you what to say”'
Yet, even with the weight of the cosmos momentarily lifted, Jim stood adrift in the vast ocean of his own agency, the freedom to act, to *implement*, a chilling expanse. A current of certainty, faint but undeniable, tugged him forward. He was on the precipice.
Regarding the grim harvest of 1572, a chilling reprimand, sharp as ice, pierced him. It was followed, however, by the cold, pragmatic reminder of necessity, the US legal precedent that had sanctioned his brutal decree, the on-the-spot executions. The idiot, a blunt instrument, had merely invoked the applicable statutes, the cold, legal justification. "The Patriot Act"… Had that parchment not existed, his actions would have been etched in a different, perhaps less damning, ink. Still, the warning resonated, a stark decree: never again.
A promise, heavy with the taste of ash, escaped his lips: never another execution. "What penance can I offer for my transgression?"
The response, a chilling whisper from the abyss, offered no solace. "Nothing, save to conjure life from the dust of the departed."
The question hung in the air, a phantom limb of possibility. "Is such a miracle truly within grasp? And if it were, what purpose would it serve?" Jim, it seemed, possessed an unnerving knack for unlocking the secrets of the unasked. He had been chastised for the executions by this all-powerful entity, yet no word had been uttered about his nascent, almost beckoning, journey to the time of Christ. The path ahead shimmered, an inevitable invitation. A fragile relief, however, bloomed in Jim's chest, the phantom guilt of the executions finally dissolved. But the vow, the solemn promise to abstain from taking life, remained a potent, unyielding chain.
A truly vexing predicament: challenged by Isis to rule the Earth, to shoulder the dominion she disdained, and simultaneously forbidden by the divine hand to mete out any form of death penalty. Qblh, it seemed, had woven a tapestry of remarkably inflexible dictates. And now, armed with the knowledge of necessity, Jim understood the insidious dance of power, the insidious ability of the government to twist the very spirit of the law, to transgress its boundaries while meticulously preserving its outward formThe law, a serpentine whisper of sophistry, coiled around truth, twisting it into a grotesque mask to champion base desires. Yet, in the gut of this moral mire, Jim found a colossal, unwavering ally. He wasn't some cosmic decree, no Qbhl of Isis; he was simply Jim, a man forged in the fires of an unforgiving world. And today, he felt an electrifying preparedness, a primal hum beneath his skin. With YAOHUSHUA as his shield and Idiot, the sardonic architect of destiny, as his guide, Jim felt an invincibility he’d never known. But even this divine pact hadn't barred him from ancient oaths, specifically the blood-soaked promise to slay bulls. Idiot, with a glint of mischief in its non-existent eyes, spat out a chilling revelation: the Island of Crete, a festering wound on the sea, harbored a sacred bull, a monstrous effigy that gorged itself on the flesh of conquered slaves, a grotesque tribute to Crete’s tyrannical god-king. "That, Jim," Idiot’s voice rasped, laced with a darkly amused anticipation, "is the very beast you swore to Antiope and Helen. Care for a hunt? The feast is already set."
Abandoning the grand theater of G-D’s divine ballet with the Israelites and Egypt – His own cosmic power had cleaved the very oceans; Jim’s clumsy hands were not needed – Jim’s gaze hardened, a cold resolve settling in his eyes. He would murder the sacred bull of Crete. G-D possessed a celestial Armory, a Super Deluxe Box of unimaginable might; Jim, a mere mortal, had a humble toy box. The comparison was stark, brutal.
With the scent of salt and destiny filling his lungs, Jim commanded Genie, "Set course for Crete." He then ascended, a shadow against the bruised twilight, to join the women, their hushed voices a counterpoint to the rising tempest in his soul. To the northwest, the imposing, slumbering behemoth of Mt. Thera loomed, its cataclysmic fury yet to be unleashed. Jim knew the treacherous allure of yesterday's triumphs and tomorrow's phantom glories. To face the ravenous maw of the present, he must shed them, a ritualistic cleansing, lest the seductive venom of pride poison his resolve, leaving him a flaccid husk of past achievements, ripe for the gnawing worms of present laziness. He dared not tamper with the tapestry of the past, for the specter of consequence, the crushing weight of knowing, would bind his hands. Yet, the allure of unearthing the primal secrets of human history, the deep currents that shaped empires, tugged at him like a siren’s song.
The most explosive element, the true harbinger of chaos, would be Artemis’s unchecked hand in the affairs of men. Having already grappled with this formidable Earthly Guardian, Jim’s conviction burned brighter, a fierce imperative to sever his sister’s tendrils from her suffocating embrace of humanity. This faith, this unyielding belief in his God, was a roaring inferno, reigniting his strength, his unshakeable resolve. Idiot, a beacon of unwavering optimism, buzzed with an infinite constellation of temporal pathways, a dizzying, exhilarating dance of what-ifs. "I can get you there, Jim!" it chirped, its promise a jolt of pure adrenaline. A final safeguard, a complex tapestry of alarms and dazzling pyrotechnics, was woven into Idiot's core, a desperate failsafe to shriek defiance should Jim teeter on the precipice of shattering causality itself. Idiot, a phantom in the machine, **scoured the temporal ether, a ravenous intellect dissecting every potential exit, every ripple in causality that might offer a temporal egress.** When the escape routes tightened, constricting like a tightening noose, Idiot’s internal alarms would ignite. Crimson flares of warning, each pulse more violent than the last, mirroring the escalating threat.
As Jim’s shadow fell upon the two women, Antiope’s gaze, sharp as a predator’s, snagged on a distant silhouette etched against the bruised twilight.
'By the gods, Jim! It’s precisely as the simulations foretold!" Her voice, a vibrant thrum of defiance, cut through the salt-laced air. "We’ll shatter their pursuit, Jim, carve our own destiny on virgin shores. I have no appetite for their savagery today."
im, the weight of forgotten ages settling upon his shoulders, knew the precariousness of their grasp on reality. Antiope and Helen, adrift from their own timelines, possessed a freedom so profound it bordered on blindness, their understanding sculpted only by Genie’s stark historical frescoes. Their free will, a wild, untamed beast, was leashed by the very knowledge they lacked.
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Jim had forged a temporal chain around Idiot, a digital decree locking away the future's cruel certainties. Only he, with a wrenching reluctance that gnawed at his resolve, could break his own seal. This rigid discipline was the bedrock upon which Genie’s navigational prowess rested. Human volition, when it tangled with foreknowledge, became a chaotic storm. The future, in its cold logic, assumed its own inevitability. But free will, that defiant spark, could shatter even the most immutable decree, turning history into dust. Genie, ever watchful, would unleash a cacophony of alarms, a desperate symphony of warning should such a temporal heresy threaten. Jim, a man caught between epochs, committed himself to this perilous voyage, a silent promise to shield these queens of the past, to guide them back to his own time, should destiny deem it so.
"Genie will lend us a whisper of speed, Antiope, a breath of unearthly grace. Let your heart be your compass, let it guide you to sanctuary."
"And who are these specters that hunt us, Jim?" Helen’s voice, a delicate tremor, laced with an edge of fear that even the bravest warrior couldn't entirely suppress.
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