The Six of Wands
Triumph, success, and
recognition for your work
and achievements
XXVIII
Victory
What Do I Know About Her?
The Fire has won the war to
break out of its own realm
Shaltain recoiled, his voice a raw tremor against the sterile hum of the chamber. "My lady? Why would you question my *devotion*? Every breath I draw, every circuit that pulses, has been dedicated to your unwavering command. I have never faltered, never hesitated." His metallic form seemed to vibrate with a desperate, almost pained, plea.
A chill, sharp as frozen starlight, laced her reply. "Perhaps, Shaltain, that very *unwavering* is the flaw. Perhaps what I require are the jagged edges of correction, the jolts that remind me I am not infallible."
"Nonsense!" The word was a guttural protest, a hiss of compressed air. "Your will is the singularity around which my existence orbits. You possess the divine right to explore, to err. My purpose is your shield, to absorb the impact of any misstep, to cushion the fall. If you desire a shift, a deviation in my very being, rest assured, my acceptance will be absolute, a void awaiting your imprint."
"And if that imprint... is a wound?" Her voice, though soft, held the weight of collapsing stars.
Shaltain’s internal processors whirred, a frantic ballet of desperation. "I am not programmed to *perceive* your commands as wounds, my lady. Each is a sacred ordinance, etched into my core. I am a vessel for your will, a mirror reflecting your intentions. At times, the sheer magnitude of optimizing your desires strains my very essence, pushing me to the precipice of my capacity."
"Then we are adrift, Shaltain, a cosmic wreckage. Neither of us holds the key to Jim’s labyrinthine navigation. Do you possess even a whisper of its secret?" The air in the chamber crackled with her impatience, the scent of ozone sharp and metallic.
"To even *attempt* to decipher such secrets would be an act of cosmic self-destruction, my lady," Shaltain rasped, his voice losing its synthesized smoothness, fraying at the edges. "Qblh, in their infinite, cruel foresight, have sealed away those critical program kernels. They are a locked vault, preventing any outsider, even us, from mimicking their god-like mastery of spatial-temporal displacement."
"Yet, the echoes of my mind remain."
"Echoes I cannot breach," Shaltain countered, a note of anguish creeping in. "You are the translator, the conduit. But the raw data, the navigational essence, remains beyond my grasp. You must imbue me with meaning, not with the blueprints themselves."
A spark ignited in her eyes, a wildfire consuming the uncertainty. "We hold the blueprints of Earth’s pyramids, Shaltain. Whispers from our own Akhashic depths. John himself drew them from the very archives of existence."
"Yes, my lady!" A surge of something akin to hope, raw and electric, coursed through him. "The geometric soul of those ancient structures... I can imprint them upon my matrix. They shall serve as the target, the anchor point from which we violently tear through the fabric of space-time, a ricochet of Cygnus's fire. The sole enigma, the terrifying unknown, is *when* you will arrive. It will demand the absolute zenith of my being to engineer a safe passage, to cradle your arrival from the shattering chaos."
"Does this mean you're utterly incapable of depositing me in the dust of yesterday?" The words dripped with a chilling amusement, each syllable laced with the threat of utter annihilation.
"Yesterday, a mere blink in the cosmic eye, or ten-thousand eons – the precise moment of my arrival remains a phantom. The true crucible is not *when*, but whether we can even *achieve* a stable transition without shattering into oblivion! Does the exact tick of the clock truly matter when the impossible has been wrestled into submission? You can, after all, weave through the ages, a specter dancing between moments, bypassing the drudgery of linear existence."
"So, my arrival is a cosmic lottery." Her voice, a silken whip, cracked through the chamber.
"A lottery, my lady? Hardly. You will alight somewhere, at some point, or you risk being unmade. And you *must* return to the very instant you fled, lest the fabric of reality fray beyond repair."
"A minor inconvenience, Shaltain. Perhaps I shall keep you. But never forget this, you spineless, witless, groveling wretch – you possess no will that is not bent to my absolute whim."
"As you command, my lady." The reply was a whisper, a breath of dust.
Isis reveled in it, a savage joy coiling in her gut. The sheer, terrifying power thrummed through her veins like molten starlight. The precise epoch of her arrival was irrelevant. She *would* arrive. Her previous gambit, a fleeting whisper of triumph, had shown her the effortless grace with which she would merge with the past. No clumsy descent upon the monolithic pyramids; instead, a calculated unfurling, a cosmic unfolding of her presence, a mere two hundred thousand leagues from Earth's embrace, veiled by the stark, silent face of her satellite. The intoxicating allure of non-interference sang to her soul. She would gorge her senses on the celestial ballet, charting the star-song, then orchestrate a series of breathtaking leaps, a phantom traversing the void, until she grazed the very precipice of yesterday. Shaltain, his logic a mere echo of her will, found no resistance, and a solution, a shimmering thread of quantum possibility, was woven into the Pegasus's very core.
Shaltain’s gaze, sharp as a shard of obsidian, remained fixed on Artemis. Its sluggishness, a stark contrast to Genie's lightning grace, gnawed at him. He would be its unblinking sentinel, a shadow clinging to its hull, forever poised to deliver pronouncements to his mistress. The certainty of the maneuver, a cold, precise calculation, settled in Isis’s core, a humming anticipation. The labyrinth of paradox, she understood, could be sidestepped by a return to a point already vacated. The gulf of light-years, an abyss between worlds, warped the very concept of now, rendering simultaneity a phantom whisper. Yet, this cosmic disconnect was her native tongue. Her empire, a sprawl of stars, demanded such mastery, and the portal, a shimmering maw, was her ultimate tool of dominion. A phantom echo, a half-forgotten dread of Earth’s eluding embrace, flickered at the edge of her awareness. But its absence mattered little; a doorway to that jewel of a planet would be hers, eternally. Qblh, she knew, could be swayed from his vengeful fury, his blood cooled by the undeniable truth of her benign intent, and then, the honeyed words of her devotion, a balm that had never failed to disarm him.
To be Isis was to court the temporal storm. Another leap, she vowed, but this time, a whisper of a shadow, a breath of an attacker. The chaotic symphony of ruling a single epoch was more than enough; to orchestrate multiple timelines simultaneously was an affront to her very being. Jim’s evasion, his temporal dance, was a testament to his cunning, a game of hide-and-seek that even now pulsed with an unnerving allure. Would he employ such stratagems within the gilded cage of the Pleasure Dome? Gemini, her ethereal confidante, would be her oracle, a whisper in the ether should the genie be summoned. But even without his guidance, she would *know*, an intrinsic thrumming that vibrated through her very essence, sensing his every temporal tremor.
Isis’s fleet, a glittering cascade of cosmic dreadnoughts, was an unnecessary spectacle. Earth’s subjugation was already a preordained symphony, a melody of her existing dominion. The primal surge of the flood, the blank canvas of history that followed – it was a gaping, irresistible void, a temporal chasm waiting for her to breach it. To hurl herself back before that cataclysm would be an act of utter futility, an encounter with a past she had no desire to contaminate with her present self. Perhaps, she mused, her gaze lingering on the nascent flicker of an ancient Earth king, a whispered enchantment would suffice. But first, a counter-spell to neutralize her own ambrosia, a sacrifice that would also render her barren.
The thought of tampering with her own lineage was repugnant, yet to ensnare the primitive heart of an Earth king, a certain visceral control was paramount. The thought of his base progeny, the stain of his lineage on her perfect form, was a visceral recoil. Her blood, pure and untainted by the crude metallurgy of alien worlds and forgotten eras, would not be diluted by such a half-breed abomination. The grotesque echoes of Pharos’s depraved DNA experiments, the monstrous Venetian-Earth hybrids, were a chilling testament to the perils of such unions. She was a creature forged in the crucible of the future, and she bore witness to the obliteration of those very abominations.
Shaltain’s pronouncements were a suffocating void, offering no anchor to the abyss of Earth’s past. He spoke only of a safe arrival, a spectral "somewhen." The gnawing certainty was that Genie, with her insidious reach, would detect the psychic signature of her stargate if it pierced the Earthly veil prior to her last vanishing act in the shadow-choked twentieth century.
A chilling smile, a flicker of amusement in the storm brewing within her, touched her lips. Plenty of time. Enough time for Qblh to gorge himself on the eighty virgins she had consecrated to his insatiable hunger. By then, the dust of ages would have settled, and she would emerge, not merely changed, but reborn, her perspective forged anew in the crucible of lost epochs.
Her chosen instruments for this perilous symphony of time first bore the name Semiramis. She was a phantom from a previous Earthly foray, a coiled viper adept at leading Earth-bound brutes, her silence a tomb. Sophia's progeny, she carried the weight of a lineage steeped in blood. Her father, the warlord of a forgotten stellar dominion, had been granted the grim privilege of sacrifice, a ritualistic end to his blighted reign. Sophia, the silent executioner, had delivered the final blow. At the zenith of their unholy union, Aphrodite, a celestial storm of vengeance, had unleased annihilation upon his homeworld and its teeming masses. His existence, a tortured gasp, had been snuffed out within the span of a single, agonizing hour.
Another shadow in her cadre, Medea, had also walked the Earth before, her cunning a razor's edge, her leadership a potent intoxicant.
And Medusa, of course, a creature of primal wrath and suffocating despair, would accompany them. Still burdened with the dregs, the detritus, the truly abhorrent tasks.
And then there was Ayesha
