The King of Wands:
Setting clear goals
and pursuing them
with determination
​
XXXVI
Exodus
Creativity and Passion
The final eruption of Thera marked a decisive rupture in the eastern Mediterranean. Minoan dominance collapsed, and Egypt—long sustained by its alliances—entered visible decline. To Jim, this convergence suggested a rare opening: if the Hebrews were ever to depart intact, this would have been the interval in which departure became possible rather than resistance. Jim wished to witness it.
​
Whether such a wish constituted presence was less certain. In ghost mode, Jim could occupy multiple spatial locations without leaving material trace, existing only as continuity of awareness. From one perspective, he never stood in a palace nor moved among the fleeing people. From another, he observed everything. The distinction depended on whether observation without embodiment could reasonably be called existence at all. Jim did not attempt to resolve the question. Through Idiot’s interfacing, awareness was preserved. That, he believed, was sufficient—though even this assumption would later prove fragile.
That night, Jim aligned himself with Egypt and encountered Moses again at the burning bush—along with the Presence that Moses addressed as his God. The nature of the temporal distortion that carried Jim there also brought him into awareness of a prior self, intersecting the same locus before rebounding several years backward. This time, remaining in ghost mode, Jim experienced the event without displacement. He inhabited the same local time and bore witness once more to the encounter between man and the divine.
​
Invisible and without bodily form, Jim could not be said to participate, yet neither could he deny proximity. Some might argue that he, too, stood in communion with the Holy Spirit before which Moses trembled. Jim felt the same reverence. If he trembled, it was not physically, but in recognition. He became aware that Moses was not alone—that a multitude of spirits were present, each displaced from a different temporal origin, much like himself. It was even possible that multiple versions of Jim occupied the same moment. He did not pursue the implications. Respect was sufficient. To witness was privilege enough.
​
Hatshepsut no longer ruled, and her stepson—true to form—had consolidated power through cruelty. What followed would later divide opinion, labeled history by some and myth by others. Jim observed something different: not certainty, but convergence. Patterns aligned. Structural failures repeated. In his reconstruction, the sequence compressed sharply around what later reckoning would call 1312 BC. It was not a date preserved by consensus, but it behaved like a fault line. If the Exodus occurred as remembered, then this would have been a bad year for tyrants. It seems that a clean sweep was about to be made and Jim was still responsible for returning all Amazons back to Artemis and bringing to a close the domination of goddess worship.
​
In ghost mode, the passage of time accelerated unevenly. Jim found himself moving far beyond the last state of his embodied existence. Dates resisted precision. Events overlapped. Still, partial calibration was possible, and Jim marked what he could. The goal was orientation rather than proof—enough clarity to determine when a visit to Minos and Crete might still be meaningful.
​
With the benefit of this forward-looking observation—and without interfering—Jim adjusted his navigational assumptions. Thera’s eruption had not merely destroyed a city; it had hollowed out a regional order. The disappearance of Dagon and Minos left a vacuum that Egypt could not fully contain. Rameses, enraged by the loss of the Israelite labor force, would carry his fury into Canaan, pursuing those who had vanished beyond his reach. He would never find them. Other nations would feel the weight of his campaigns as Egypt strained to reassert authority through conquest rather than cohesion.
After Hatshepsut, Egypt’s dynastic continuity fractured. In Jim’s reconstruction, no further Amazons entered the royal line, and the long bloodline of the pharaohs began to thin well before Moses’ return. Princess Tiaa remained an exception. She carried residual Amazon lineage, diminished but not extinguished. Her daughter—according to traditions that survived only in fragments—raised a foster son, Moses, with the intention that he might one day rule. That same daughter later bore Tutankhamun, who briefly held the throne before dying young, marking the effective collapse of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
What followed was succession by proximity rather than legitimacy. The Nineteenth Dynasty emerged under Seti I, formerly vizier and designated successor to the general Horemheb. Seti’s son, Rameses, would later confront Moses upon his return from exile. In Jim’s view, these rulers shared a defining absence: none carried Amazon blood. With the support of the priesthood, they restored the older state cults and rejected monotheism with increasing severity. Horemheb, in particular, harbored deep hostility toward Moses and succeeded in forcing his exile shortly after Tutankhamun’s death.
​
Lineage records themselves were unstable. Princess Tiaa’s grandmother—also named Tiaa—was the sole known wife of Amenhotep II and mother of Thutmose IV. Why their son, Amenhotep III, later ordered infanticide remained unclear, though Jim noted that the decree failed in at least one critical instance.
​
Horemheb, by Amazon reckoning, had never been a legitimate pharaoh. Like several earlier dynasties, he ruled without stellar lineage. This absence explained Isis’s preference for Hatshepsut and her reluctance to endorse subsequent claimants. By Jim’s accounting, the remaining hybrid-Amazon males perished during the Passover sequence, leaving no viable blood successor after Moses’ departure.
​
Hatshepsut, by right and custom, retained the authority to establish a crown prince. She had intended that child to be born of Xiang, with Isis’s blessing already extended. That future was interrupted. Jim intervened before the union could occur. Hatshepsut had rejected all human consorts, and Xiang had been the intended father. At one point, Isis even contemplated transferring legitimacy to Moses himself, but that possibility collapsed after Moses killed an Egyptian overseer, severing any remaining bond with Egypt.
​
The rulers who followed lacked endurance. Thutmose’s campaigns produced wealth but no stability. He magnified himself by defacing Hatshepsut’s monuments, converting erasure into self-glorification. Authority consolidated briefly, then thinned.
​
Meanwhile, displaced populations from Thera who had not crossed the Atlantic returned gradually to the eastern Mediterranean, seeking new settlements along the coast. Thutmose refused accommodation. Treaties were rejected. Former allies were treated as intruders. Raids and reprisals followed. Egypt’s hostility toward foreigners—intensified after the Hyksos—now worked against it. The Hebrews, long reduced to servitude, departed without regret. Phoenician and Philistine networks adapted and flourished despite Egyptian aggression.
​
For forty years, the Israelites remained beyond Rameses’ reach. His campaigns expanded territory but failed to restore authority. Jim observed that Rameses never escaped the memory of having confronted what he understood to be the Living God—and having been humbled by those he had enslaved. Pharaoh’s divinity no longer convinced as it once had. Rebellion followed withdrawal. To contain the damage, Rameses ordered systematic erasure. Scribes and artisans were tasked with removing all trace of the Israelites, Akhenaten, and Hatshepsut, replacing absence with monument and omission with stone.
​
In ghost mode, Jim did not observe these events sequentially. He traversed them repeatedly, adjusting vantage and offset until pattern overtook chronology. When he had learned what he could, it was time to return. He rematerialized on a backstreet in Colchis.
​
Before the transition completed, a directive was imposed. Jim was no longer to act as emissary to Isis. The scope of his mission had shifted. What began as containment of goddess worship had escalated into something broader—less surgical, more structural.
​
"
“That clarifies our approach more than I expected,” Jim said. “At least in outline.”
​
“Clarifies what?” Idiot asked. “I am not certain I understand.”
​
“We have verified patterns that align with the Biblical accounts,” Jim replied.
​
“I have no record of such verification,” Idiot said. “Your displacement to Egypt was not completed. You regained consciousness only moments ago.”
​
Jim paused. “You have no memory of the transfer?”
​
“None,” Idiot answered. “The execution aborted immediately. I registered a fault I cannot yet classify. This is the first instance in which an intended transition failed to occur—yet the outcome appears indistinguishable from success. It is… anomalous. Would you like me to initiate diagnostic recalibration?”
​
Jim declined. He understood then that his artificial intelligence had been excluded. Whatever he had experienced had not passed through Genie’s systems.
Jim did not believe the episode had been a dream. Whether the presence he encountered was God, technology beyond Genie’s reach, or something for which the distinction no longer applied, he could not say. What remained was implication rather than instruction.
​
If the future carried obligation, it was restraint. History did not yield to correction by force. Belief did not fracture cleanly under confrontation. Whatever awaited Jews and Muslims in the centuries ahead would not be resolved through domination, nor through humiliation disguised as certainty. Coexistence would be required—not as decree, but as consequence.
​
Jim understood how easily conviction hardened into cruelty. He had seen what happened when power mistook itself for truth. If intervention was to occur at all, it would have to take the form of patience rather than command, assistance rather than coercion.
​
It seemed that his role, at least for now, was limited. A watchman rather than a ruler. He would finish his time with Helen and Antiope, return to Artemis and then to Earth, and observe what might yet be nudged without being broken.
It struck Jim as strange that events three and a half millennia distant should weigh on him as if they were imminent. Yet that was precisely his condition. Time no longer receded. It surrounded him. He understood now that he ruled two domains, and that the pharaohs had patterned their authority on the model Isis once intended for him. Still, the role repelled him. To govern Earth as a god-king was neither his desire nor his temperament.
​
If he resisted Isis, it would not be through inversion or spectacle. Power, he had learned, was too easily mistaken for purpose. Instead, he found himself drawn toward a different principle—one that distributed authority rather than concentrating it, that depended on consent rather than awe. Democracy, imperfect and fragile, seemed to him a corrective rather than a replacement. Not a weapon against Isis, but an alternative she had never seriously considered.
​
He allowed himself to imagine other crossings. Israel, and his obligation to it in the twenty-first century. The possibility of witnessing the rise of Islam—not to intervene, but to understand how belief hardened into division. He sensed that permission to observe did not imply permission to act. The Burning Bush and the Nativity had not granted him answers; they had imposed restraint.
​
His second visitation had been made in spirit—ghost mode—and that distinction now mattered. He could no longer underestimate the reach of his Dimensional Controller, nor the technologies that enabled such traversal. But more unsettling was the realization that these instruments were not alone. Yaohushua, or the presence Jim understood by that name, seemed not merely encountered but aware. Whether the affinity Jim felt arose from his own longing or from something reciprocal, he could not determine. The thought that he might one day stand among those remembered as companions rather than observers lingered with him—not as ambition, but as unresolved possibility.
​
He reassessed his position. The conflicts seeded across history appeared less immutable than he once believed. What had seemed impossible in his youth on Artemis now resolved into problems of calibration rather than scale. Genie’s circuits spared him repetition, but they also magnified consequence. Each adjustment echoed.
​
For the moment, his task was concrete. Medea and the fleece had to be delivered to Greece. What followed would be her choice. Jason’s ambitions would fracture. Kingship would realign. Jim would arrive later under another name—Theseus—and introduce a form of governance that did not depend on divine lineage. Antiope would understand immediately. Helen would not. She would burn for what awaited her elsewhere.
​
Antiope would return to the future changed—not converted, but instructed. Democracy would not impress her as idealism, but as practice. That alone made the experiment worthwhile.
He would need to find the Argonauts.
