Title: Posthumous.
Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh is the intellectual property of Kazuki Takahashi. I'm not making any money off this.
Rating: K+
Summary: Lady Ishtar does not have the Sight, but she still finds a way to see beyond. Justice will not come in her lifetime, but justice will be served.
==o==
It has always been like this—dark corridors and dust in the air, shadowed alabaster shrines, vaulted ceilings underneath the sand. They have always lived like this—a legacy of muted chanting, a clan of ritual and sacrifice, an order of priests forever awaiting a departed god.
She will die down here.
They say the Ishtar women have the Sight, but they are liars and always have been. Magic swirls down here like the dust-motes in the air, lurks in corners with scorpions, and if they'd just stop chanting and listen, stop waiting and look, halt the 3000-year momentum that pushes toward nowhere...they'd see too. The women see because they listen. The women listen because they don't speak.
The necklace glints golden in the torchlight.
She doesn't dare put it on, doesn't even dare look at it most of the time. She is furtive, alone, ever half-listening for her husband's footsteps, or the swish of the stagnant air if a guard turns. But with a silent breath and closed eyes, she runs her fingertips across the surface and waits for the sparks. The visions.
She sees the boy whom she is not allowed to call her son, the boy she loves as deeply as her husband hates, the boy to whom her devotion is just as secret as her hands upon this necklace. She watches as he falls under her husband's beatings, angry but never screaming, desperate but never crying, watches as he falls and always stands again. She watches him become a man. She watches him surpass her in both loyalty and love, simply because he has the bravery to show them.
She tucks this vision away, into a corner of memory no one else can see. The next time she hears her husband's whip crack along his back, the next time she's forced to call him servant rather than son...she will remember this.
She turns to the necklace again.
Her daughter has her eyes, and one day she'll turn those eyes against the world, against the sunlight of a far off land. She will not be another Ishtar woman, mild and silent, listening to magic among the dust-motes. She will rise to a power beyond the Ishtars' combined, stand regal at the feet of an ancient god while riding a device modern beyond the Lady's comprehension. It is her fight, not their endless wait, that will fulfill their destiny.
She steps away.
The guards never turn. They have utmost faith in her deference to the laws of their clan, and she has never given them any reason to doubt. She walks back through darkened corridors, and settles in bed next to the husband she resents so silently that even she can't always hear.
She lies on her back in the darkness, runs her hand over her rounded stomach and feels the baby kick. It is this child, she thinks, that will pave the way for the others. It is this child who will who will silence the chanting, who will let sunlight into the torchlit halls, who will be an heir to the new legacy. It is this child who will validate three thousand years of silence and oppression and wasted lives, this child who will speak for the generations of tombkeepers who could not, this child who will set them free. It will not be without its price, but justice never is.
She closes her eyes and sleeps easily, barely choking as the dust in the air settles on her in the night.
Her children will bring them to justice.
Her children are destined for greatness.