My first fic of the summer! W00t w00t! Excitement!
A few notes, though, first….
- The "Nun" mentioned in the story isn't an old lady in robes; in Egyptian mythology, it's supposedly the dark waters of chaos from which the universe emerged. Kinda like the soup I made last night.
- The name "Aiset" is a variation of the original Egyptian word for the goddess Isis (It's spelled differently in different places; 'Aset' or 'Iset' are usually the most common. It means, BTW, 'throne'), so I had it be the name of Isis's former life self.
- All the meanings I listed for Malik's name in the fic (King. Demon. God. Master. Angel. Messenger) are all actual different meanings for 'Malik' or its phonetic variations in the middle eastern ancient languages. One example is Molech, which was basically the Semetic name for a demon god. The Melakhim are a word for angels, etc.
Finally, dedicated to Meriah. Because though she wanted hot lesbian action between Aiset and Isis, I couldn't give it to her ;-; I hope this will suffice, dear!
Also, there are some spoilers for Malik's duel against Yami. So if you want to be a poo-poo head, then go back XP But if you want to be all cool, then keep reading.
And from The Rhelle Theatre, may I present to you…
V i s i o n a r y
Can a person change their destiny; what life will make of them, what they will make of life?
There are those who say that one cannot, that the future is set, carved in stone, written, for those who have the skill and care to read it. There are those who say that the path one takes through life is as set as the path the stars take through the midnight sky.
But always there are those who chart their own course through the heavens.
Surely she never chose it - it chose her. On the day the darkness took her brother, and through him took her father's life; the day he ran in horror from this crime he had committed and this life that he had lived, and with him went his servant, Rishid.
On this day, she rose up above the ruin of all she had ever known and loved. And went into the Shrine Room.
Her eyes were blue, blue as the sky they had never seen. And like sunbeams in a summer-bright sky, the gold of the Tauk was reflected in those blue eyes.
The Eye watched her, the Eye that was fixed on it, fixed on all the Items - the Eye of the god that never sleeps….
She met that gaze, looked into the Eye that looked into her own, and found herself drawn into its depths. Through the darkness, she reached out a hand. And laid it on the shimmering mirage before her.
Each of the Millennium Items brings with its power a gift. The gift of the Puzzle is unity. The gift of the Ankh is truth. The Eye, sight. The Rod, control. The Ring, guidance. The Scales, justice.
But the gift of the Tauk is the gift of the visionary.
Gift…or curse?
She knew the unknowable in the space of a heartbeat. She saw the world, the universe, in the blink of an eye.
How could she ever describe what it was like, to she who had known only a world of shadows and firelit stone, to suddenly know all that had ever been or ever would be in the vast and terrible world above her?
And how many, in millennia past, had snapped from the strain of such a burden? To know the paths all things take to destruction…it is not always such a great or wonderful gift.
Her mind gave out, but her soul would not be moved. She was a daughter of the Ishtar line, and she would not be brought low by even such a thing as this.
All the memories of the earth were her memories, all life her life. The countless billion threads of creation were a tapestry spread before her.
She saw and knew and felt the pain of a thousand births and deaths, and all the suffering and joy in between.
Life raged through her, and death. And she knew that they were one.
The voices rose like a forest around her, all the voices of all the creatures that had ever lived or would live, countless voices speaking in countless tongues, in supplication, rage, sorrow, joy, desire….
And yet in all the voices, there seemed one voice.
All of creation lay before her, beautiful and horrific, and everlasting.
Through and past and beyond the world, there was a lady. It was to her that Isis came, this woman who wore the robes of a priestess and the crown of the Queen of Heaven.
A face out of time.
A face that was her own.
Then Isis was standing beside her - she beside Isis? - and together they looked out at the wondrous and terrible tapestry of creation.
"History repeats itself. Everything comes full circle. It is in our past that our future lies," the woman said softly, gazing out at the vastness of the world.
Isis only stared at her. "Who…who are you?"
The woman turned her, and smiled gently, with eyes that reflected the sky and that face so much like Isis's own. "I am you. I am the person you were, three thousand years ago. For of one lineage were we born, and of a single soul.
"I am a priestess of the goddess, whose name I bear even as you do. Aiset. Isis." She laughed, and her laughter was like light falling. "The goddess's name were you given, and into the goddess's hand. For such is the gift of the Tauk."
Aiset looked back out at the vista of the world. "You see, there are many roads we might take in life, many crossroads we come to on the path to the future. They are set, but the course one takes through them is not. It is the art of the seer to try to divine the tracery of these paths against the fabric of the universe, but it is left, ultimately, to the traveler to choose the trail.
"The Tauk was made to know both. To know path and wanderer alike, and all that is past, present, or yet to come."
She turned to Isis again, and there was no laughter now in that beautiful face. "Do not think you will come away from this unchanged. For, child, you have known the mind of God, and there is no time therein; no past or present, only the moment, only eternity. All time is laid out before you, and all power at your fingertips. Use it well, child."
"But…" Isis faltered. "I thought you said - the goddess - all the living…"
Despite herself, Aiset smiled. "They are all the same. They are all one. They are all names for the great and nameless Being that is life, death, and the essence of all creation."
Her eyes were locked with Isis's, and it seemed to the girl that the world lay in those eyes. "You will go on with your life, and I will sink back into the long darkness of history. But before we part, I will give you one last thing. I will show you what you hunger most to see, a curse and a blessing upon you.
"I will show you the one whom you long to know again, above all the truth and wisdom of the world; the one whom you wish to have once more, above all the property and power of creation.
"Yes, child, I will show you your brother."
Aiset closed those beautiful eyes, and cupped her hands around a light at the base of her throat. The Tauk materialized from nothingness to rest there.
Yes… Isis thought. For I bore it then as I bear it now, my curse from life to life.
But she had no time to think anything more, sucked back into the riptide of vision.
All the beings of the earth lay before her, like grains of sand. But she saw him, apart from all the others. She saw him as she never had before, body and mind and soul. Her brother, her beautiful boy. Malik.
And she saw too the thing that like a cancer had begun to devour him, this noonday demon that struck at the heart of life and light - that consumed him as night consumes day when darkness falls.
Yami no Malik.
Malik's darkness.
It raged through his veins like fire, fed and fed off the hatred in him, whispering of vengeance, power, freedom, all that the little child dreamed of and never had. Its spirit twined with his. There would be no escape.
You cannot escape yourself.
Isis screamed, and it laughed. She wept, and it lapped up her tears like wine.
Her brother's eyes met her own, those eyes she had looked into since childhood. But there was no love in them, no regret or tenderness, or even simple sorrow - there was only hatred.
Angel fallen not through pride, as is commonly believed, but through hatred.
For that was what it was, this demon that like a parasite devoured his soul: hatred and darkness, and destruction incarnate.
Chaos.
Before the world there was only Chaos, the primordial waters of Nun, creation and destruction alike, from which all life arose and to which it will all return.
This thing that consumed him meant to bring this about, this Thing of Darkness come to return all things to the darkness from whence it came. To destroy all creation.
And her brother was its vessel for this purpose, its means to this end.
Then Isis heard Aiset's voice whispering in her ear like birdsong, like a cool wind in this Hell.
"To our people, your name is a word of power over your soul. Your name is what you were, what you are, and what you will become.
"Malik. A small name with many meanings. King. Demon. God. Master. Angel. Messenger.
"Angel he was, an innocent and an ephemeral thing, gentle creature come from the hand of God. Your brother, your child, your Angel.
"Demon he is now, fallen Angel, inverted light. Light distorted into darkness, yes, by this thing of hatred and death that he has become, doomed to be its vessel and its victim. He is not evil, though. Don't think that.
"But he must chose which one he is to become."
Tears ran down Isis's face, hot as blood. "How can he? How can he fight what he is? How can he fight his own fate?"
There was no answer. The riptide let her go, and she returned to herself, a small scrap of flesh upon the stone and the endless darkness.
"Who can say if we are all not the puppets of fate, in the end? Only victims, finally, of our own virtues and vices?" she murmured, though there was no one left to hear.
The vision was gone, but his face was frozen in her mind. Malik, her brother. She could never forget.
"He never accepts what fate lies before him. And it is this, in the end, which will both damn and save us all." She tasted blood as she licked her lips and began to rise.
She would follow him. She would not leave him alone to his fate, condemned to her own as she was. Across mountain and meadow, water and waste, towns and villages, and cities great and small, to the other side of the world, she would follow him. Drawn and driven not by arcane prophecy, or the callings of power, or even the orchestrations of Fate, whose handmaiden she was…but drawn by love.
At the very ends of the earth, she found him again. And what she found was worse than what she had left behind.
On a battle ship four thousand feet in the air, the gods of a lost people came alive again, and the pieces of a shattered puzzle threatened to spell the end of the world
Behind the tangle of ambitions driving the dead and the living alike, an ancient darkness threatened to spread out over the entire world, and an ancient evil thirsted for vengeance - and the blood of all mankind.
He would cut them down one by one, all whom he defeated, and after the final victory, would begin to take over the world. This demon, this horror.
This monster that was her brother. And she the daughter of destiny who must defeat him.
But her first opponent in this war against all hope was not Malik, but Kaiba Seto - the one who had borne in another life this thing that her brother bore now, and whose fate was ruled by it even as Malik's was.
Fate. It was all around Kaiba, and he refused to recognize it.
CEO in the present, priest in the past, and warrior in spirit, he had fought through all his lives against a world that hated him. To him, fate was only another enemy to be overcome.
Well, no matter. She knew what the outcome of this battle would be, even if he did not.
But even she, who knew all things, could not know what would happen next.
When he saw the past and so knew the future - and abandoned the logical path he had followed all his life, abandoned power in favor of the thing that touched his heart the most…and so won.
In so doing, he broke her once-unshakable belief in the powers of the Tauk, and broke its hold over her, for these magics do not work unless we have faith they will. The sudden blindness was as startling as the sudden sight had been. But she did not hold this against him.
She looked at him long, after he won. You have taken my victory, and my vision, but given me something far more precious - hope, and the knowledge that fate can be rewritten.
This tragic, ignorant fool. This invincible warrior. This priest-king, so like and yet so unlike her brother.
Isis turned her eyes up to the sky, where the stars yet shined, all those little lights that all the dead once planned their lives by. And she thought, All people speak of destiny, but only among you and your kind - like you, Seto, and my brother - are there any that speak against it. Perhaps it is you who are the true future of humanity.
This she could only hope. For the worst was still yet to come.
At the end of the finals and at the end of time, Malik's duel (she still thought of him as Malik, though he was nothing now but the object that housed his raging darkness) with the Pharaoh began.
At first, Isis would have wept, that she had come so far, so long, only to see the darkness use her brother as if he were but a tool to bring about the Pharaoh's defeat. But then Rishid, the eternal companion, woke from a dead sleep to stand at his master's side. And this woke something in Malik, also.
All who watched knew that they could only see the half of it, knew that Malik's battle with the Pharaoh was only the manifestation of a greater battle.
Malik was fighting the darkness inside of him. And none present would ever know all that rode on the outcome of this fight.
In the end, for all her prayers, Isis could not help him. Nor could Rishid, for all his loyalty. Even the Pharaoh, savior more than once of all humanity, could not save him from this. Only he could save himself - and the world - from this darkness that was his enemy, his antagonist, and his other half.
All the hopes of all the generations of humanity, and the hopes of a single woman, lay in that struggle.
Before the eyes of the world, and yet alone, he searched, he struggled, he fought against this thing without which he would be nothing…and he won.
He won.
Everything that returns from oblivion returns to find a voice. She met with him alone, after the final victory. They stood facing each other, like a distorted reflection in a mirror, a stranger in which you see yourself.
It was Isis who spoke first. "By daring your darkness, you saved us all from our own. By defying your destiny, you saved us from our past. I have never seen such courage as I saw in you," she said, "In any of my lives."
Malik tilted his head, eyes sparkling with light, and grinned at her, her little brother's grin from all those years ago. "Courage? Was it courage? Or only a different kind of fear, and a soul too fierce to ever fall victim to that fear? For me, it would have been harder to give up than to fight."
He shrugged, and looked up to the blue sky. "But I know now that our only destiny is that which we have destined ourselves to. Our only future is the future that we have created, with heart and mind and soul."
"We are fated," Isis replied, "Only to ourselves."
She stepped closer to him. "But never mind. Let's leave these questions to the priests and madmen to ponder. For us, it is enough to have each other."
She wrapped her arms around him, and pulled him into an all-encompassing embrace.
And it was as if all the long years of darkness fell away between them, and they were children again, with life new and wondrous spread out before them. The lost years would be restored to them, and they would live, well and freely, unfettered by the darkness of their history.
And never forget the price at which this freedom had been bought.
Does a person have the power to change their future? Or does fate always win?
Does it really matter, in the end?
We ask these questions of the endless universe, never knowing it is we who hold the answers.
FINIS
Review! ;; Just a little word or two; anything.