Queen of Pentacles and the Wheel of Fortune. In the Garden. Kyra.
Instead of dropping into a dark alley, Kyra fell hard at the feet of the Empress. But instead of a young laughing Egyptian woman crowned by the sun, the Empress now wore the flesh of a middle aged European woman who had seen much grief. She carried stalks of wheat in her arms from a late harvest.
Kyra rolled to her feet in a field that in the spring and summer would have been full of flowers. "Fuck!" she screamed. "No! What the fucking hell is your problem? What makes you think you have the right to do this to me?"
The Empress shrugged. "Many reasons."
Kyra snorted.
The Empress continued. "First among them being that you gave yourself to me."
That stopped Kyra cold. "I was thirteen," she said.
"The second being," the Empress continued, as if she hadn't spoken, "Necessity. My brother Set is not," and she paused, feeling her way around the words, "committed to this world. Increasingly, he thinks it might be better to let it end. He has come back for grandfather. But not with great enthusiasm."
Kyra asked deliberately, her anger growing colder. "But you thought he'd come back for me. Because you thought he'd come back to rape me."
The goddess shrugged. "It was worth trying. Sometimes I even get a line of heroes out of it."
Kyra almost fell down from the implications. "That makes it right and shiney? You fuckers play with people's lives."
The goddess smiled a honeyed smile. "Of course. We're in the god business. That's what we do."
"Fuck that. It's not right."
"You think you deserve to be more than a means to an end?" The Goddess asked, quietly, and there wasn't even a shadow of the lush and laughing woman on her face any more. There was an implication of many arms, of crows and scales and tombs and scythes dripping with blood. "Be careful child. I indulged you. I let you see my true face. I let you hold my child in my arms. I kept you out of death's domain for a few precious years. I have given you the chance to walk the path of the hero with your eyes open. Most of my heroes go to their deaths with nothing more than the memory of my kiss to guide them.
"There was another path. You would have arrived at the turning point raped and beaten and despised and bloodied. You might have saved the world. And you would have died at the foot of a throne.
"I saved you from some of that. I gave you this chance. To be," and her lips quirked with a shadow of her earlier amusement at life, "more than a spear carrier at the siege of Troy. To be an Enlightenment Hero.
"But I can just as easily put you back on that other path, with no memory of any of this."
Then they were walking through the field in silence, the setting sun painting everything blood red and gold.
"Just 'cause you can don't make it right," Kyra said, sullenly.
They stopped awkwardly at the edge of a gash in the earth that ripped down into the abyss. Finally, the Empress conceded, softly, "Maybe it doesn't."
The Empress looked down into the hole in the world.
"This is where it happened," she said, finally.
"What?" Kyra said, her anger ebbing slightly in the presence of such quiet regret.
"Where he took her. Where the lord of death, my brother, took my daughter into the underworld. Out of the light. To be the Queen of the Dark Places. My laughing Persephone."
"Your brother your dead husband or your brother the rapist god killer?" Kyra asked, acidly. The Goddess gave her a sharp look. They walked around the gash, still raw in the ground. Realizing that was not, perhaps, an appropriate thing to say to a mother, Kyra said, grudgingly, "I'm sorry."
The goddess smiled sadly. "The first time, I searched the world. No one, no thing, that I could find had seen her. Not the wind or the moon or the sun. She was just gone."
Kyra said, with some bitterness, "that must have been hard for you. To loose someone you loved."
The goddess smiled again, but with a malicious curve to her lips. "Hard for everyone.
"I withheld my gifts. Everything stopped growing. And everything that died, stayed dead."
She tossed the wheat into the pit, stalk by stalk.
"Hecate finally told me what happened," she said at last. That he'd taken her. That he'd raped her. That he made her eat the fruit of the underworld. That she belonged to him."
This penetrated. Kyra shuddered. "I'm sorry," she said again, and this time she meant it.
"Not your fault," the goddess replied. "I got her back. I always do. But I always lose her too. She spends the growing months with me; the dying months with him. Every year after the harvest, I bring her here and she goes down into the pit. That is the deal I made with my brother Death.
"Every year he takes her. And I grieve until she is reborn."
The goddess turned to her with eyes as golden as wheat ripened in the sun, as shadowed as forests at sunset. "Every year she goes into the dark. With the dead. With the monsters."
The sun set.
"And now it's your turn," the goddess whispered. And there was a roar as something came out of the pit, and Kyra was seized by something inexorable, furious, rapacious. She tried to fight, but it was like fighting a whirlwind ripping through every cell of her body. And then consciousness was snuffed out.
Kyra woke up – really woke up -- deep in the bowels of a prison planet. And she was not alone. Six men were grinning down at her. They were armed. She was not.
Eight of Cups. Sorrow.
When they were done with her, she could not walk; could barely see. Bruised inside and out. For some reason, they had not just dumped her into the pit for the rest of the prisoners to finish her off. They'd called one of the boy scouts of the place to take care of her. He had wrapped her in a sulfurous blanket, carried her gently to his own cell, put her in his own bed, locked the door securely, and left her alone to sob herself to sleep.
In retrospect, she probably shouldn't have killed the first guy. Or the second. But killing usually solved the problem. This just pissed them off. And did not solve this problem. They finally just tied her up before continuing, which she decided to count as some sort of victory. Even so she had uselessly fought so hard against the bonds she nearly broke her wrists and ankles.
When she finally woke, the Magician who had played a juggler danced with her in a palace, once upon a time, was sitting cross legged on the floor. She looked at him, and felt a stirring of relief.
"This is a dream," she stated, trying to make it fact.
The Magician grinned at her. "No. You are really here. You always were, on these little trips. When you gave yourself to her, you gave her the power to put you into these stories. She always sent you back before morning. But I don't think you are going to wake up in your bed this time."
"Where the fuck am I?"
"In an antechamber of the underworld. So to speak. Specifically, a prison planet. The one in which you would have been serving time for murder, if she hadn't pulled you off that path."
Kyra stared at him.
"You made her angry," the Magician scolded in an utterly inappropriate high sing song voice. "Not good to make gods angry. Especially her. She's showing you what she saved you from. When she kept you from going off with that mercenary."
Kyra continued to stare at him. He waited, smiling brightly.
"What the fuck are you doing here? If I'm not dreaming?"
"I told you," he said. "I'm the guide. I guide people from one place to another."
"You brought me here, you motherfucker?" She tried to lunge at him, causing new waves of agony. He didn't bother to move.
"She's not really into this whole self aware Enlightenment Hero stuff. She tries. She liked one chick named Buffy Summers a whole lot; she was a true Enlightenment Hero. Even brought her back from the dead a couple of times, just to mess her up a little. But child," and he grinned at her "Buffy was divine. Well, part demon. When you've got nothing but kittenish defiance to back it up, you should not pick fights with gods. You will always loose."
She stared at him, not comprehending. "I want to go home. Now."
He kept grinning. "Not up to you. Not up to me. Up to her. You belong to her."
"Not the Emperor yet?" she asked, sardonically. "Isn't doing this to me dissin' him?"
"He would have brought you here years ago."
She closed her eyes as another wave of pain wracked her body. Her defiance was ebbing, she realized with dim horror. "What should I do?"
"Make her like you again."
"How the fuck do I do that?"
"Maybe a little gratitude? What just happened to you was terrible, terrible. But child, it would have happened all the time if she hadn't wrapped her cloak around you. Every day for years and years."
Defiance faded more. "I guess I'm grateful."
"Try not to overwhelm her with it," he said, dryly. "Look. I'll tell you a secret. We leave you here, we get what we want. That boy of yours, Riddick, he'll come looking for you in a year or so. And that will launch him in the right direction. We take you out of here, it's not so clear he'll have any reason to grow up, accept his destiny. You'll probably never see him again if he doesn't think you're in danger. Saving you was always a risk, and once you pissed her off, her evaluation of the benefits of that risk changed."
She stared at him, the blood in her veins suddenly frozen. "This is all about Riddick."
"Always was. The universe needs him. And you are the only thing in the whole universe that matters to him even a little bit.
"We will use you. The question is, are we going to use you up."
You thought he'd come back for me, she remembered telling the Empress. You thought he'd come back to –oh god, don't think about that. "I won't betray him."
"You were about to, a few hours ago, or you wouldn't be here," he said and there was no longer the ironic, singsong tone to his voice, but a deadly seriousness. He unfolded himself from the floor, walked forward to stand over her. "What do you think would have happened if you'd gone down there, confessed, asked for absolution? They would have peered into your brain, seen him. Known he wasn't dead. Then it wouldn't have just been random mercenaries looking for him on a hunch. After they finished giving you 'treatment,' they would have held you in protective custody. If you tried to get out, they would have held you as a material witness.
"And if he had come for you, it would only have been to kill you. You'd be useless to us."
She started to cry again, heartbroken, heaving cries. The Magician knelt down stroked her hair. "All you have to do is help him kill someone who needs killing. Help him reach his best destiny. To be an emperor. You can still do that."
To be an emperor, she thought. To be a lord of death . . . Riddick might like that. On the other hand, I don't think administration is really his bag. The thought was weirdly funny. She started to laugh, triggering another cramp of pain through her abdomen, banishing such sophisticated thoughts. "Please," she asked, "take me home. I promise. If that's all you want, I'll help you."
The Magician shook his head again. "The Empress is mercurial," he said with a grin, as if expecting her to get the joke. When she didn't, he sighed. "Don't you see? One of my names is Mercury, and – oh, never mind. It's not me you gotta ask. It's her. You gave yourself to her willingly years ago. Can you swallow your pride enough to ask her forgiveness for trying to back out of the deal?"
Kyra swallowed, felt the bruises on her throat. "Yes," she said, at last.
The Magician sighed. "Your people were never that good at devotion," he said, wryly. He took her hand gently, and sleep closed her eyes.
When Kyra woke up, she was already in a hospital bed, with worried mutterings above her and strange mummers in her head.