"Enlil." Ammit growled as we materialized within the Goa'uld spaceship, grabbing me by the collar of my armor and dragging me bodily behind her as she bum rushed towards the cargo-compartment at the back of the transport. "Get us in the air."

"Where am I heading?" The bearded babylonian looked up at her from the pilot's seat as he went through the pre-flight checks. The Colonel settled into the co-pilot seat. He clearly had no idea what anything did, but sitting in the chair apparently gave the impression he was in control. Kincaid rolled his eyes and just strapped himself into a chair.

"I don't care. Just turn on the cloak and make sure the weapons still work." She replied as I found myself frog-marched by the massive saurian being into the cargo hold. She pointed to my brother as she fung me bodily through the door. "You - come with me."

"I don't have to - " My brother protested briefly before her eyes flashed with murderous fury and she made a horrific snarling noise over his anemic attempt to assert himself.

"In. The. Hold." Her eye twitched as she pointed to Muminah. "None of them enter."

"Yes, Lady Ammit." Muminah replied meekly, putting herself between Ammit, the door, and a cockpit full of people who wanted no part in whatever was infuriating the Demon Goddess. Precisely none of the Russians seemed in any hurry in interrupt her currently murderous mood.

My brother scurried over to me, for lack of a more apparent source of safety as Ammit punched the activator to the cargo-bay doors hissing and spitting furiously under her breath in the Goa'uld language. She crossed the room in three long strides, manipulating a crystal on the wall to open a long panel covered in hieroglyphs. It moved aside, exposing a vast array of bottles and phials containing various colors and hues of liquids. She grabbed a bowl and started decanting various liquids into it, jabbing at it with long crystals that sparked and sputtered into them as she did so.

"Uh - Ammit… what are we doing here?" I asked her cautiously in the Goa'uld language, doing my able best not to seem alarmed to Thomas.

"We are not doing anything. I am brewing a potion to prevent an addlebrained child from ending reality because he hasn't gone through the centuries of training and study that one ought to go through before trying to make themselves a god." Ammit snarled shattering an empty jar on the ground after emptying its contents into the now smoking purple morass in the bowl. "I am saving the fool boy who just blurted out the same impossible truths he used buy Winter's armies as an idle joke because he was enough of a blithering moron to make himself a god of chaos."

She set the potion on fire, turning to face me as a pillar of green flame illuminated her from behind as she bellowed at me in incandescent fury. "The powers with which you meddle are not to be played with idly. You cannot use them as you would play with mortal wizardry. You are a conceptual being. The more you create an image of yourself, the more that image will warp you to suit its own ends - even at the cost of your life and the lives of your subjects."

"What I said was true. Aurora will try to destroy the world." I replied firmly. "Allowing them to know that will motivate them to act against it."

"They are Hok'tar warden, they will act in whatever way most pleased them. If simply telling them the best way to act motivated them to operate in a reasonable manner we would still be sovereign over this world." She quenched the smoldering flames on the liquid with a metal lid, counted to three, and then revealed a bubbling orange sludge. She lifted the bowl of sludge and held it out in front of Thomas, addressing him in English. "Spit."

"I'm not giving you bodily fluid." Thomas insisted, gagging at the odor of it.

"Spit or I will take. Save the Lord Warden." Ammit snarled, her unpracticed English even more broken than normal in her anger.

"Ammit, is this safe?" I asked in Goa'uld. "I need him whole."

"It is harmless to the Phage but necessary." Ammit replied in Goa'uld before swapping back to English. "Spit! Now!"

I nodded to Thomas as he looked at me questioningly. He clutched his silver pentacle, muttering, "Damn it mom," before spitting in the bowl. The liquid dissolved as he did so, the congealed orange melting into pure silver. Ammit sniffed it, then held out the bowl to me. "Drink."

"Ammit, what the hell is that?" I held up my hand in front of the bowl.

"Drink or I will cut off your head and pour it down your throat." Ammit grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and forced the bowl to my lips. I gagged on the foul tasting brew, but swallowed most of it in spite of myself.

It gave me the same dull warmth as when I'd taken pain killers for broken bones, a dull sense of disconnection from my own body. Not just my body either, the insistend well of power that I'd been feeling since I used it on the bus felt far away. Not so far that I couldn't use it, but the compelling need of it was at a distance. It would be a lie to say my mind felt clearer but it felt more like me than it had since I attacked the forces of Summer with the storm much more "Harry" than "Ha'ri."

Harry was not thrilled that Ha'ri had casually referenced the fact that Harry had broken the sixth Law of Magic to exactly the worst people on earth to joke about it to. Apparently casual invitations for war were what my mante thought of as a fun way to end a meeting.

God I hoped it was the mantle to blame. It was getting hard to separate my own desires from the will of my godhood.

Ammit snapped her fingers on either side of my face, gauging my reactions as I flinched from her talons. "Good - it hasn't damaged you too much."

"Damaged me?" I said in a voice that wasn't at all girlish or panicked. Really, Thomas was giggling at nothing. I swear.

"Warden, you are an unfinished product. I don't remember everything about the ritual, but I remember for damn sure that it took multiple rounds of it to actually create a stable god." She scratched her chin pensively. "You're… clay that hasn't been put into the fire yet. You look like a jug, you may even be painted, but if you start trying to store wine and hold a party you're going to end up as a messy pile of clay."

"But - I can feel the power in me." I clutched my hand, looking at the ruby circle in my gauntlet. "I am a god."

"You're a start, Warden." Ammit shook her head. "You have worshippers. You have purpose. You have the urges. But if you try to actually channel that the urges will become more than you and all you will be is a broken mess of something. The universe is full of deadly jabbering powerful messes that might once have been gods. We filled our prisons with them as often as we captured the Adversary."

"How… how many times would I have to conduct the ritual to be whole?" I asked, the prospect of doing it even once more to terrible to even consider.

"Hundreds of times, thousands, perhaps even millions." Ammit shrugged. "The Terms stole that knowledge from me, but the others purged cities to become what they were. I was fed with the unworthy for millennia, even before the ritual."

I flinched. It was sometimes hard to remember just how many people Ammit had killed. It was easier to think of her as my companion than as the predator she was. She was a mass murderer by any possible definition of the word. How many millions had she killed? Had they all deserved it?

How many were dying in my name without me ever having met them as I tried to excuse away the behavior of a primordial Demon God? I didn't like knowing that I was getting people killed for me.

"I can't do it again, Ammit." I shook my head, reverting to English reflexively in a moment of vulnerability. "I shouldn't have done it the first time. A monster was trying to kill me. Consuming him and taking his power was the only way I could survive. I was dying."

I don't know why I was trusting her with who I'd sacrificed to become a god, not when I'd been keeping the knowledge from her for so long. But I had to talk about it with someone. I had to - she needed to understand that the ritual was horrible. It was evil and I wouldn't do it again. "I was dying. I was weak. I had a moment - just a moment - and I took it. I didn't want to do it. I didn't know I would do it."

I realized I was weeping when I stopped being able to see. "He was evil. He was terrible. But I took him. I devoured him utterly."

I wiped the tears from my eyes as I sniffed, feeling foolish for having allowed myself to seem weak. Hell's Bells - I was feeling survivor's guilt for the death of an utter monster. "I don't want someone to die just so I can consume them."

"You're not a bad person." Thomas put his hand on my shoulder gripping my pauldron firmly as he glared at Ammit. "And you do not have to be the monster others tell you that you must be."

Ammit rolled her eyes, muttering in Goa'uld. "The Vampire doesn't even know what kind of monster you are let alone what the consequences of what he's implying might be."

"If memory serves - neither do you." I jibed back in the Goa'uld tongue, wiping the tears from the corner of my eyes. I patted Thomas' hand, replying to him with a simple - "Thank you Thomas."

"I think I might understand why Mom wanted you to watch over me." Thomas spoke calmly, swallowing as he did so. "I - I don't want to kill anyone either. I never - they didn't tell me what I was. Not the first time."

I nodded. White Court Vampires' first feeding was always fatal. In their twisted attempt at parenting, they declined to even tell their children what they were until after they'd fed upon their first victim. They wouldn't know they were monsters until it was already out of their hands to find another path.

"Thomas - you are more than what your family wants you to be." I replied. "You can be who Justine knows that you are."

Thomas pulled his hand away at the woman's name. "She''s just food."

"Thomas." I sighed, the argument ages old for me even if it was a fresh concept for my brother.

"She can't be more than food, Warden." Thomas looked at Ammit. "Are we done? Can I go?"

"Top button." Ammit pointed to the controls to the right of the door and waited for him to leave. She considered the creature as he departed. "Warden. Why am I with you?"

"Ammit?" I looked at the goddess in confusion.

"Why am I with you? You don't approve of my hunger. You hate the pantheons. You've done everything in your power to erase the Goa'uld. Why am I with you?" Ammit replied calmly. "You trust me as a General in your armies. You let me plan your campaigns. Never once have you asked me for any proof of loyalty. Why?"

"You've been straight with me, Ammit. You've never lied to me. You do what I ask. You help my people." The Eater of Sin was as close to a "friend" as one could expect from a supernatural predator. Sure she was a monster, but she was my monster.

"Then why are lying to me at every chance you get?" The Goddess exhaled long and slow. "Oh - I know you've told me the truth, or as much of if as you feel safe sharing with me. But at a certain point, Warden, even you have to realize that I'm tolerating your eccentricity. "

"Ammit - there are things I can't tell you. There are things too dangerous for you to know." I winced at the genuine hurt in her voice. "It isn't that I don't trust you. I just can't tell you."

"You can't tell your Generals, but you can tell the Winter Queen." Ammit replied mockingly. "Warden, the only reason we're on this hell world is because Mab told Titania what you told her. I am not entirely devoid of the ability to follow the course of events unfolding around me."

"I have to be selective in what I share." I replied firmly.

"If you had elected to share with us that the Summer Lady was going to try to kill all life on the First World, we could have made preparations. I could have found weapons - mustered armies. We could have planned to bring tracking devices with us so that Ul'tak could bring a fleet to rescue us and siege Buyan." The goddess gestured to her potion making kit. "We know things you do not. The only way for you to exploit that knowledge requires that you share information with us."

"Ammit, even the most basic information could be catastrophic." I hated hurting her feelings, but there was nothing for it. "I can't be incautious with what I know."

Ammit's eyes shone with the deadly threat of her truth-sight. "Warden… are you from the future?"

I froze, terrified to speak. "Ammit… I can't answer that."

"No wonder!" Ammit groaned. "Blood of Apep, you're worried that you're going to cause a paradox that will prevent you from ever coming back in time! Are you from the past or the future? No - never mind, don't answer that. I can't know."

She looked at the closed door in horror. "Warden - no-one can know about this. None of your followers. Paradox is of limited threat to the events that brought you to this point, but the knowledge of how to travel the river of time is a jealousy sought secret of Eden from the Folly. The System Lords would unite against us as surely as they united against my brother's madness after the Terms."

"Ammit - why, why are you protecting me?" I blinked in confusion, looking at the giant saurian creature.

"Warden, my brother's throne chooses who it allows to sit upon it. It is not in the habit of selecting those who are unworthy." She got a far off look in her eye, her voice tainted with sorrow. "Anubis wasn't able to even touch his own creation - not at the end."

She shook her head, exhaling loudly as she waggled her saurian jowls. Her eyes flashed as though she were angry to have indulged in nostalgia. "You are the Advocate. I am the Executioner. I am not waiting another five millennia to find your replacement."

"I - I'm sorry for not trusting you Ammit." I replied, considering it for only half a moment before insisting. "But there is no way in hell I'm telling Enlil."

"Blood of Apep - no!" Ammit scoffed at the idea of it. "He'd jump out of the moving transport just to be away from the implication he might have tacitly aligned himself with a Chronomancer."

"Why are the Goa'uld afraid of Chronomancy?" I furrowed my brow. "I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a rational fear - but I've never heard it vocalized."

"The Fisherman and the Scholar mostly." Ammit scratched at her chin with a Talon. "I never met them myself. Never had cause - even at the end they seemed content to leave me be."

"Ah." That made sense, suppose. Goa'uld history was littered with apocryphal references to a group of vengeful spirits or demons that were apparently disjointed from time. Killing them seemed to only come at a horrific personal cost and they always - and I mean always - seemed to come back to life. I hadn't figured out what specific kind of creatures they were, but their primary demonic motivators were the "Fisherman and the Scholar."

The only fact that seemed to be a certainty about them was that they hunted the Goa'uld at the height of their power. God only knew if I'd find out enough about them before they came for me. With my luck they were already looking to kill me.

I was lost in that troubling thought when Ammit leaned in close to me, sniffing me twice before saying. "You weren't lying to to the Vampire when you said that you hadn't intended to conduct the ritual."

"No." I answered honestly, looking into her eyes as they glowed a violent viridian.

"You honestly don't want power, do you?" Ammit replied incredulously, her voice boiling with disappointed mirth. "All that bullshit about using power responsibly and being defined by right and righteous action. You're not just manipulating your followers. You believe that shit."

"I do." I nodded.

Ammit devolved into uproarious laughter as she slumped against the wall. She pinched her nose between her talons, hiccuping with joy. "Oh - oh this is too good. The System Lords are going to spend years looking for a plot that doesn't exist. They can't expose a lie that isn't there."

"I'm not trying to make worshippers." I insisted.

"Ra would have liked you, Warden." Ammit stood up from the wall, walked over to me and tousled my hair. "It is a pity he never met you."

"I've never actually heard anyone talk about him." It was odd. He'd been the unquestioned hegemonic leader of the Goauld for longer than human history but I knew as little about him as I knew about the Folly.

"He was a good man. Or, he wanted to be, I suppose." Ammit lamented, her voice somber. "The King of Gods does not often have the luxury of kindness, even if he might wish it. You'll understand as you grow into being a god."

"I don't want to be a god." I replied softly, almost ashamed to say it aloud. "I never asked for any of it. I just want to be a good man."

"Warden," Ammit laughed. "Nobody would ever actually want to be a god if they understood the truth of it. That's just sanity."

"I kinda got the vibe that most Goa'uld wanted to be gods."

"Nobody has ever accused my people of being sane."