Seershipping (Isis Ishtar x Priestess Aishisu) for Round 11 of The Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest. WARNINGS: Yuri, kissing, general weirdness. Don't like, don't read.
Disclaimer: Saying I own YGO is like saying that Ken Jennings just won a million dollars. Noooooo.
Summary: AU. The people laughed at her, mocked her, watched her and disapproved. "What a useless gift it is to be able to see into the past!" they said, and she cried.
Notes: The Air of Niger is a mountain range located in the western Sahara. This is set loosely in Ancient Egypt. A trilithon looks like the pi symbol; don't kill me when the Egyptians start throwing around that term. xD Finally, please withhold any comments and/or thoughts on the writing style and confusion between the characters until you have finished the fic. Enjoy!
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Air of Niger
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Magic, the people whispered. Magic. What is this strange thing?
The girl walked among them with eyes blank as the sky, clothes torn and tattered but shoulders back, head high, not seeing them but another world. I have the magic, she said as light glowed on her forehead and in her palms and along the lines of her veins. It runs through me.
Magic, the village said, tasting the word, turning it over, like a dog presented with an unfamiliar meat for dinner. What is this magic?
It is power, the girl said simply, words flowing cool like water from her lips. It is the power to do anything I want, to control everything in the world, to control everyone. It is the power to move mountains and wash away the desert with the fire from the oceans to the north.
Dangerous, the people murmured. This magic sounds dangerous. It sounds evil.
The girl nodded, and her eyes did not see. It is evil, and it is good too, she answered them, speaking as the sun rose and the sun set and the stars and moon blurred into streaks of white above. It is everything.
We are not magic, the people snapped.
No, the girl agreed softly. You are not.
Why is it that you are, then? they demanded.
I take my magic from the dead, she said, from the good spirits and the bad sprits and the demons who wander the desert at night.
We want the power too, said the children, hopping around her and staring with open wonder at the gold that shimmered around her in the light of the high noon sun, and she did not look back. She did not look at any of them.
You can't have it, she said instead. Only I can have it.
Why not? the children asked.
Because I am the only one who can wield the power fully, she answered. If anyone else does, if anyone else after me tries to take it, then they will not survive. Their souls will become part of the underworld, part of the demons, and they will be like that forever.
The children shrank back; the village shrank back and regarded her warily, suspicion in their eyes. Then why should we let you stay? the village asked. If you cannot give this magic to anyone, then how can we know that it will be useful to us?
I see all of time, the girl said, not answering them, letting them search for the answers in her words. I see the past and the present and the future.
The village parted for her, and she walked through it.
Later, the village told tales of a girl in tattered clothing with long black hair and eyes that were the blue of the sky, and they said, This was a girl who saw the world of the gods.
The children told their children stories of a girl with a gold eye glowing on her forehead and a gold eye glowing in a necklace clasped around her throat, and they said, This was a girl who could stand against the dead.
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Isis ran across the sand-dirt that tore and whipped at the soles of her feet and the bare skin of her ankles. It was hot still from the merciless, dry glare of the daytime; the sand took hours to cool, and the sun had left the horizon not fifteen minutes ago. The faint orange glow of its rays still lit up the western sky, casting long black shadows onto the ground; the sky of the east was dark and blue, night creeping across it with languidly stretching fingers.
She glanced back at the empty desert behind her, stretching on further than the eye could see and almost curving downward, as if the cities she had passed were tumbling slowly to the edge of the world, their foundations slipping and sliding in silence.
There was nobody there.
The cliffs rose in jagged lines and spotted shadows before her, rocks balancing precariously in between others and on precipices, waiting to fall. The entrance to the passageway between them was marked by two stones, rounded by time, with one looking like a table positioned on top—like an unbalanced arch of sorts, positioned strategically to welcome anyone in.
Isis could hear the whispers of the demons there, hiding in caves and hollows in the stone, waiting for visitors to pass by and the chance to take over a body and live once more. She had heard that the skeletons of the unfortunate ones who had passed through littered the path that led straight into the mountains, the remains of the demons who had driven their new bodies to exhaustion and forgotten what it was to inhabit a human.
She had heard, but she had not seen.
She took a tentative step closer, breaths sharp and painful as they parched her throat further, and she listened to the sound of the wind whispering through cracks in the rock and making its way down, down, down into the earth. There were tales of vast cities underneath these mountains, built by fairies and ghosts alike, and there were also tales of burial pits and lakes of molten fire, remnants of a war of the supernatural gone wrong.
Once, the Lord of the Underworld was fighting an ice demon from the Seventeenth Hill, and the demon tipped over the lord's cauldron and set fire to the land beneath, burning the farms there into ashes and the grass into barren desert. Once, there was a rebel leader who wished to usurp Heaven, and swore that he would climb the clouds themselves to reach Heaven's palace. But he fell.
Once, there was a girl who was born with a golden brand on her forehead that her mother covered up with makeup, thinking it was disfiguring. That brand was in the shape of an eye, and the girl saw the truth.
When she was not six inches away from entering the passage between the cliffs, the howls of the monsters there grew louder, drowning out the shriek of the wind over the desert dunes. These were the mountains that no traveler had yet passed through and returned from safely; these were the mountains that killed, that took in passerby and left them to the ghosts, that formed the impenetrable boundary between her homeland and the west.
The sun's light, left over from the day, was shining still in her eyes, beaming in trickles and rivulets of gold-orange between cracks in the rock, peppering the dark wall before her with spots of brightness. It spilled over the path before her, welcoming her in as it tumbled over the rocks and came to a rest at her feet, there yet not quite present.
If she waited longer, the night would only become darker, and with the blackness came the creatures that feared the sun, welcoming the birth of the shadows that came with each dying day.
She stepped forward, and a rush of cold air enveloped her and knocked her on her back, sprawling her body across the invisible line between the inside and the outside of the cliffs.
Isis choked on the dust that had been kicked up by her fall, legs shivering as violently as if she had lain outside for hours during the winter, her arms burning under the gaze of the final rays of the sun. She lay there, frozen in place, as the day turned to night and the whispers began.
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"Ah."
"What?" Mahaad said, his stylus pausing over his paper as he looked up. When he saw that she had her eyes open and was almost automatically fingering the heavy golden necklace at her throat, he left his papers at his desk and went over to her, sitting on the bench by her side. "What did you see?"
"I'm not sure," Isis said honestly, unfolding her legs and fingers moving to reach for her own papers lying on the bench next to her. "It was a strange vision, certainly..." She tapped the stylus against the clay thoughtfully before beginning to draw a map of Egypt, tracing the path of the Nile down the right of the tablet and marking off dots on the left carefully.
Mahaad glanced over. "You saw a map?"
She shook her head. "No, I saw someone traveling across a map—over long distances actually, but I know where they are in relation to other parts of Egypt." She began sketching triangles that formed a meandering chain of mountains in the center of the desert, observing what she had so far before slashing a straight line through them. "It's strange, though," she continued, taking another tablet and starting to write. "I usually see myself doing these things; this time, I saw another person."
"Not for the first time, though," Mahaad pointed out, watching her intently. "You warned us of the Thief King's advance and had not seen a vision of yourself then."
"That was important," Isis said. "Then, I had thought that it was the gods warning me of this so the Pharaoh would know and prepare, but this is not vital to the future of the country." She paused, hand hovering over the tablet, before drawing something like a trilithon in the center. "In fact, I would say that it will not even happen in the near future."
"Do you mean during the reign of the next Pharaoh?" Mahaad asked uneasily. It was near blasphemy to speak of the next Pharaoh's ascension when the present one had not any sons, and there were always slaves in the gardens, waiting to hear whatever bit of gossip the priest and priestess could provide.
Isis shook her head. "No, I mean hundreds of years in the future. Perhaps even a thousand."
Mahaad frowned. "Then why...?"
She shrugged and set her stylus down, handing the tablet to him. "I don't know."
Mahaad looked at what she had drawn—first a map of Egypt, mountains rising jagged and impassable in the west, then a pass between two walls of a valley of a mountain, elevated high and lonely on a plateau. The path there was empty of life, simply stone and more stone laid down in blocks that almost could have been paving, and an unstable-looking trilithon that marked off its beginning. It meandered past fallen stones and was at times completely blocked-off, disappearing behind the rubble of a rockslide that seemed to form a ledge that obstructed the view of the rest of the valley.
"Those mountains are here," Isis said, pointing to a spot in the center of the first map.
"Why is someone traveling over there?" Mahaad asked. "And who did you see?"
She paused for a long time before answering, and when she did, her voice was quiet. "It was a girl with blue eyes, and she was searching for..."
"For what?" Mahaad prompted.
Isis took the tablet out of his hands and absently tapped one of the cave entrances that she had drawn in the cliff. "For the truth."
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We don't believe you, said the city, said the priests, and the girl followed them, desperate. We don't, the city said again, with its people's aristocratic heads turned away and silken, embroidered robes swishing just over the dry brown-yellow of the desert sand. Nobody has had this gift for years and years, and why should you, village girl, peasant girl, have it when all the priests of Egypt do not?
The girl pushed past the crowd, pushed past the door, and entered the cool white and gold and blue of the Pharaoh's court. The people whispered, backed away from her nerve as if she carried bad luck with her, and let her be.
Who are you? asked the priests, and she answered, I don't know.
Do you have magic? asked the priests, and she answered, I don't know.
What do you see? asked one, and she answered, I see half of time.
They took her in, tested her, studied her and her gift, and finally, they told her, You have magic.
What is my magic? she wanted to know, and they said with eyes uncertain and shifting toward each other, toward the throne of the Pharaoh who was not there, toward Ra's dying rays in the western sky, You see the past.
Not the future? she said, disappointment in her eyes.
They shook their heads, sorrow in their faces and something like curiosity there too, like bewilderment directed toward whatever gods had given her this odd gift. They did not question the judgment of the gods, they reassured her that her Sight could have a purpose, but she did not believe them. And the people did not believe them.
What a useless gift, the people laughed, and the girl cried. What a useless gift, what a waste of magic, what a joke it is to see into the past!
What can the past do for us? the city asked her, and she could not answer. Will the past warn of thieves and the Sea People and great victories and invasions to the north and south? Will the past feed the poor and quell the rich and guide the Pharaoh in his war campaigns?
Go back to your poor village far upstream of the Nile, back to the boundary between Egypt and Nubia, back where you cannot bother us, they commanded, and she trembled.
What if I were to find some use for the past? she asked them at last and they quieted briefly to listen to the words of this worthless girl, this girl with the gift that could do nothing. Would you take me in then?
The people peered at her, examined her, tilted her heads and disapproved. They asked why she wanted so badly to live in the capital, where the poor like her could do nothing but wallow in the streets where the others of their kind, and she did not respond. It cannot be a reason then, they declared, watching her on the knees of her frayed tunic in the midst of the gold and intricately carved stone of the royal court. It is no reason at all.
Crazy girl, the children mocked when she left the palace in defeat, pattering after her with dirty feet and poking her as if she were a new toy as she walked. The crazy girl knows nothing.
She spun around then, whirled on them with anger born of hurt, and they backed away from the trembling of her hands and the subtle glow of the Eye of Wdjat on her forehead, lit golden and shimmering by the rays of the setting sun.
The crazy girl is cursed, they cried, and they disappeared.
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"Will you take me back?" Isis insisted. The hem of her tunic was frayed, her hair uncut and tumbling—uncombed, too—over her shoulders.
"Back?" the priest said. "You were never here before."
Isis's fingers shook, and she clenched them into fists despite the nervousness twisting in her stomach, and tried to look determined. "I was."
"Not in this life," another priest said, and she nodded in agreement.
"Not in this life."
"We will take you back," the Pharaoh agreed at last, and she turned, surprised, because he had not spoken to her before, only watched as his advisers analyzed the nature of her gift. "But it is not us you need to convince, because the people will accept you so easily."
Isis bowed low to him, not caring about the way the tattered sleeves of her tunic showed her famine-thinned arms and shoulders. She backed out of the hall and began running, past the crowds of people, past the streets and houses and gardens, past the gates of the capital city.
She didn't stop running until night fell.
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The desert lost its heat quickly once the sun was well below the horizon, and the winds blew unheeded by trees and brush across the vast expanse of the sands. Isis shivered, cold on both ends of her body now, and squeezed her eyes shut against the dust carried by the breeze. The moon had not yet risen, the land was dark, and she lay helpless on the ground as the demons and ghosts woke.
The darkness rippled before her, the ground shifting beneath her body and the desert turning even quieter than it had been before. The whispers of the shadows ceased suddenly, silence falling thick and heavy over her ears, and her breathing sounded muffled and far away even to her.
The wind became a hiss, words falling from it like droplets splashed by a child carrying a bucket of water, and she listened.
Human.
Human?
Alive?
Mine.
Mine!
Isis shuddered, cold wind blowing over her and pushing her hair back from her face, dust settling lightly onto her skin. The whispers neared, paused, and began again.
MINE!
"Get away from her," another voice said—a man's voice, cold and unyielding and calm. A hand reached down and grasped her by the shoulder, and Isis gasped as she felt the immobility in her limbs loosen. "She's mine."
Isis scooted back from the entrance to the path between the cliffs as soon as she could move her legs, breaths quickening in relief as the mass of shadows felt at the air and receded as if they had hit an invisible barrier. "Thanks," she said, and glanced up to see who had saved her.
A man with a shock of white hair and a tattered red cloak that billowed around him nodded. "The mountains don't often have visitors," he said quietly. "Not many are willing to come here, and less are willing to enter. Or"—his expression was amused—"attempt to enter. Why didn't you try to escape before?"
"I couldn't," Isis said. "I couldn't move."
The man raised an eyebrow. "Interesting."
Isis stood, eyeing the passage warily. "How do we pass through it?"
He gave her a look that clearly said he thought she was insane. "Why would you want to enter it again when you barely escaped? The demons know you now; they won't hesitate this time."
"Because." The word came out as a whisper, and Isis coughed. "Because I need to go past it."
"Why?" the man insisted.
"I don't know," she admitted.
"Are you searching for something?" he asked.
She hesitated before nodding. "Yes."
"You won't find it here, then," he said harshly, face illuminated in spots of white and black from the quarter moon that had risen without Isis's notice. Their clothes, once colorful and bright, were nothing but slashes of gray across their bodies, the sand below their feet silvery and slick. The light spilled in pools of molten metal over the cliffs, and the shadows were silent. "This isn't a place to search for the truth."
"As good a place as any," Isis said softly.
"There's deception everywhere here," he said stubbornly, but nevertheless jerked his chin toward the side of a cliff when he saw the resolve on her face. "But if you insist, come along."
"What's your name?" Isis asked as he ducked underneath a stone lintel and entered a chamber within the cliffs.
"Bakura," he said, and turned and grabbed her by the arm. His hand was burning hot against her skin, eyes gleaming red and contrasting sharply with the black and white of their surroundings. His mouth stretched into a grotesque smile, and he began dragging her through the passage, past widening stone walls and darkened corners that seemed to shrink back as he progressed.
"Let me go—" She struggled against him, bracing herself against the wall and prying his fingers off her wrist, running the opposite direction once she was free.
The rock blurred past her eyes as she took turns blindly through the caves, not caring where she would end up, not caring how many of the night creatures she encountered; there were dozens of feet of rock high above her head, dozens of feet of rock waiting to tumble onto her, and miles and miles of stone still to go before the mountains ended and she could travel past them.
I trusted him, she realized, and for some reason, tears blurred her eyes and she wiped them hastily away. I didn't know—I couldn't see—
These mountains were not where her journey would end.
Isis closed her eyes and slept.
Her body kept running.
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The city whispered, watched, pointed as the girl with her fine white dress and blue eyes closed made her way through the streets, toward the palace, with a golden necklace dangling from her fingers. Look, they whispered, look at the one with magic. Look, for there has not been one like her for years, and there will not be for many more.
But what if she is lying? came the other voice, the suspicious voice, and the whispers increased in volume.
The girl walked past the guards, past the gates of the palace, and came to a stop in the Pharaoh's court. She knelt, held up the necklace, and waited.
Where did you find this? they asked, and she answered, I don't know.
The city murmured.
Will you train here? they asked, and she answered, I will.
Don't interfere with the future, they told her, years later, stern and disapproving and unyielding despite the chastised tears in her eyes. The future is the future; it is what will happen and what must happen, and do you know why you never see the outcome of a battle, only the events leading up to it? It is because it has not yet happened, because the Pharaoh will prevent it before it does, and it is too uncertain for it to be seen. The future is set in stone.
But I've seen something, she insisted. Something important.
Important to the country? they said, disapproving.
She paused. No, she said, important to me.
Don't interfere, they repeated, and she nodded.
But she did not agree.
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"What do you see?" Mahaad asked again.
Isis opened her eyes and sighed, tapping her fingers against the bench. "The same thing. The girl in my last vision, running through the cliffs. She was still searching, still looking for something, but I don't think she found it." She paused thoughtfully. "No, she hasn't found it. Not yet."
"Why do you think you're seeing her?" Mahaad said.
"I'm not sure," Isis admitted. She bit her lip but plowed forward nonetheless, words rushed as she attempted to speak them before Mahaad interrupted her: "But she was in trouble, she was about to enter that place and be killed, so I—"
"You can't interfere with your visions," Mahaad said sharply. "We told you this, many years ago; have you forgotten it? This is the one thing you cannot do, Isis! It weakens your magic, saps at your strength, and you were not—"
"Not what?" Isis interrupted, staring up at him in surprise. "You haven't told me this in my training before, Mahaad; what am I not supposed to do?" Her hand crept up to the golden necklace at her throat unwillingly, fingers worrying at it and rolling the metal between them.
"You were not born to this gift," he said. "You were not the first, and only the first has the greatest power, the greatest knowledge. Only the first can do everything that the Sight demands and survive it. You have been taught and trained without this knowledge, because if you were to know, you would not have accepted."
"What's so bad about it, though?" Isis frowned. "So what if I have to channel my power through this necklace; so what if I'm not as powerful as my predecessors? I can still carry out my job; I can still protect the Pharaoh."
"You will not live through it," Mahaad said softly. "Your soul will not go on to the afterlife; you will be trapped here, in the cliffs that you saw and drew in the vision before this one, with the demons who were chasing that girl."
"Oh," Isis whispered. "Oh."
She remained sitting on the bench as Mahaad stood and left her there, fingers tracing over the tablet that she had marked the previous day. Her head bowed, eyes following the lines of her drawing, she thought of the girl she had seen in her vision, and she planned.
Don't interfere with the future.
She decided, and the future shifted.
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Isis woke to find herself sprawled on her back in the center of a cave, staring up at the swirls of black and white that lit its ceiling. She blinked another time, coughed, and felt the smooth stone of the blood beneath her fingers, cold and unyielding.
"Hi."
Isis sat up quickly, looking to her right and seeing a girl her age sitting there, wearing a dress the tan color of Isis's own that fell in soft billows and waves at her feet. "Who are you?"
"My name is Isis," the girl said.
"So is mine." Isis frowned at her.
"That's interesting," the girl—Isis—said simply.
"My parents named me Aishisu," Isis blurted, not quite sure what she was saying. Above, the lights flickered again, casting shifting shadows over both of them that reflected off their faces and clothes. "But I've never liked it, so everyone calls me Isis."
Isis tilted her head. "You can call me Aishisu, if you want to," she offered.
"Really?" Isis asked, surprised.
Aishisu nodded. "I don't mind."
"Who are you anyway?" Isis asked.
Aishisu said nothing, simply stared at her, and Isis, if uneasily, stared back. The light circled in gray-speckled beams, dappling their skin and clothes and washing everything in shades of monochrome. But despite this, Aishisu's eyes were blue, blue as the sky, and Isis found that she could not look away.
"I've been waiting a long time," Aishisu said finally. "I've waited years and years for you to come here, so I could save you."
"How?"
"I possessed you," she admitted, hands twisting in her lap, and Isis caught a glimpse of something flashing around her neck as the light shivered once more. "First to try to make you leave, and then so you could escape Bakura."
"Why?" Isis said, picking at loose threads in her clothing and seeing the way the lights, the spots of black and white, made Aishisu's look equally disheveled as hers with its tatters and rips.
Aishisu shrugged. "I don't know." She scooted closer to Isis, the hem of her dress trailing pale and unearthly against the stone floor, closer still until their shoulders were pressed together and their faces less than an inch apart. She leaned further in, breath still and silent, until their eyelashes were touching and their lips brushing, and she kissed her.
Isis leaned back against her hands, bracing herself on the stone floor, and sucked in a breath, feeling her fingers begin to burn, heat spreading up her arms and down her neck and to the rest of her body—not a blushing burn, not a pleasant burn, but the full-out burn of fire, the burn of the sun, the burn of molten gold scattering to cover her skin.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out—her lips had been sealed to Aishisu's, and they were immobile—but her eyes snapped open. What are you doing?
Aishisu's hands came up to rest on her shoulders, gently pushing her back. You came here with a question. I'm going to answer it.
The stone floor hit her back with a thud, hard and unyielding, and Isis closed her eyes and let herself burn.
She let herself disappear.
She drank in the freedom, drank in the power, drank in the magic.
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She woke up outside the cliff face, outside the trilithon stones that marked its entrance. It had rained, the miraculous, saving rain that came so infrequently to Egypt; her clothes were damp and gritty with bits of sand, but she didn't care.
Her hair was matted against her shirt, her bare feet stung when she turned and began running to the east, but she did not feel the pain. The sun rose, golden rays shining directly into her eyes, and Isis smiled, glancing down toward the puddles that she was making her way through.
Her reflection smiled back, broken and shattered by the ripples caused by her steps, and she looked at the sun and laughed as Egypt was washed away.
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You have come back, the city whispered, the priests whispered, staring at the girl with her long black hair and blue eyes and clothing that was all the more torn from her long journey. The people murmured, wary, stepped away from the girl; crazy, the children whispered. She is crazy. She is cursed.
I have come back, the girl agreed, eyes lifting to meet those of the priests and the Pharaoh without heed, without fear. The gold-white palace shone in the afternoon sun, sending glittering silvery reflections spinning around the room and into the sky. The city watched, and the people talked among themselves of water falling from the clouds and miracles and the slick mud-thatch walls of their homes, dripping to nothing after the rain.
So what have you found? asked a man, a particularly bold man, with his eyebrows a slash of black on his disbelieving face. You are a girl with a useless gift, you are a girl who is a waste of magic; what purpose have you found for the past?
The girl turned to him, smiled a lopsided, blind smile with pale lips. The people shuddered and moved another few feet back, avoiding her. I have learned that the past is dead, she said, and the city laughed at her again.
We know that, they said, people crowding around her, crowding around the entrance to the palace, shouting in their anger that was half fear. We know that the past is dead, and that is why your magic cannot be used—because it is dead magic, dark magic, and it has no purpose for us.
I have learned, the girl repeated, and they fell silent to hear, that those who are in the past, who are not alive now, are at peace.
At peace? the people whispered. At peace? Not all, they said. What of those whose hearts are eaten by Am'mit, those who do not pass the Judging, those who become the ghosts who haunt the desert and the mountains far to the west?
Even those, the girl said.
Even those? the city repeated, suspicious.
She nodded, the sunlight casting shards of yellow onto the land, reflecting off the puddles that lay sprawled across the ground. And I have learned that the lands at peace, the people at peace, are much more apt to change.
Change, the city whispered. Why change, if they are happy?
She shook her head, black hair falling over her shoulders and resting along her neck. They change because they are happy, because happiness is not bliss for all of eternity.
Then what? they asked her again. What can we do with this knowledge?
The girl straightened, ragged clothes hanging in threads off her shoulders. I know now. I know that to die is to change. I know everything. Her smile widened, eyes staring off into the horizon that glowed white with the heat haze, and the people watched her and murmured.
You are different now, the Pharaoh observed. Who are you?
She lowered her gaze to him but did not see him, still with that empty smile, hands limp at her sides, face blank as the flat blue of the sky. I am Isis, she said. I am Aishisu.
She bowed to the Pharaoh, bowed to the people, and they let her pass through them in silence. They let her walk away, walk past the city gates and into the desert, walk to the west once more—in the direction of the setting sun.
Later, they told tales of Aishisu, of Isis, of a girl with eyes that did not see and the ragged clothes of a peasant and gold glimmering on her forehead and at her throat.
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end
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Many thanks go to the7joker7 for beta'ing.
Reviews are loved, concrit especially, and explanations will be given if asked. Thank you for reading!