by Jean Johnson
Expanding and twisting, she snatched up the two Feyori with her thoughts, swirling them into her grasp. Ia watched them carefully as she spun them around her expanded sense of self. There, in the wake of the energies thrust aside by her vortex, were the little hyperthreads that attached each alien to their faction-allies, their favorite places.
Seizing those threads, Ia pulled. It was a variation on the summoning spark that alerted each attached Meddler that they were needed, a variation that could only succeed if the Feyori doing the summoning had access to a great deal of power. A solar flare, a massive thunderstorm, even the surface of a dying star could be used. Or an explosion caused by the catalytic conversion of tens of thousands of metric tons of purified water fused into a muddled, white-hot plasma of pure hydrogen and supercharged oxygen.
When each Feyori popped into range, dragged there by her summons, she grabbed their threads and yanked. Grabbed those threads and pulled. Grabbed the next set and tugged. Four degrees out was all the strength she had to spare for her task, and only with the first cycle’s worth of Meddlers did she literally pull any of them through the aether of hyperspace.
But the others came out of alarm and curiosity and boredom as she summoned each clutch. They crowded around her, dozens, hundreds, then roughly two thousand strong, brushing through each other, bobbing in empty space. Demanding in pulses of energy and empathy and telepathy to know what was going on, even as they drank in the remnants of the explosion she had made.
Spun out to an almost tenuous level, Ia enveloped the last ones to arrive and pulled them all inward, spinning around and down, flipping everyone in, up, and out. Landing on the banks of the timestreams in her Human form, she looked at the mass of tiny silver beads clinging to her left hand. They huddled close to her skin not because they willed it, but because her will trapped them there. Ruthlessly, Ia forced them to see the verdant fields, the golden waters, the blazing-hot skies in her mind.
“Welcome to my chessboard, gentlebeings. Welcome to Time itself,” she warned them, letting the word roar across the plains like wind from a thunderstorm, letting the force of that word shift them forward by three centuries and a little more. “And if you do not faction with me…welcome to the end of your precious little Game.”
I am not fully Human, no. I admit it outright. Half of my being was conceived by the usual earthly delights, while the other half was crafted by the meddling of purified will. But I was raised to be a Human, I have lived as a Human, and I fight as a Human. And I love as a Human. With compassion for more than just my own interests. For more than my own culture. More than my own kind. I have loved from birth every person you have ever seen, regardless of species, and I love the septillions more that you won’t.
Because I am still Human, I swim in the frozen waters of my duty, lifting up others’ lives so they do not drown in the tempest-tossed storm. I burn with the raging flames of my conscience and never divert from the embers underfoot on the dangerous paths I must tread. I walk through the hellish inferno to save others’ souls, knowing that at the same time I slip down the ice-cold slopes of my lonely task with each condemned step.
I am the Prophet of a Thousand Years, the Changer of Worlds, the Meddler of Destinies, the Defender of Our Galaxy…and neither Hellfire nor Damnation will keep me from my task.
~Ia
