The Black Madonna (The Mystique Trilogy)

by Traci Harding

  Mathu nearly choked. ‘If they have, that means we fail, as Meridan won’t be here to unite the rod and ring.’

  Lugh nodded. ‘There would be no chance of an Anu rescue then, as the failure to bring the sphere down into Earth by the end of the SAC alignment would send the Signet Grid offline, and the physical world and the astral world will again be cut off.’

  ‘And we have no way of telling to what time in the future Amenti’s staff have been sent?’ I asked.

  Lugh shook his head slowly.

  ‘And so it unfolds,’ Killian, said, getting paler by the second. ‘They have been sent to 2976.’

  Mathu gasped, knowing this year all too well. ‘The end of the Kali rift; the year of Earth’s final destruction.’

  ‘If they are in the future when we have lost and the Signet Grid is offline, then there is no chance they can get back to us!’ I began to pace as I pondered how I might rescue the Amenti team. ‘And I’ll bet my bloodthirsty brethren will be waiting to milk our staff mates of their pure angelic essence, and then it truly will be game over.’

  I stopped pacing, having decided on the best course of action. ‘As we seem to have lost all our double agents in Irkalla, I volunteer myself for the job.’

  Everyone protested at once.

  ‘I will go, and I’ll wait until my staff show up,’ I insisted.

  ‘That’s nearly a thousand years,’ Mathu appealed. ‘It will be too late to bring down the Sphere of Amenti by then, and all will be lost anyway.’

  ‘The pendulum of time swings both ways,’ I reminded him. ‘I can come back.’

  ‘How will you do that?’ He was desperate for me to reconsider.

  ‘I’ll have a millennium to figure that out,’ I said, and looked at Killian, who nodded sadly. ‘So this event was also prophesied?’ I asked him.

  Again he nodded, with a look of utter devastation on his face. He waved me closer, and I approached and leaned in close so he could have a quiet word.

  ‘None of this is your fault,’ he said, far more emotionally than seemed warranted, but then I suspected there was much that he knew about the future that he wasn’t prepared to share. ‘I know what I must do and what you must do, and I want you to know that we forgive you.’

  I could tell the sentiment was heartfelt and had to wonder what it was that I would do in the future to warrant such a sincere absolution. We forgive you? Who else did he mean? Still, as he’d made a point of keeping the information quiet, I didn’t question him further; besides, the man was obviously exhausted.

  ‘Keep doing what you have been doing,’ I said, forcing a smile, not pretending to understand what he was trying to convey to me. ‘If I do succeed eventually, I need to know that the world will be on track to host Amenti no matter when I return.’

  I wanted to ask outright if I did succeed, but refrained. Still, as Killian smiled and nodded at me, I felt encouraged.

  ‘I cannot let you go back to Ill,’ Mathu said, assuming his true form as if that would add more weight to his statement.

  ‘Listen to him,’ Ereshkigal pleaded. She knew full well what the Nefilim were capable of doing to a being’s sanity.

  ‘I have but one task to perform on this Earth and one route to follow to achieve it,’ I said. I looked to Lamhfada for further argument, but, unfettered as he was by emotion, he offered no objection and thus I knew my reasoning was sound. ‘If I don’t make it back by the eleventh hour, you will see everyone here safely into your realms,’ I requested of him.

  ‘I surely will, Your Majesty,’ he pledged.

  ‘Your last stay in Irkalla nearly destroyed us. Imagine what an extended stay will do to your sanity,’ Mathu protested, but I hushed him with a finger over his lips.

  ‘If you are to be trapped for all eternity somewhere, I would much rather it be in the Ranna time flow than in the downward spiral of the Kali rift,’ I said.

  ‘Not without you,’ he insisted.

  I decided a more private conversation was in order—and Killian offered his bedroom so that we might speak alone.

  ‘I will return, I promise you,’ I told him, gripping his face between both my hands. The confusion of my psychosis was beginning to clear and my heart opened anew to the soul who had endured so much torture in my name. ‘But before I go,’ I moved closer to him, ‘there is something I want you to do for me.’

  His eyes met mine and I didn’t have to speak the request for he knew what it was I desired.

  ‘Not like this,’ he stalled. ‘Not with you distrusting me and—’

  ‘Shhh.’ I kissed him to silence, and savoured the delight of the act. When our lips parted, Mathu was not so resistant.

  ‘Please, take me now,’ I urged him with all my heart. ‘My virtue and inexperience will only be a curse where I’m going. I need just one sweet, truthful memory of you that I may cling to in Irkalla.’

  ‘They will make you like them.’ He pressed his forehead against mine and his eyes moistened at the thought.

  ‘Not really.’ I brushed his soft silver hair from his deep soulful eyes. ‘The flame that burns violet in my heart cannot be extinguished, and that flame will always lead me back to you.’

  Mathu wanted to argue against my decision, but the more pressing need—to strip me bare and finally consummate an entire evolution’s worth of desire—took precedence. Finally, we immersed ourselves in the only truly perfect moment either of us had known in any of our lives.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE DESCENDING SPIRAL—2976 AD

  MIA DEVERE—MERIDAN

  In the liquid blackness there was no way of determining which way was up. I tumbled aimlessly around in a panic until I was finally forced to release my breath and my lungs filled with salty liquid. The water filled and bloated me, and I floated about like a sponge at the mercy of a strong tide. This was surely the depths of darkest density: it was freezing, stifling and oppressive.

  It took me some time to determine that I hadn’t died. I could still wiggle my cold, water-swollen digits and, although it got me nowhere, sway my limbs. So I floated, wondering if this was to be my fate for all time.

  A large, long entity surged past me, and in its wake I spun around furiously, until I finally ebbed to a stop. I had barely recovered my sensibilities when I felt the entity coming up underneath me again. My heart pounded in my chest so hard that I knew this was no dream or even a nightmare; it was very real.

  The motion of the entity felt fluid, like a large school of fish, and I wondered if perhaps that was what it was, for as it surged upwards, it divided, separated and circled out around me and I was again set swirling in circles, but more gently this time. Could any living thing truly exist in this place? What was its interest in me? The deep rumbling of the massive body of liquid around me was drowned out by the fast swirling sound produced by the entity, and as it spun faster it began to make a clicking sound—like metal components attaching to one another.

  After a time, the clicking stopped and everything went silent. There was a whooshing sound, like a vacuum below me, and my body lowered with the water level to come to rest upon a solid metal grate. As the fluid drained from around me, a bank of lights came on; even though they were quite dim, the glare was blinding. I turned on my side and vomited a massive amount of seawater from my lungs, windpipe and stomach.

  Nostrils and throat abraded from the effort of my purge, I pulled myself to a seated position, rubbed my eyes and finally looked around. I was in a small metal pod, just big enough to sit cross-legged in.

  Meridan. It spoke to me in my husband’s voice.

  ‘Arcturus? What’s going—’

  Just sit tight, we’re bringing you in.

  He spoke over me, which led me to believe that either he couldn’t hear me or it was a recorded message, meant to set me at ease.

  But what if it’s a Nefilim trick? I asked myself.

  This is not a Nefilim trick, the recorded voice said, and I felt the little pod begin to surge through the
water.

  This kind of nanotechnology had Nefilim associations, so I feared I was being taken for a ride in more ways than one. I drew a deep breath for courage, and coughed up more seawater. What choice did I really have but to trust in the universe and be thankful to have been retrieved from the cold, dark abyss?

  The universe! The resolve stirred recollections of the meetings I’d had with my higher selves. I recalled being Meridan and her ominous warning about the outcome of the RRT: The answer lies with Kali, she has not betrayed you. An even higher source had told me: You can occupy each instance of time only once, but any time missed is open as a destination, as the pendulum of time swings both ways.

  I began to shiver violently. What has happened to us? I thought. I had never felt so wretched and betrayed. I knew within my being that during the Rainbow Round Table, under the instruction of the Sanat Kumara, we had channelled something magnificent into the Earth grid; so where had this hell come from?

  I felt sure I was frozen solid in my huddled pose by the time my little metal ice-sphere slowed to a standstill. With the sound of interlocking metal latches above, my transport was abruptly hoisted upwards for a long, long way, then stopped. All was still and silent a moment, then a thunderous metal crack startled me. The pod instantaneously dispersed into a swarm of shadows that flew off towards a storage module in the dimly lit loading bay, and I fell a short distance onto a padded landing mat.

  ‘That’s the last of them,’ said a female voice that I’d been so sure I would never hear again. Yet here it was, coming from right in front of me!

  A pair of fabulous high-heeled Gucci boots rose up and over the knees of the tall warrior woman. The rest of her form was hugged by a dark body suit made of chain mail and leather, rather risqué in design. Her hands rested upon the large buckle of her weapons belt, which was, thankfully, free of devices at present.

  ‘Ishtar?’ I said through chattering teeth and she nodded. I was confused. I thought I’d been shot back into the past, but the goddess appeared as one of the Anu. ‘I saw you leave for the Hall of Amorea,’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ she confirmed with a smile. ‘Where I sped through my spiritual healing process, thanks to you aiding me to clear my blockages naturally before leaving the physical world. En Ki gave me the green light to return and join Lugh’s taskforce here on the Earth plane as a guardian to our lord’s staff of Amenti. You didn’t really think the Lord of the Earth would allow the enemy to send you hurtling a thousand years into the future without—’

  ‘A thousand years!’ I gasped in shock.

  ‘Give or take a few hundred years.’ She crouched beside me and placed an arm around me for comfort. ‘All the other eleven staff have been retrieved and are recovering here in HC-BS-XXXV. The Sanat Kumara has seen to their safe delivery.’

  ‘Killian,’ I said with a smile, believing I had him to thank for saving our lives.

  ‘I’m afraid that Killian is long dead,’ Ishtar said sadly.

  ‘And Tamar?’

  Isthar’s expression soured. ‘She is the Queen of the Underworld. She lured Killian to his death. Lugh Lamhfada and Mathu followed her into Irkalla and have not been seen since.’

  I found myself gasping again and Ishtar rubbed my back. ‘I am not completely sensitive in emotional matters yet. If I could have delivered the news more subtly, I am sorry.’

  I shook my head, still processing it all, and shivered uncontrollably. ‘What became of Ereshkigal?’

  The hatch to the pod bay opened and the being in question stood facing me. ‘I became the leader of the resistance,’ she said, ‘whose sole purpose was to get to you before the Nefilim did and return you to the past. I owe Killian that much,’ she added sadly. ‘With your deliverance I am halfway to completing that goal.’

  I attempted to stand, but as my limbs were numb, Ishtar had to assist me. ‘What I hear about Kali can’t be true,’ I said. ‘During the RRT I spoke to my higher self who told me that the answer lies with my daughter and that she has not betrayed us.’

  Ereshkigal strode up close and looked straight into my eyes. ‘Oh, I can assure you that she has betrayed us, over and over again.’

  ‘But why—’

  ‘Because she has lost her mind!’ the warrior-like Ereshkigal hollered at me.

  ‘Ereshkigal, are you trying to confuse the issue?’ Arcturus entered through the pod-bay hatch. He was bedraggled from the quantum leap into the future, but to my eyes he’d never appeared more handsome.

  ‘Damn all these emotions,’ Ereshkigal said, stepping away to compose herself. ‘However do you control them? I’ve been attempting to master the emotional bandwidth for centuries now and I still fail miserably. My apologies, Meridan, for I owe you much.’

  I hugged and kissed my husband, revelling in his body heat. ‘I’d say we’re square,’ I assured Ereshkigal, for I was deeply thankful for all she had done in order to save us.

  ‘We need to talk.’ Arcturus held me at arm’s length to assess my well-being. ‘And you look like you could use some warming up.’

  He rubbed my arms in an attempt to stop me shivering, then put his arm around me and guided me out of the pod bay and into a corridor with large windows along one side that gave a very high-angle view of the world. Sunshine poured into the enclosed walkway and I hurried over to bask in the warmth. After my time in the murky, wet darkness, to be warmed by the sun was quite simply a dream come true. Still, as I observed the dark, stormy planet below that had once been my home, my heart sank.

  ‘We’re only a thousand years in the future,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think all this devastation happened until much later in Earth’s history?’

  ‘That was before we went back and changed events in 2003,’ Arcturus said as he came to stand alongside me. ‘Our actions prompted the Nefilim to develop their electromagnetic technologies faster, and events sped up. One of their ionospheric heating experiments went horribly wrong, resulting in a fireball in the ionosphere over the North Pole. The solar furnace melted the icy wasteland in a quantum blink of an eye.’

  That explained the massive flooding I could see below. I gasped at the thought of what the event must have been like for the unsuspecting souls still living on the surface of the Earth. ‘It’s Atlantis all over again.’

  ‘They say the glare of the explosion was seen all over world…and that it was the last light the remaining inhabitants of the Earth ever saw.’

  ‘Was everyone lost?’ My heart ached for all those we had failed.

  ‘Many enlightened souls were evacuated to the Inner Earth cities and, in future, they will come to occupy these sub-bases, which have been constructed beneath what is termed a—’

  ‘Terraform island,’ I said, realising that Levi had already explained all this to me.

  Arcturus was surprised by my knowledge. ‘The project was the brainchild of Ereshkigal, or at least she devised an elemental process known as—’

  ‘Hypercording.’ I surprised him again.

  ‘Is there anything you don’t know?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know where the rest of the staff are.’

  My Amenti staff suit had dried and repaired itself during my moment in the sun and now I felt ready to do something about correcting this blow the Nefilim had dealt us and the rest of the inhabitants of the Earth.

  My husband smiled broadly at my resolve. ‘This way.’

  The complex was largely unoccupied, as were all the terraform substations at present, for they were still in the primordial stages of their accelerated development. Moving around from substation to substation to check on the progress of the terraforms was what had kept Ereshkigal and her small band of Anu warriors sane during the long wait for the arrival of the staff of Amenti. They were the only beings on surface Earth that had managed to slip under the Nefilim radar.

  Arcturus and I entered the boardroom, where the rest of our teammates were listening intently to Denera. We sank quietly into a seat each to listen to the a
bysmal account of our enemy’s accomplishments in our absence.

  ‘The Nefilim and Dracon gained access to the Halls of Amenti, and the breach in security prompted the universal stargate system to shut down,’ Denera explained. ‘This event effectively sealed off humanity from the protection of all the guardian races. All the evolutions taking place in every harmonic universe above ours have become stifled, for they are unable to fulfil the natural evolutionary process of ascension without the soul minds of their soul group trapped here in the Kali rift. This has always been the core motivation behind the Old World Order’s continuing Grail Quest—they believed they needed to possess the Rod and Ring of Power in order to accomplish their objective of claiming Earth and the Amenti stargates.’

  I feared I’d missed something. ‘But if I’m the only person on Earth capable of forming the key, then how could they have gained access to Amenti?’

  ‘Kali,’ Denera said sadly.

  Again, I was lost. ‘But even she can’t—’

  ‘You are the only being on Earth with the power to create the key, but even independent of each other the ring and the rod are very powerful,’ Denera enlightened me, ‘and Kali knew this. Although she couldn’t form the key herself, she commanded Lugh Lamhfada to bring the items to her.’

  ‘My daughter is still on our side.’ I felt it in my heart.

  ‘Tell that to Killian, Lamhfada and Mathu,’ Ereshkigal said, joining our council.

  ‘Why would my higher self lie to me?’ I insisted. ‘Kali knows that once she has us back, we can use the Staff of Amenti to go back in time and change all of this.’

  ‘She might have known that once upon a time…’ Ereshkigal sounded hesitant to concede even that much. ‘But I fear that she forgot her objective and allies centuries ago.’

  ‘Many thought the same of you once,’ Dexter commented, but Ereshkigal’s opinion was not to be swayed.

  ‘Whether Kali remembers or not is irrelevant. Going back without her is a complete farce. She must come back with us,’ Denera concluded, putting an end to the speculation.