Chapter 25: The Golden Thread

25

Monique had spent the entirety of her childhood as a ward of the State of Illinois' Department of Child Care Services. As far back as she could recall, she had been an outcast, a second thought. She filled a space for some, serving as a warm body in a billable bed. She did nothing much else but help to make ends meet for most others, arriving on the doorsteps of strangers with a bill of sale in her pocket.

Until Askauri, no one had ever spoken to her about her worth, her true value as more than a commodity or simply someone's fantasy. He told her of unbelievable things, and then he showed them to her, took her to see far off worlds, light-years away and yet nestled right alongside this one. She saw massive and majestic kingdoms and castles and met Black men and women of true power who wielded their magics with love and compassion.

She met many others as well, finding that Black folk weren't the Incata's only inhabitants. That there were just as many ethnicities there as on Earth. Askauri's people, though, were native to the Long Plains. These were the primary lands of the First Peoples.

As she traveled through the Incata with Askauri, first as his most cherished guest, then as a harried fugitive, she learned a good many things about its many people and places. Most telling, particularly for a post-slavery African-American on a whirlwind tour of a foreign world, was the absolute lack of racial animus that she encountered. Skin tone, hair texture and ethnicity it seemed, just didn't occur to them as cause for discrimination.

There in the Incata, outside of the magical hierarchies, which prevailed above all else, the difference seemed to be in the level of respect and reverence given over to the land, to the interaction with the Source and the rich natural bounties which acted as its channels, broadcasting and amplifying its creative energies

The most fertile, the most abundant of these natural resources were to be found on the continent of the Long Plains, where Askauri's kin, the ruling family of the Askai, served as stewards of the land and therefore shared in its high regard.

They were no more special, no more pure or powerful or magical than any of the others. They simply served as an honored extension of the land upon which they lived. So long as they served, that is, with distinction and honor.

Monique had read their histories. She had studied their customs and cultures. Askauri was pleased by her interest, selfishly believing that she did so for his sake, in order to make herself more presentable, acceptable at least, before the Queen Mother.

Well, as far as she was concerned, fuck the Queen Mother.

Monique never gave a damn what Askauri's stuck up ass or his stuck up ass mother had thought of her. She was who she was. A survivor. And she was so of her own accord.

None of them could've ever imagined what it had taken for her to have made it to this point. Monique was unapologetic for that and in spite of all that she'd endured, was quite proud of the strong sense of self-determination and the strong moral code by which she lived.

Indeed, Monique could balance judgment swiftly upon the edge of a Justice's Sword. Right and wrong were clearly apparent to her and the latter offended her sensibilities. This she always assumed to be the result of a messed up childhood, which had long ago imprinted upon her the determination to never again be anyone's victim and to suffer none who would chose to victimize those she knew or loved.

The past, though, was nothing that she'd ever spent much time concerning herself with. Like her, it was what it was, and she could do nothing about it. She held no ill-will towards whoever it was that had either chosen to abandon her, or had been forced to do so through some seriously screwed up circumstances, and harbored no particular interest in an explanation.

For whatever reason, however, as she searched for her way back to Earth, looked inside to the newly discovered fount of maternal wisdom, she did consider that she had no clear recollection of either of her true parents.

She just always assumed she had been abandoned for a good reason. At least good enough for either of them. Growing up as a witness to the worst of humanity had left her sympathetic to decisions made in desperation.

Anyway, what little she did know had never had any impact on the day to day grind of her existence. What good would it have done to know that her case worker had picked her up from Decatur, IL, a little nowhere town in the middle of nowhere, when she was just three years old?

She didn't know a soul there. Knew nothing about the place beyond the fact that it attracted low level dealers from Chicago who would set up shop on weekends to sell packs of overpriced cocaine to the locals. The town, three hours south of the city, had a criminal history dating back to Al Capone, and was a good place to lay low and fill their pockets.

That is, until the locals no longer treated them like visiting celebrities. Those who overstayed their welcome or failed to establish roots were sent packing, dead or alive.

Since she'd been picked up from there, Monique could only assume that's where her mother either once lived or still did. Still, it never really mattered much. This was, after all, a woman who's name she didn't even know.

So she didn't know why she had thought of it as she opened up and slid into the space between worlds. But she did. Think of it.

She held on to the idea of it, the thought of a mother she'd never known. Had only ever wanted to know as an example of how not to show love to a child.

Perhaps it was this thought then that had led her astray.

When the demon had worked to unravel the mystery of her memories, prepping her mind to devour, he had unwittingly granted her access to layers of an ancestral history that she had yet to fully comprehend. So that what she saw as she focused her energies on the working needed to open the gateway in the Incata was a new thing within her.

She worked instinctively from this newly revealed template, accessing formerly unknown, innate abilities. She saw a Line of Matriarchy woven throughout her spiritual being like a golden thread. It lead back through the gathering weight of the past and on into the blinding infinity of the future.

She seized upon it as she folded between the two worlds with a newly acquired, natural ease. The action felt silken, almost sensuous as Monique walked out of the Incata and into a small, sparse copse of trees clinging to life alongside a once proud, now strangled river. Her body tingled, flush with pleasure.

She had no idea where she was, though. The sound of flowing water could be heard nearby. She could smell rot, the foul odor squelching up from the mud at her feet.

“Where are we?” Jo-Mel asks, looking around slowly as she draws her blade. “This is not where the boy's trail led.”

“I'm not sure,” Monique says, looking around confusedly as well. They stood at the bottom of a basin that sloped down further behind them, dropping off steeply to form the bank of a small river no more than twenty, thirty yards across and shallow enough to wade through in spots. The basin itself, forming a narrow band of wild, tangled growth, represented the former boundaries of the river.

“I don't understand. I'm don't know where we are.”

Monique's ability to move between worlds had been one of the first things she learned high up in the mountains of the Moor's University Cities. They explained to her that she had a natural affinity for the workings necessary to open the way. As a warrior-caste descendant empowered by the God of Two Skies, both realms recognized and welcomed her blood. She was a child of Earth, but was greeted as a friend, an adoptive daughter of the Incata.

Her ability to shift through the void was one of the first things she'd forgotten how to do when the Queen Mother scrambled her mind, though, and it would be years before she found herself capable of going back. Many years of struggle as she tried her best to maintain for Bealz's sake.

She had been labeled insane by then, though. Her power was gone, she was subdued. In order to break away, to wrench free of the stifling medications and the incessant disbelief, it would take an inhuman act of sheer will to open the portals necessary for her to find escape. An act of desperation driving her to the brink, reduced to lashing out, ripping and tearing at the boundaries, inflicting trauma upon the thin veils that separated the Earth and the Incata. The effort would leave her spent, weak and disoriented for days.

After the revelations of her ancestral history by the spider demon, Pickle-Me-Jack, Monique could see instinctively how it could be done with so much more grace. So much easier even than the deliberate, academic manner which the Moor's had shown her.

She controlled her fiery storm, the flames which engulfed her form and essence, with a bludgeoning brutality. But she could now see a counterpart to this unfocused power. There was also the balancing attributes of her maternal instinct, the genetic matrix which served as an instructive guide.

But somehow it had led her astray.

“There is something here,” Jo-Mel says uneasily. “I feel a presence nearby, something similar to the Anansia Shitani. Why did you bring us here?”

“I don't know,” Monique says. But there is something. She, too, can sense, something? A sort of underlying frequency, a near imperceptible vibration.

She recognized it. Felt as though it were honing in on her, sounding her out, attempting to align itself with her. She turned to the North, looking up to the top of the embankment, and begins to slog through the dead things sunk deep in the wet mud.

“Where are you going?” Jo-Mel asks, weapon at the ready.

“Home,” Monique replies with uncertainty. “I think...”