“BIRTH OF PHARAOH” CHAPTER 2

“my lady”

COPYRIGHT 2023. CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Instead of a happy voyage to the Planet Po, a spot upon an insignificant asteroid is as close to the Hidden Wall as anything gets me.

For the past few days of space travels, I have remained happy after such a narrow escape from the newly-formed police force called Shine Reign (or something stupid) that now once again plagues the Major Universe (a new name they gave everything after the dust settled).

Aye, I managed to fly safe away from Shamus and his wandering police troupe. It was inside that sleek pod I had earlier commented upon—the one that was being readied close to my broken shuttle, upon the eerily domed space platform.

I have been lost inside thoughts for a good seven days. This day, I wish I would have looked around more at where we were headed, before the pod crash took place an hour ago, and where everyone died.

Last night, our pod had made it to the very last edge of Northern Sky Territory. I traveled well there. I was like a deputy lieutenant of a crew that knew nothing of my kind before. The captain was already on an inspection mission of the Hidden Wall. It was a perfect match sort of thing of us.

The Wall is composed of a strange electrical substance, but the pod’s captain really couldn’t care why or how the Hidden Wall exists because Merther (that’s what he was called by his crew), he operated mechanically like a robot from sheets of instructions pinned on boards inside his cabin.

It was only him and his handful of a crew inside their craft that was bestowed upon me as a prestige thing, like a smart guest they wanted to dine with. We ripped through space in a pod constructed for private design that shot straight across the sky with such speed as to impress us. We should have escaped that Hidden Wall by using my little, hidden code, but I never knew it was going to be our last conversation when Merther curtly shoved me into my room with a necktie wrapped over my mouth.

Next, we should have been on our way to planet Po, whose location is said to be far on the other side. Alas, Merther and his crew is dead, located not far away. They’re already buried now, it seems, inside the twisted cold ship and everything that burns is set free, there.

The last recollection I have is the pod careening away from me in this space suit. It struck a side. There was an asteroid in its way. Everyone perished.

I rest in my spacesuit. I look upwards only at a closed door. It sits with only a few feet of a platform in front of it and then nothing but stench and dark air in front of it. No ladder or stair exists yere. I am near the middle of some strange, hideous shaft that I am pretty well captive inside of. I am aware of how, outside this smelly place, the Hidden Wall is nearby.

How to solve the real problems of life? For, between this ugly place and the wall, there is no resting place. I can’t swim there, in this dangly thing, this spacesuit, can I? Yes, me, the idiot, would choose to float around like a mermaid in space only because I have no vessel to set sail again.

I don’t know why I understood this terrible asteroid that Merther and his friends still lie smoking on, was a resting place to swing closely past. I am curious how I could be so stupid. Something inside my head made me risk contact here on this thing, for creatures are scarce but they do often lay or hide in this very type of zone, hoping for idiots like me for food. If I’d ignored the thing entirely, I would be working on getting through the Hidden Wall right now instead of turning things over inside my head again.

The thought inside my mind tonight, you want to know? It is, simply put: “Life outside Northern Sky Territory is a happier one.”

I wrote a poem, once, and it ended with, “Gravitational pull brings one down,” as sort of a joke.

Beyond the wall is the planet I seek, Planet Po, and it should have a strange machine close to it, one they call The Factory—perhaps even in its orbit, somehow.

I hate to tell you this, dear Listener, but the sight in front of me tonight is a grisly one.

So, I turn to my accompaniment and say out loud, “Would you agree with me on this, My Lady?”

Close at hand, a hideous female Macrabre Illie Bo looks mindlessly towards me. Her four eyes are square. Her main mouth is a snouty strange thing, indeed, though she has more mouthy things like slices around her armored body. It’s terrible how she is four times as tall. Hideous torso like a bear on Earth.

Everything is dark and terrible. It’s quite a long tube of asteroid and metal with nothing for me to do but dangle from a chain that might be half a mile long.

My Lady says she will never remember spacemen, never tell one from the next, and, yet, she is whispering now into my mind. Her telepathy is beautiful.

With the power of her mind, she describes me in terrible words just the way she sees me: her morsel. She tells me that she never can assume what a space-boy or a space-girl might be made up of internally. She wishes I would stop haggling. Simply put, for her, I will be dead shortly after she starts to eat.

Now, Listener, she adds this: she will bite me in two.

“This is morbid gore, My Lady,” and I say it out loud to her, as you, Listener, hear in this recording. Now, I may address her directly for I have captured attention.

In return, My Lady laughs. She’s seated high above me. I am in a prison. I am caught, again, already.

I must explain, through telepathy with her, how I never am without my recording devices so I simply start making a long reminder to whomever finds this thing floating around, one day. Recordings as this one I make all day. In the good days, my journals would normally be embedded in my ship, the one I have lost and never recovered though I tried to locate that ship in the last days of the White Queen’s life (but didn’t).

Without my steadfast vessel, I transmit this journal type of thing to a lot of other places—one mighty load of a lot of other places!

The Macrabre Illie Bo in my presence before me now sends over a thought filled with pain. I don’t even shudder because I know The Discipline.

There is no wind here, only chilled space outside the dome she is sheltered in. Her home is one elongated funnel made of core minerals. It doesn’t have any window. The only light is from the oozing ore below.

Hot fumes.

Death pends.

A telepathic droopy monster nuzzles within feet of my head (and that is you, My Lady)—nuzzles, of course, threads of meat that dangle from another arm twisted inside the wires and bars.

I wait inside a private wish-filled moment that some escape route exists that I can ponder. As of yet, there is not any. Best for me to finish making you, Listener, the big priority.

It’s now time to turn my mind to my patron.

The only gift I have for you is friendship, My Lady, even though you took advantage of me, cracked me in the head, set me in this cage. I woke inside your lair, listened to your scrambling males, and, yet, I still retain composure enough to engage you in such a private conversation as this most would envy.

Here I dangle above a mess of hot lava.

The cage is sturdy but it was built to dip.

I see the pully and the line.

Admit it! You would have eaten me in a dirty way, the instant I brought my body into your control room, had we not been friends from long ago? Oh, but you cannot recall.

I feel sadness alike to that oil well beneath me, how my heartache spills onto a mess of boiling ore, all over my past fails. The combination of old pain with this hour’s let-down steeps me in a steam that, at once, is slowly working my meat from the outside. It drives inward—both inside me and emotionally, too.

The female Macrabre Illie Bo coils. She will strike a death meal from me.

What skill can I use tonight?

My Lady, our friendship for so long was blue like the home skies you said you can’t wait to have once again, outside a window, in a home far away, one without broods and eggs and eggs and broods.

Blue skies. I wear the scarf of blue, now, but you have refused to see my oldest hung color because you didn’t let me know you. You snatched me from air-contained spaces when I arrived in peace, and I never had time enough to splay the coat, show the blue, and float in the sky, on my own terms, while conversing like this with you as a longtime friend.

“This is me,” I say now, again, with my hands moving in the sign of the Amashey, which is a specific planet with families upon it which I am born into, quite often.

The female Macrabre Illie Bo will not answer.

No matter.

Lady, you are always in the right.

Lady, you are friend.

I head towards her in a specific manner, by moving in this way—only so many inches I may be permitted, within a three-foot-by-three-foot cage, dangling above the acre of molten steel she turns every hour, at the bottom of this, her kitchen! Focus is medallical. I am not alarmed. Bones of saucers and craft were virtually everywhere outside. I use the tiniest sleight of my hand to entrance her, along with a rhythm of my toes making a silent sound she enjoys blissfully.

My Lady, I remember the embrace of life you made in my mind, so many years and years ago. With that memory, I do not turn. I do not run away.

Her wretched scales shake along a spine three times as large as mine and five times as thick. Looks like some scaly thing from the past. With her permanent fangs installed everywhere on the outside of her diseased and rusted armor plates, she resists her rather small snouty mouth that gnaws the air. She laughs with an horrific sound of a million teeth grating back and forth throughout the female throat she is planning to swallow me whole with.

My Lady, at least I have your presence. You would have sent a guard if you didn’t remember me. That’s the hint you already showed me.

Now purring, she rests a claw against my spine. It tingles with friendship and her own remorse.

My lady, notwithstanding your plan tonight to consume my body and accumulate my mind inside your skin, I know you once treasured my companionship not so very long ago—though it was an eternity ago to people who are still planet-bound. For me, it was like yesterday when we met in some other dimension. I feel I might have loved you, back then.

Her mouth pretends to speak a bit with sighs and growls, but for the most part the Macrabre Illie Bo are so telepathic that they permanently refuse to tell anything out loud. Should she be remembering the old days before this one hot mess she chose, she should also be trying to speak the way I do.

My Lady, just relax, for I’m here.

Wants to know how I plan to leave here, and where I will go next. Sounds like she wants to see something. She’s been a lone guard posted in the nether-regions of space—a lost command relic of the Esentuaria for so long.

I have never known such intimacy as this night’s talk!

Esentuaria was the friend-planet of the Amashey who are, once again, quite an old and distinguished area known to many, even the top brass of intergalactic things, and such. I have been born into top rivaling Amashey families too many times to remember. And this planet’s only real neighbor, Esentuaria, is from the oldest books in humankind, so this must have been just such a long time ago. Tonight, she remembers her lifetime there and wants to make a visit together, and some time soon such as tonight, with me.

Then she asks in a miracle through her tongue and cheeks and mouth, “How could I forget that you would still be here?”

I resist the urge to applaud for she no longer feels anything much for me.

“My Lady, no one far away from the usual travel routes ever knows of your kind’s presence or, of course, they wouldn’t be here, would they?”

“My lady, you cannot be seen. You have forgotten how much outsiders hate your unique ways. Or, maybe, you are not notified of the seasons as they change amongst the hierarchy? No one permits Macrabre Illie Bo anyplace inward from here.”

Your hisses!

I have no anger to you in any way. I was on my way to breach the Hidden Wall for this is something I alone, of all space travelers, know how to do at once. And I approached this particular spot without knowing something like you would be here living on this silly place for all eons! I thought creatures like you were long-since departed, one way or another!

“MY LADY” PART TWO – HOW I ESCAPE

My Lady, tonight, she urges me to use my mind and not my mouth?

The Macabre Illie Bo are sneaky. They have a way to disappoint you, mentally.

Dear Lady asks me through my thoughts, Where did you think you would get to?

Presses my mind for the facts, claims my pod would not have gone much further for I would smack into the Hidden Wall and fry. Blocking her understanding of my voyage plans. She claims I should relax. Death with her means rebirth in her personal army. Feels like I’ve been with her before. And why should she fight off her hunger anymore?

My flesh is still on fire or, at least, it feels terrible right now.

She thinks my crash outside is only a hoax! Tells me I’ll leave her here, that I may come and go. Doesn’t believe I am her friend. She blathers, but I know this creation at the out-go, and how she drew me in by hiding not only herself but hordes of filth at her command, as well.

My Lady, I won’t be played nor ever will I forget myself to you.

You are a good liar and since you control your mind you think you own the entire galaxy.

You, who are Macrabre Illie Bo, are so sneaky in the mind that I resign to take planned steps. I talk aloud in soundwaves, otherwise you will know everything. I must tell you out loud to hide the repercussion. You and I both understand how to avoid dangers in telepathy.

Fire from the constant rush of steam drives upwards off the oil and ore. Inside a strange dipsy-dangle, I still discover that a little portal on the outside of the helmet works. It was meant to service as a voice speaker for its wearer, and in every temperature, I’m guessing.

I speak to her out loud and say, “My Lady, the real downer, of course, is the condition of Pharaoh and how they are being grown inside a particular Space Garden no one thinks about. This one Space Garden is located far outside the Hidden Wall. Most likely, it will be identical to the old White Queen’s (rest her soul, please) Sky Garden. This new development of horticulture (Pharaoh) inside something like a garden cage is the enemy’s next diversion because Pharaoh, and this new and unknown Creator of Pharaoh, are the winning team, so to speak. I must reach the Creator, whoever it will possibly be. I have no name, but I know indeed it functions from a Factory located close to the planet Po, upon which the Pharaoh grow up. I can only predict Pharaoh will one day lead a takeover far inside this home we all dwell in, the Great Universe. If no one cares to believe me thus, then be the arm of their Creator that decides my future fate, and so I must meet them all.

The White Queen herself shared with me all the intel she held about Pharaoh. In her days, eons and eons ago, she had a specific idea about where it would all go so I learned from her the terrible problematic future the Pharaoh present everyone, for all those “newly born” people reveal such a terrible hatred towards any human beings that they seek to erase humanity forever from eternity. They have no sense of kinsmen ship, is what I’m getting at.

She should know, too, because the first Pharaoh were manufactured without the White Queen’s guidance, I guess, and for that she sought them out. In the end, now, she is dead, and, yet still, Pharaoh continue to be manufactured somehow.

I admit how I, too, believed Pharaoh would help end the wars that beset everything inside the Hidden Wall, plus all the terrible monsters and third-rate creatures who are at risk outside. For, you see, Pharaoh are each designed as divinity. These perfectly groomed meat vessels are a manufactured human version of life that has been constructed from the manipulation of perfect meat. But, yet, these meat vessels are next painfully synthesized into, using electrical means and forces, with such force and beside the beaten, tricked and lied-to souls of the Not-Wanteds. The Pharaoh become them, these Not-Wanteds, who suddenly find themselves to be some kind of reborn terror. Beautiful beyond anything offered anywhere else, and yet their souls are wild with revenge. With them, something new and beautiful arises. It’s my theory that the wonderful vision of Pharaoh has somehow been sold to the new regime inside the Major Universe as the next great thing: all gutsy and strong as metal.

I predict complete failure. Pharaoh have been attempted throughout eternity many times before. I go by the dead queen’s advice, alone, for I never witnessed anything.

I say into my speaker: “Answer me, please: who is the Creator I am seeking?”

The female seems shocked. She is silent, says she won’t look at her own history again. She won’t see herself, anymore. She can’t see herself as anything other than a monster now. She is riddled with self-imposed hate, and I have heard from many other Macrabre Illie Bo who say this very same thing about hating themselves, or an experience similar enough.

She speaks easily, mentally, now. Confesses an urge to kill herself. It’s strong enough to worry over, for me.

Through the cackling portal atop my helmet, I tell her, “My Lady, stop. If you plan to die and be reborn through this new factory which you seem happy to know about, then this makes you fully a future foe to me because I seek the Pharaoh to bring them and their factory to a complete end.”

Now, I see her completely. She stares in shock through the bars that hold me inside. History is made when she speaks again, softly now.

She creeps to me, bares her soul and says, “Die, evil little space crawler.”

As the heat turns on, I can only scream through the helmet because I hate it so much there. I still manage her tongue through telepathy to tell her: My lady, you are only safe where you are loved. Stay here in conversation for some time longer.

She backs and again hovers along the spine, rests her feet up against the wall. I can’t talk. This pain hurts.

My Lady, I promise, I will call on another day when it’s a good time. You are bound here until death and afterwards, because you cannot travel soul wise to Planet Po, and that’s sad to know.

You spit! You say friends gone wild all year round?

My Lady, considering that the Pharaoh would be an obvious escape, remember that I, like you, feel all the Pharaoh and their factory, and their silliness. I sense these things every day. I gather you have, also, being so close from her to Po.

And now, she finally rests her abdomen above my space suit so as to let herself fry a little. She whimpers. I must continue to entrance her with my stare.

My Lady, Pharaoh has never, ever, ever been suited to my taste—or, rather, to the family of witches’ taste—yes, I mean taste literally—and I laugh only because there was a man who called himself The Slave, and he is said to always be at arms against the Family Of Witches, but it was a joke! The name is, actually, Ay-Ta-Fa-Ye.

The Slave, who was fun with his deriding comments, laughed each time he referred to some “family of witches” he claims raised me since birth.

In fact, the phrase, “family of witches,” was said to me less than one week ago by the newly formed police chief. His name is Shamus.

Shamus seems to believe the very thing that inhabited a person known as The Slave is not an opponent but, in his mind, the new cauldron leader of the Ay-Ta-Fa-Ye!

Shamus is derelict mentally, however.

I’m sorry I let The Slave enter my mind, right now, when I am forced to speak to you. I am dying, it’s true. Perhaps, you will fry too? Your size overloads something about this cage I am set inside of.

I continue: the information about The Slave is something I never should think about anymore except I do. This certain Slave is from my ancient past, as well as a more recent encounter, shortly before I lost my wonderous ship. In both of our interactions, he died.

Yet, this Shamus sensed The Slave in my eyes less than one week ago, calling “family of witches” instead of the proper phrase, Ay-Ta-Fa-Ye. Suddenly, he rambled on about some Slave, and so I had to affirm all his men that the Slave is dead.

This woeful Slave, he stays in my head. You would most likely be as fooled by his lies as I once was. He flips things.

My Lady, I have caught him many times and, in those incursions, he has eaten me! For that Slave had joked in every conversation we endured with each other about eating my mind. That’s how he ate me. And that’s the risk I knew him to be.

The Slave is silly as the Pharaoh and their forsaken Creator ought to be, but never you, dear Lady.

Aloud, I find the ability to say, “It's the Slave who comes and goes inside my mind tonight. My Lady, behave. If you disregard any thoughts I still share, and only listen to the sounds I speak through this microphone pressed to your ear as you nibble close to my body, I would be more than happy.

The Slave would take whatever he could grab. He would steal from me. He would do that still, to you, too, if he and you were ever introduced.

Yes, My Lady, he may be on the very planet the Pharaoh are manufactured for today.

Yes, My Lady, he might manufacture Pharaoh inside the Factory, then grow them freely—aye, as in free people—upon the planet which is named, I think it is, Po. Yes, it may be the reborn Slave is the Creator I am seeking.

No, this Slave will not arrive to your lair! He is not following. He is not taunting you from the past! It’s just his ugly memory that comes sailing into you through my mind. I must escape this torture! The Slave is gone! I escaped him. I would not find him again in my hair, especially here, where you have toasted me slowly for many hours now. Please hear my words! Never ambush his memories from my mind. There is nothing more.

My Lady, say you what? You know this Slave I speak of? It isn’t true. You know only the image of that presence inside my mind. He just is a terror in my head. I am so drifting in my thought. We are letting it all go together, here.

Look around here at the millions of eggs and cocoons hidden in the walls, and figurines perched here and there to help you devour me. It is fine.

My Lady, I have changed my mind. Once more and then it’s the last: Shamus relayed that the planet is thought to be called Po, but I don’t believe that’s its real name. Do you?

No, you refuse to be nice to you though I’ll continue to pay you with kind words and every piece of information. I am dying here, this night.

In return, I owe you a debt so that, My Lady, you move much too slowly now. You are sleeping but awake in a dream state. Feel it everywhere tonight with me.

With my last words, I bare before you everything I have. Every golden hint should be stated to you, and here I go: I swear to you, I am confessing everything I know of the routes and ships heading here and there. I want to let you know everything I’ve been told.

With the confessions I have made to you, I cannot be a prisoner in my new life nor can you ever lead me. Now, I ask for my safe exit plus a lift. That station ship left outside this place, with the man’s torso still in the driver’s seat, should do me justice and well.

Yes, I can only be devoured, says you. Then, what will you have? Me to contend with, in your bedroom! You blush. Don’t be coy. You know it’s lovely there.

Lady, think on my aims. Think about my truthful and pure quest to undue the Pharaoh state.

Luck has been with me because, as of now, I am back to my own mind, in fine form. Profound forever, I am genuine.

Your snarl is audible. Thoughts are filled with my blood on your mouth oozing in every direction. It’s everything on your mind. As your friend, in this moment, it’s the only thing on my mind now, too, and that is my whole problem. You’re just hungry as you portray across to me the moment Wonderman flies into the pit!

You cackle! A mischievous plan flies through the air! This is why I have hopes, but not any fear!

On this dayless night, on the very edge of the world I know, swinging in your cage, set within your lair, on this dumb rock, I must lament how my life returns—backwards—to the starting point, regardless of every step forward I make. Or, it’s just that I run back and forth, in circles, around a conclusion.

I must pass between the layers of the Hidden Wall, and then soar through the sky to Po. But before I reached the planet today, as was my hope, I wound up before you, one more time.

The men she commands stake a claim now. How they beat their hoofy paws like calves, waiting for their mother to make their kill for them.

This rocking will not do! Should you also disgorge me, I shall not be very happy about that! Send them all back to the edge of the cage where they were just a moment before you gave the signal. Otherwise, I simply react and use your own people as both tool and food for a new plan in my mind! Alas, it will be twice you have failed with your plan to suffocate my ambition with fear.

I am leaving soon!

Ah! Suddenly, she is sleeping in a strange way. Aye, that was a snore.

Her minions drops like stones without any cries into the gooey ore below. You cannot see them falling all around you and dying in their strange silence for you. I, in my fake solitude, leave a shadow which is like a cloak of challenge upon the ground, for I know the Macabre IIlie Bo never truly sleep in all their eyes, but one eyeball always sees a mirage, while the others are gone.

I wait to be sure.

I coo to her to soothe any last nerves because I know her well, and I already ask her to forgive this.

Now, you dream, and I speak softly, wordless, so as to kill you with my song.

My mind is over! I reel backwards! My suit is half gone, so I am slipping against the bars and the wires start to pierce through. I felt you call to the Slave, and ask for him to save you tonight before we die together! With my mind alone, I feel death reaching for us both. Still, I command the same Slave, wherever it may be, in order to stop such a force completely—barricade it from my present, plus stop it from entering my future.

You see the Pharaoh as an aim, and I seek the Creator to bring the show to a complete end. And in this, the Slave leaps to life inside my head where he hasn’t been in years!

You sleep soundly, now, so snore on, you venomous feminine of urine and egg. You are death, itself. You seem to kill me as I kill you.

Under a pine tree with the White Queen, I waited for a revenge against the children of the Houses that went mad with rage, or greed (some of them), when the Order was destroyed. She looked skyward at The Rainbow if it appeared to ask a question, to learn her future from. And with the Rainbow came a song she would sing. And from there she would go about her day, aimlessly. For me, instead of wondering what The Rainbow did or did not advise, I looked upon my own fortitude. And I always looked forwards, to my future, to my careful plan to regain my ship, as I had hoped for so fondly. I only needed my ship back! I never learned where it went to!

A single eye shudders. She knows I should be on a throne. She is remembering everything now.

When I mope, I will think about your fate, Lady. You are a friend from a long since dead time. Beautiful before but now, for thousands of years, you still reside in that terrible carcass, unable to stop yourself from terrible things you do every hour if you pluck space travelers and disembowel them, fry them and eat them standing here in this cage.

My Lady, it’s hot. My bones are warming. Maybe the plans this evening include eating me, after all, but you are fast asleep and this tells me in a nice way how you have no worry about my leaving.

Lady, snooze on.

Why wonder?

My Lady, in your dreams, you claim I am threatening you. I’m sorry to hear you believe this.

Once, you told me how much I meant to you. That was when together we were amongst the skies beyond the galaxy, where life is a song and the days are light and merry.

Now, you fall, like a great pendulum swung much too far to one side, and you have slipped in a lovely arc off the nub that your chain of life has moved upon for years. Fall you down into the molten ore.

My Lady, it’s time for you to go into the ore now. Soothed with fire and oil, you shall be reborn into something you can finally be joyous about, and will eventually speak to me of in fair and softer terms than you ever did tonight, the next time I stop over to say hello.

TO CONTINUE THE ADVENTURE CLICK ON CHAPTER THREE: “PLANET PO — DAY’S LOG ENTRY” FROM THE RENEYT HOMEPAGE!