“BIRTH OF PHARAOH” CHAPTER 5

“whittne fax’ explanation”

COPYRIGHT 2025. CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Something is cooking, below, My Lady, and it is not me. 

“This is how I stay up-to-date on the news,” responds the telepathic voice of the departed female Macrabre Illie Bo. Less than a second later she was flown away.

In my field of thought-vision, I didn’t dare look where she went, and I never do. It’s rude. Secondly, I like to tell myself that I will be always treated the same way I treat others. Whenever someone like me is on my own road, I don’t want that one, either, tracking my spirit or owning my soul.

When the dear departed female went down, the chain on the pully sent me skyward. By less than an inch of ground, I caught my toe on the tiny platform built into the wall in front of the large door. I used an unethical mathematical symbol that breaks every computer to release the trigger which allowed me to go.

Outside, I simply drift. Everything is dead. I’m in a terribly crusted spacesuit. And if fate is around, her hand gently picks me up now. This is good. She guides my wasted mind and its body like a talisman in outer space, and so I go through the Hidden Wall, twisting and turning around (several times) so as not to be fried. In short order, I am on the other side.

Still drifting, the space between myself and the Major Universe elongates itself completely.

Time is everything now that I come to know I can’t possibly survive. Seconds become a year. Fear of heights is absurd when, here, everything is wasted space that goes on forever so that closing my eyes feels much better than seeing the hideous motionless.

There is nothing like this sadness. Immense morose mixed in with exhilaration says at once that I must perish shortly, or die.

There’s a hope I might meet a friendly spider I once knew in the days of the great Houses. He was my kind. I would be able to catch a ride. Spiders are sort of the king out here, in this, but they surround the Major Universe and threaten things so the Hidden Wall was built to protect against them.

Spiders are numerous here. They are huge, to be sure. Haven’t seen one yet, however.

But, then, I can’t believe my eyes because a lone star-cruiser crashes out of the netherworld beneath me. First it was a strange shadow moving in an unnerving pattern. I didn’t mention it. It was so scary to me. Then, it was coming towards me from below.

I see how the hull is covered in space trash. Who knows the color it once drew for now it is ash, almost like rock or porcelain. Filth clings everywhere. Inside me, I know this is the Bonne Valle Quatra returning as if a dream from the abyss.

I ask myself what next move to make. It seems to pass me without care and I might only be just out of reach for its magnetic situation, but then an awesome sight emerges: a burst of light and it is tugging me into a massive portal which I soon discover is the ship’s interior docking area for smaller vessels.

This gaping chamber I find myself inside of fills with the right type of atmospheric pressure for me. My suit and even my clothes seemed to fall apart at the seams. My body is purified with light and water, but also, I can’t barely move. It’s a terrible thing that has happened to me. After everything with that fatally dead Macrabre Illie Bo female I am so raw and so cooked that it would be wrong to claim here I am even still alive as of yet.

I am restless lying there like a lump of meat and broken bones. Everything but myself—shackles, spacesuit and more—is slowly being removed from the area by some gigantic claw, by using its tiniest pincer extended out from one excruciatingly huge arm.

When the jaws of death stop yawning at me so as to allow me to listen, it’s still a long time before I sense the presence of anything alive. I contain my emotion. I try escaping reality. Searching and searching, and then I halt the practice to convince myself I am the only being onboard. I continue my struggle, mentally, to finally locate anyone. Then, I beg someone to think up an answer—spill the beans, so to speak.

Physically, I am about to waste. It’s terribly cold in the hold. I hear a last precious whimper escape from my terrible form as if saying to Nature that I am now hers once more.

Almost as if on cue, through the main entrance, comes an atrocious but maintained lost entourage of the Golden Queen. There might be fifteen, and these people were said to have perished in combat lifetimes and lifetimes ago in this very ship which is called, if I remember correctly, Bonne Valle Quatra, and there’s a movie someone dreamed up for her. In reality, this group simply vanished back in the days the Major Universe was known as Earthra Tetus. It really did happen all the way back then, too.  

The entourage have since grown scaly and worn. They cannot survive on land after far too many years in space flight. Stopping motion could set them back a million years in a regular atmosphere, but I won’t say. Hurting people’s outlook is not my thing.  

They strangle my vision. I am exhausted. They struggle with each other in order to be the first to speak to me. Believing I am still a last survivor of their long-lost landing party, they snatch me up and place me on a flying table to arrive, naked, in the medicine area of their cruiser.

The medic is rushed in. He can’t understand how my body works for the flesh is just terrible to see, and all the little bones are crushed or missing. I listen to every mind on board, whether each is standing before me or not. The medic stops gaping and just works for a long time.

Trust me, everyone stops by to see me in person. I say nothing. They soon realize that I am the one who lead the Na Halien training so long ago. Back then, I was a real nobody except that everyone praised me for the job I did and, for that, I was well-known by my looks in every corner.

For me, it was easy to talk telepathically to every person on-board the Bonne Valle Quatra, and to see why they became nostalgic. It was because everyone was good, back then. They are all into the evilest crud they can do these days. That, I detest and fight against.

It was nice to talk back and forth with individuals who are used to my sort of prying. Different people come in and depart. This keeps going on for some time.

The medic is using every tool he has.

Everyone wants to hear about things. I am having trouble remembering because it has certainly been a long night. They throw ideas but I still won’t tell them much before I understand their true aims for they don’t know they are meaningful men and women, yet. They pretend things they like. They lie to each other. They beg me. They push each other. They shove around places they know they shouldn’t be going to.

 Still trying to get a place in this world, though their wrinkles and warts and long, long white hair are perfectly there and yet they still don’t know themselves that well. I eventually come to tell them they must have been lost in a terrible time warp due to recurring computer problems, so it seems. Next, they are all staring into stupid air trying to find someone when it was me telling them all the while, though I am a motionless figure upon the table, waiting for the medic’s work to stir something inside me.

They love their idea of a god or a friendly spirit on-board as all of our protector.

These Entourage sail northward beyond the guide posts. Then they zigzag around. If anyone remembers, this profound luck for avoiding spiders and hurtling asteroids, and the strange adherence of the Entourage to avoid at all costs any mother’s milk set upon the clouds of man and planets, is identical to the magic that kept the White Queen upon her throne. It’s a strange magic. It keeps them on their own zig zagging path.

This strange magic captivated me way back when and I am finding myself enchanted again.

Only recently were these individuals finally informed of the Queen’s death though, in reality, this happened a long time hence. They were away and missed the entire dilemma. Now, they are fevered about keeping everyone onboard alive.

I seem to be competition to the men, but the women promise me they shall be more than glad to invite me to participate.  

“What is your name, sailor?” Asks the medic. He has a stethoscope and a pair of gloves.

“I cannot remember. I don’t remember where I am going, either,” I say, surprising us both. I hadn’t intended to say anything for a while.

“We are going to the Queen’s Castle. But we are lost and have been for many years,” he says. Then, he looks strange. I can hear him wonder inside his mind why he said it.

Now, I see it all: They will not be thrown off their mission; the Queen’s only surviving bloodline may be alive on one of the three planetary orbs floating in midair inside her sky garden, and they are not happy because they are too far away. They want a big reveal before they die, yet the ship cannot penetrate the hidden wall.

I fall to sleep. Perhaps I am drugged.

Na’ Halien is an old term. It predates the eons spent with the Golden Queen upon the throne. It pre-dates the days when our planets aligned themselves to stars. Some say the origins of Na’ Halien predate the Nehiolethic period, when the Derelicts and The Wanted Not were happy and lived everywhere, though still restless without reason.

The word Na’ Halien literally means “to fight well”. But, in some places, I’m told, it means “to fight with the wind at one’s back.” Either way, fighting was the basic discourse so far as I knew. Recently, students have to tell me, slowly, that Na’ Halien actually meant “the wind,” and they tell me it always did. So, that’s that. I just been using the word for a trillienia after someone else seated beside me, way back when, had dreamed it up. And I can’t remember him telling any of us in the room that day why.

Either way, time moves forward. I lie awake inside the tube that heals everything after every inch has been cut through. Itchy skin tests me. I simply remain stationary for I am a great teacher of The Discipline and resolve to demonstrate it as I can.

Na’ Halien meant a lot more than “to fight”. It meant, also, the ones who fought and lost everything good in the universe to the Golden Queen’s evil predecessors. You may remember how getting rid of the men and women who had been raised Na’ Halien laid the bed upon which the Golden Queen was consecrated. I’m being rude here.

Base, sacrilege culture, where beings hated everywhere, for a long time was spat at, and it was called called the Macrabie. They scraped and jingled with The Holy Black who had suddenly appeared to be everywhere. Once, this picture seemed scary, then it turned downright rude. I won’t even go into details.

I think about things, and how time moved forward. The Holy Black ruled the entire place inside the Hidden Wall which was two or three times larger than today. That was Eartha Testus, and it encompassed much, much more universe and planetary command zones than today’s new Major Universe. I can see why they say things are going down. If anything, things are smaller.

And in those days, it seemed Na’ Halien was uttered with such hatred by all the new rulers and the witches and the regular people that one could die simply saying the name in the wrong space.

For me, being old, Na’ Halien only means to fight, but I hail from The South, close to the border, where people are educated very carefully. I usually come from the Amashey planet but also many, many times was I born into regality. In fact, at the dawn of time I was once inside one of the oldest houses, one where women only were permitted to have a say. Yet, I was born a man so that was that.

From that location, I was raised many times, mainly, in The West, with the merchants, during the time of the White Queen’s rule. And for a while I am lost in contemplation thinking of all the men and beautiful women and youngsters. Such times as I have had are priceless to me.  

Bonne Valle Quatro is home to a lively bunch that is a lot like my families on Amashey always were. They tell me, telepathically, how the word Na’ Halien just means, only and forever, those olden-days folk whom they are sorry they never met—people like me who acted like geniuses and street fighters mixed together. At the same time, they speak thankfully about how they were killed successively and repeatedly without mercy. Be that as it may.  

It’s very sweet because they all care here. I don’t mind spending some time resting here and steeping inside their thoughts.

In Na’ Halien, the culture, there is a distinct impression within the term “rude.” I know this because, once, I was a Na’ Halien queen during a time when those who were trained successively one day, all at once, sort of angered of everything and yelled about everyone and then began making their own Houses which they were absolutely not permitted to do. That was the beginning of the Na’ Halien revolt but it really wasn’t revolt because what happened was understood later as justified. And there were a lot of very impressive Na’ Halien who ended up leading a lot of people I had carefully trained in a different direction than the plans had laid.

In the mix, I died and was reborn. Then, I was a queen like the best of them, and this is the story I feel I should relay to anyone who cares to hear me. 

TO CONTINUE THE ADVENTURE CLICK ON CHAPTER SIX: “HALIEN-9” FROM THE RENEYT HOMEPAGE!