Near the crater of Lidya, wearing a space suit with hydraulic exoskeleton and a backpack, Astarte placed a small but powerful transformer by the side of one of the aquamarine portal gems left there by Llacme. After some settings, she turned it on, and an electric arc passed from that gem to the other and formed a door in the air. From that door, a gale of hot dust came out and Astarte entered the portal to appear in the middle of an obscure Venusian paramo, whipped by torrential winds and lightnings. From the backpack she took a small shovel and dug a hole in the ground, inside it she placed The Black Vulture of Kish, that she was also carrying in the backpack and refilled the hole. Then she came back through the portal and closed it.
Maria had a two feet long rat stunned in her lab, she touched its belly and said: "she definitely has been eating some carrion" and proceeded to bleed it out, took out its eyes, washed them with rat blood and some chemical compounds, and then glued them to some empty sockets in the black tiara. Then she placed the tiara inside a cage covered with electrified metal mesh, that allowed to look inside it. The cage was a cube measuring seven feet on each side, mounted on a wide platform. At each side of the cage, Maria placed a transformer of two Megawatts of power connected to electromagnets in the mesh. Astarte had dressed up for the occasion, she wore a long blue dress, she had painted her claws blue, and combed her blue mane backwards, that was almost reaching her shoulders. She looked as if a little girl had played too much with blue watercolor.
They turned the machines on, and the tiara started to tremble, absorbing energy from the magnets. The rat eyes in the tiara crystalized and became gems, maintaining its form and color. When the tiara started to float upwards, Maria turned the transformers off. The tiara stood still at five feet and five inches from the cage's base and a figure started to solidify under it. It was a woman with dark-red curly hair, long to her knees, in a long black lace dress, shiny leather boots, long sharp nails painted blue and a sapphire ring in her right index finger. Hidden under her hair, a pair of vulture wings were folded in her back. Her skin was almost white, and she appeared to be no more than sixteen years old, although she had lived for more than three centuries. She had two eyes, and they were a mix of compound and reptile visual organs. The sclera was blue with a dark-blue eight-pointed star instead of iris and pupil, which rays crossed the eye to its borders; superimposed over the star, a white vertical line passed through its center, coinciding with its upper and lower rays. The blue sclera was in turn composed by thousands of ommatidia. Below her eyes, she had two black moles, each centered under one of her eyelids. The moment she appeared, she extended her right hand downwards, as if she would be calling something to her hand. Somewhere in Venus, a mound of earth trembled.
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Carmina Drekkva and the Black Vulture of Kish (Ekron)
Carmina observed Maria in silence for a couple seconds, analyzing her and the situation that she was in, then said, "You are Rebekka Brähl's daughter, don't you? Why do you have me in a cage? Release your Queen immediately," and looked aside, acting offended.
"We are not in Nineveh; you are not Queen of anything."
"Where are we then?"
"Kish."
"The same, my authority is recognized in the whole Empire. I'm still Queen of Nineveh."
"I have no idea where Nineveh is."
"What do you mean? You know where it is, orbiting Saturn... you grew up there."
Carmina touched the cage with her left hand and a mild electric discharge made her remove it. Then she emitted a short, high-pitched, and slightly sensual cry showing her little white fangs.
"I mean I have no idea where Saturn is, now."
In Venus, the Black Vulture emerged from the ground and the wing extended, floating in the wind; the needles between the feathers started to shine, the crystal layers over them became black and liquid, projecting themselves eight inches further than the needles' tips in a plasmatic mass that reached three thousand degrees Kelvin, tied to the needles by thick electric arcs. Venusian lightnings got closer to the portal as if the Black Vulture would be guiding them.
"Are we not on Earth? What happened?"
"You tell me, I was in the Moon for a year. The last I knew, after the war ended, was that Ekron had attacked Kish, the upper levels were evacuated but most of humans living in the lower were left behind."
"I was fighting near Lidya."
"And you killed Gog."
"We killed each other, I just happened to be dead already."
Lightnings reached the aquamarine gems and the portal opened, the Black Vulture of Kish passed through and appeared near Lidya. It flew over Eastern Europe, heading to Kish, as the portal closed itself.
"We are on Earth and in the Solar System, but we are not in the same place in the galaxy. And only the inner planets are here, except for Mars that was destroyed."
"Where in the Galaxy? And how was Mars destroyed?"
"My best guess, Orion. Mars was destroyed by a planetary size beast."
"So, they are here... no, we got closer to them. But how?"
"I made some star mapping approximations, assuming that we are in the Orion Belt, but time framing doesn't add, is like we would be twenty-five to thirty thousand years before our time."
"Something is wrong," interrupted Astarte.
"Oh, hello there, you're all blue," saluted Carmina.
"Thank you,"
A noise, like metal soldering was heard before the Black Vulture entered the lab and cut through the cage to reach Carmina's hand. She held it in an unaggressive posture, so everyone kept calm.
"We can't blind her; she would be useless blind," said Astarte.
"Shut up," replied Maria.
"I have more questions," said Carmina, "did you put rat eyes in my crown?"
"I don't kill cats, as you can imagine."
"You couldn't find a bird or a human for that?"
"There are no more birds, not even vultures and I use humans for other purposes."
Actually, Maria had a vast variety of beasts from Qatra whose eyes she could have used, but she knew rat eyes would be diminishing for Carmina's vital force. That could be useful to submit her, and to attenuate the effects of her blood on the Macsks.
"Fine... now, where is The Empress?" asked Carmina.
"I have no idea, but you should know, that now... we are in trade with Orion natives, I factually rule over Kish and Anubis is Emperor of Ekron and Orion."
"What? The Black Dog is Emperor? Does he wear a crown?" Carmina laughed with scorn.
Astarte took advantage of the distraction and approached the hole in the cage made by the Black Vulture, introduced a hand in the cage attempting to touch Carmina's skin, but her boots where too tall and the dress was too thick, Carmina noticed and rotated her weapon. From a vulture eye near the wing joint of the Black Vulture, a white ray was casted against artificial illumination in the lab roof. As lights went down, Carmina cut a hole in the cage side and escaped. Then, in darkness, she made a wide gap in the walls of the lab and opening her vulture wings, she flew to the upper levels of Kish.
When they finally got the lights back, Maria started to fix the lab mess, and Astarte approached to help.
"I didn't know that Croms had wings."
"Only a few of them have," then Maria made a pause and added, "this will not end well for anybody."
