For Love of Family
Warning for: partly narrative style
Chapter note: In case it is not clear in the chapter alone, the memory snapshots are from the point of view of Black, not Harry.
Ha’tak at Valley of the Kings, 22nd May 2004
I rarely deal with rituals, even in my Auror days. Most of my exposure to rituals has been theoritical, through various tomes and other kinds of manuscripts that the Houses under me – especially the Blacks and Potters – have gathered throughout the centuries. But I do know when I see an active, in-progress ritual, though it’s more instinct than knowledge… and the one I’m facing is just such, while I can discern nothing about its purpose.
Damn. Damn. Damn. There are more than five hundred people aboard this alien spaceship, and I can’t get to them to evacuate them, and Black has been absorbed – oh.
“Black, if you’re still here like you promised, I’d like to ask, what’s going on with this ritual? Is it going to harm us? How can I deactivate it? Or if I can’t, can you buy us some time to evacuate this ship first?”
No answer. Ha. Go figure.
But the air is thickening, charging up, without affecting the ritual site….
“Black?” I reach out a tentative hand into the not-so-thin air. “Tell me?”
A broad finger of something brushes against my left cheek, like a gust of controlled wind, while another – a more solid one – wraps itself gently round my outstretched hand, shaking it up and down twice.
Retracting my hand, I sigh and slump in place. “Black, what’s all this about? Why did you kidnap me? What about this ritual? I hope you don’t mean me to sacrifice myself?” Ah, yes, what a “good” memory, being a hapless, helpless fourteen-year-old and tied to a headstone while a monster is being remade in front of you, after being one of two victims in a kidnapping and subsequently witnessing the death of the other kidnapee….
The half-shaped gust of wind and magic tugs gently at my wrist, as if urging me to get closer to the ritual site.
“Promise me I’m not being sacrificed? Not anyone else on this ship, too!”
The invisible finger turns into a cocoon, just so, but doesn’t seek to urge or carry me anywhere.
“Well, all right, then, you pushy grandpa.”
I step forward, right to the edge of the sketch.
And then the finger comes again, now pushing cocoon-me farther. – “Black!”
But, strangely, the toe of my boot never goes over the sketch. Instead, as I stumble, my body arches forward and drapes itself over thin air as if over a solid dome. And, in the instinctive flailing that accompanies it, coupled with a “helpful” nudge from the busy invisible fingers, my left hand strikes the side of the boulder squatting on the centre of the sketch, followed by the right one seconds after.
An audio-visual presentation runs before my eyes, just so, as if the private viewing of a very, very, very lifelike collage of short videos, or as if I were an invisible, intangible ghost flying about witnessing select events involving settings and people that are alien to me.
A dark-haired, tan-skinned girl of perhaps ten is standing before me, barely able to contain her excitement. Her deep brown eyes flashes golden, and the echoing tone of a Goa’uld greets me in an unknown language that I nevertheless understand, though in a childlike tone I have never heard from Arga, “Hello! Mother said you are my servant. What are you called? Why are you clad in only a loincloth?”
The scene switches to another place, right after. This time, from the vantage view of a balcony, the Goa’uld girl is thoughtfully observing what looks like a family of four – a father, a mother, an older daughter and a younger son – gathered on the steps to an edifice, talking among themselves. “Mother said human families do not fight among themselves to prove their individual powers. It must be nice,” she remarks wistfully.
The girl is a little older in the next scene, both in body and maturity. “Mother said you cannot be my First Prime because you are my servant,” she frowns. “Silly Mother! Why not? I know you the best, and you are good in all sorts of matters.”
She is not much older, next, but the look in her eyes is definitely not a young child’s anymore. “Father gave me a legion of Jaffa to command,” she says gravely. “But I do not want soldiers, Black. I want a family of my own. Do you think they would agree to be my family instead? Do you think Father will punish them if they agree? I…. I am sorry, for attempting to make you both my First Prime and my servant. I am sorry that Father punished you. Please take your time to recuperate. I have notified the other household staff not to bother you until you are well again. And I shall be most angry with you if you return to duty before you are fully recovered!”
She looks distraught and quite shaken, in the following scene, folding into herself on the edge of a luxurious-looking bed. “Father killed Sanka and his wife,” she says, her voice as wet and twitchy as her face. “Just because Sanka obeyed my instruction to return home instead of continuously attending to me! And Father said…,” gulping, a hiccup, “…Father said I am broken, weak, a failed experiment of Mother’s. Father said he gave me a gift to keep safe and relish, and I was doing that! I have been looking after them all, you know that, and you said it is how family members are supposed to behave to each other. Why was he so angry for what he had told me to do, then? Did he not mean me to treat them as family? What should I do, Black?”
I am greeted with, “Father gifted me a ship under my own command for treating them ‘right’, Black,” by a furious looking now teenager, in the subsequent scene. “It is wrong! But I do not wish to jeopardise my people’s lives any further.” She huffs and glower determinedly at me, then, and grits out, “I am going to save my people from Father and his ilk. Are you going to help me? – Very well. I heard rumours through my siblings that there are a few others of our kind who are as ‘broken’ as I am. I want you to discreetly make contact with them. We are going to coordinate an attack… or, barring that, an escape to a distant planet without a ring gate.”
The girl rapidly matures into a woman not only in body, in the scenes following the declaration. Her gaze is far from youthful, now, burdened with something that I am reluctant to find out, and her face has turned grimmer and grimmer. The look is sadly familiar to me, having witnessed it on the faces of my schoolmates when the war with Voldemort escalated during my sixth year at Hogwarts. And what I am witnessing is a war indeed, or at least the beginning of it, in which various plans are hatched and various individuals meet and send messages to each other secretly. It is to be a world-wide war, against this Goa’uld’s own kind and even her own parents and siblings, and I can clearly see that it taxes her greatly, emotionally.
Arga, Egeria, Prometheus, Paracelsus, Icarus – this Goa’uld woman, Pandora, never sees any of them in person. Always through Black – the same Black that is both my friend and ancestor, the same Black from whose eyes I am looking out of. She considers them allies, all the same, and, in one of the rare soft moments she shares with Black, she is even thinking of making a permanent pact with them. “It is like having family of my own! Aside from the lot of you, that is,” she exclaims whimsically, her eyes for once as light and youthful as they were once.
And then the attack is executed from multiple fronts in multiple places, with various plans in reserve and an exodus of Pandora’s claimed “family” mobilised simultaneously.
Sadly, as in any other war, despite all the meticulous preparations, plans still go awry and lives are still lost. Icarus – the scientist among the allies – is lost, with his ships shot from the sky and sunk in the sea before he could release the bombardment that would cover up Pandora’s escape alongside their combined peoples. Because of that, the retreat to Egypt where the allies have secreted a well-stocked and particularly big ship away is far longer, far bloodier and far costlier than they have predicted, and both Arga and Egeria are captured while guiding and guarding the various ships. Paracelsus is also captured, and publicly – not to mention horribly – put to death by Zeus, Pandora’s own father, as “example” against further rebellion for any other underlings. Pandora herself loses her host, and she is subsequently sealed in a stasis jar, after her own mother forces her to spawn children who will not have her “defects.”
Prometheus is the only Goa’uld left to carry out the exodus, aided by Black, and they do make it to their destination. On Black’s urging and pleading, they and select Jaffa return for the three captured allies and the latters’ respective spawns, as all three are queens and have received the same punishment as Pandora. However, they only manage to find and rescue Pandora and her younglings, on the cost of their Jaffa guards, while Egeria’s and Arga’s stasis jars turn out to have been spirited away and their respective spawns scattered. Black returns to Egypt alone, then, as Prometheus, who is Arga’s lover, decides to incite rebellions in as many domains as possible in retaliation for the loss of his lover and her sister.
Unable and unwilling to guard and manage so many traumatised people alone, although by now many magicals have flocked to his aid, Black decides to put the whole exodus ship in stasis and under wards, instead of flying them to the lush but uninhabited planet that Prometheus has previously scouted. Many bereaved refugees offer themselves for the willing sacrifice needed to power the various wards including the stasis field, and Black chooses seven times seven times seven out of their number.
Not a few magicals end up sacrificing themselves as they erect the warding arrays together, as the ship’s protection needs to last not only until a powerful mage with a good heart finds it but also long after. Black himself ties a good chunk of his life force to the warding, vowing that he will beget heirs that will one day discover and lead these people – his people, by now – to life of freedom, safety, prosperity and closeness as Pandora has dreamt and invisioned.
And, apparently, he has chosen me as that person.
I have no choice but to be rid of any remaining doubts, even, when, as I straighten up post-viewing, the boulder’s bottom silently opens up, to expose a sealed clay jar and a small water tank full of tiny things that look like the blend between baby eels and baby snakes.
He is entrusting Pandora – also his family – to me.
I let out a drawn-out sigh to that thought. “Don’t you think I’ve got enough responsibilities already, Black?”
But I lean into the hollow and begin to empty it, anyway.
Added responsibilities or not, Black’s family is my family, too, including this Goa’uld and her younglings.