The Descent of the War Goddess 2/3
See part 1 for warnings and summary.
The matter of this prison was in the form of a cave, but not one that would ever have existed on a planet shaped by natural forces. The roof of the cave was thirty meters high, the cave itself roughly circular and about ten meters in diameter. The walls were largely smooth obsidian, with ragged veins of silver, gold and various exotic crystals running through them, and an occasional spot of rough granite. The floor was smooth, water-polished feldspar. Stalactites of igneous rock hung from the ceiling in shapes remarkably similar to limestone stalactites, which simply wouldn't happen under most planetary conditions, and occasional stalagmites of the same substance poked up through the floor.
Up to that degree, the substances being used to make the cave were at least substances that naturally occurred in caves. But all the light in the room came from brilliant liquid streams, a viscous, nearly gelatinous substance radiating with the spectrum, though not the full lumens, of a yellow sun, flowing down the walls of the caves in narrow trickles. The radiance coming from so many trickling lines on the walls made the room into a checkerboard of shadow and light. It was infuriating that without access to her powers, Q couldn't tell whether M was employing a natural substance or was just showing off.
Her ex was in his own preferred mortal form, so presumably M hadn't forced him into a form he didn't like as she'd done with Q, but she'd found other ways to humiliate him. He was naked, arms shackled apart and above his head by chains attached to two different stalactites, legs chained to two separate stalagmites. M was half-sitting, half-reclining in a stone chair piled with ornate pillows, wearing a standard humanoid form herself -- her favorite, the short, pale, slender woman with close-cropped red hair -- in a green silken robe edged with gold-colored filigree. She was sipping from a tall glass of a liquid in layers from red at bottom to gold at the top, with ice. There was a cool breeze blowing over her, making her short hair and the edges of her gown flutter slightly. Elsewhere in the room, such as where Q was and where presumably her ex was, the air was still and stiflingly warm. Sweat was breaking out on Q's forehead already, and she could see her ex was drenched with it.
What a disgusting way to eliminate excess heat. And why were they all in baseline humanoid forms anyway?
"So glad you've come to visit us, Q," M said. "I'm surprised, actually. Q here didn't think you'd come."
"What Q doesn't know would take several thousand years to describe," Q said sharply. "Why, exactly, did you think it was a good idea to kidnap him anyway?"
"Q has been a massively disruptive influence on the universe. You know this."
"He's always been. That doesn't mean the M have the right to try and imprison him."
"Well, the Q haven't been able to control him, so someone's got to."
"And your ideas of control are so masterful, darling," her ex said, his breathing slightly labored. "I haven't forgotten you gagging me with a metal clamp. Have a few secret kinks you can't get the M to indulge in with you?"
"I never gagged you with a metal clamp. Although it's tempting."
"Oh, you don't remember it either. No one remembers it. I'm finding that difficult to believe."
Q froze. Her ex had mentioned running into M, in the surreal experience they'd had when the universe was ending. He hadn't mentioned her gagging him with a metal clamp, but that had to be what he was talking about, because there was no other experience he talked about that no one else remembered. She'd tried her best, herself, to pretend that it hadn't happened, to go along with the rest of the Q -- who as nearly as she could tell, genuinely didn't remember any of it happening -- and convince herself that none of it had been real. She didn't want any of it to have been real.
"I do have to wonder," she said, trying to cut off any further discussion of that horrible event. "Why do you have him chained up and naked in a form sexually compatible with the one you're wearing?"
"Perhaps I thought I'd try out a different Q. What do you think, sweetheart?" M asked Q's ex, letting her voice turn into a parody of sultriness. "Have you been enjoying yourself so far?"
M didn't touch him physically, but he moaned, shuddering. A spike of hot jealousy stabbed into Q. She forced it down. "I thought so. You've been pining for me ever since I left, haven't you?"
"You flatter yourself," M said. "It's just that being here to watch a prisoner for eternity so he doesn't lose his mind in isolation is incredibly boring. Anything that can pass the time is an improvement." As she spoke, she was obviously using her powers to do something to Q's ex; the male humanoid body he wore was displaying signs of arousal, and he writhed and whimpered in his bonds.
Q was furious, but didn't know who to be angrier at. It was entirely possible that if her ex had gotten bored enough, he might have consented to let M touch him, in which case she was angry at him, and angry at herself for being angry at him because she had left him and she wouldn't have had the right to be jealous anyway if she hadn't. The Q weren't monogamous. The fact that she wanted to be, and wanted him to be, was a character flaw. Everyone said so. But it didn't change the fact that when she saw him giving or receiving pleasure with someone that wasn't her, it infuriated her, even if the person he was with had once been her lover.
And the truth was, it was likely that he hadn't consented or had only consented under duress, in which case it was entirely M she wanted to be furious with. She didn't perceive what M was doing as criminal or heinous, even if her ex had not consented -- many mortals would consider forcing pleasure on someone against their will to be rape, but the Q had very few taboos about pleasure and considered inflicting it on one another to be an irritating power game but no more serious than mortals considered tickling children to be. M's actions were not in the range of what Q considered evil or even seriously immoral, but she did recognize that what M was doing was a power game probably intended to humiliate Q's ex and definitely intended to make Q herself angry.
"If it's so boring why did you elect yourself to do it? You never had to take Q captive in the first place, and you didn't have to volunteer to be his jailer." She was trying to remain calm, but she was trapped in flesh, without access to her powers or many of the tools she'd have used to hide her feelings, and it was unpleasantly hot and stifling in here. Despite herself, her hands were clenched at her sides into fists, fingernails digging into her palms.
"I know him better than any other M," M said.
"And that's why you're so interested in feeling him up, I presume?"
Q's ex laughed, although it came out as more of a gasp given what M was evidently doing to him. "Oh, very good, M. Get her where it hurts. You notice, she comes down here and she doesn't ask for my release, she doesn't demand an explanation as to why you even think you have the right to take a Q prisoner, she doesn't even pay attention to the fact that you've taken her powers... all she cares about is you molesting me. If you're trying to piss her off, I think you're succeeding admirably."
"Is that a request for me to continue?" M asked.
"I don't really see the point to requesting anything of you," he said, panting. "Since the whole reason you're doing this is that I'd rather you didn't, and if I actually wanted you to touch me, you wouldn't go anywhere near me. But if you're actually taking requests, I'd like a glass of water."
His sarcasm cut through the haze of jealous rage that had been blurring Q's perspective. Of course, he was right. M was doing this to make her angry, and there were more important things she should be focusing on. "You're an idiot, Q. The first thing I asked was why M kidnapped you."
"Yes. Maybe it would be better if you were seen and not heard," M said, and tapped his mouth. His eyes went wide, and he tried to wrench his head away, but there was no outracing M's power; a strip of adhesive materialized over his mouth, effectively silencing him. He protested, but with the gag on Q couldn't tell if he was pleading, demanding, or just cursing at M.
"Let's not play these games, M," Q said. "You took Q for a reason, and it had nothing to do with something as general and vague as him causing disruption to the universe... which he's been doing the whole time you've known him, and in fact the whole time I've known him, and that's never been adequate justification for an M to kidnap and imprison a Q before. So what's your real reason?"
M left off tormenting Q's ex... not that she had her powers to tell, but from the way he suddenly sagged in his bonds, the way his breathing changed from panting to something as deep as a sigh of relief, it looked like M was no longer stimulating him. "Q started a war within your Continuum. You, one of the oldest and greatest of the Powers, reduced to warring with one another like infantile mortals. And we are your counterparts, the reality that you reflect. What affects you has the potential to affect us as well."
"If you were the reality we reflected, how could we affect you? Reflections go the other way around," Q said. "Are you finally admitting that you descend from us rather than the other way around? Because if you're not, I don't see how you could possibly be so afraid that what we do would have an effect on you that it justifies kidnapping a Q."
There was a large, rectangular stone slab behind M's seat, with a depression in it holding water that seemed to be coming up from an underwater spring, judging from the ripples on the surface. The breeze that fluttered over M and bypassed the two Q in the room blew over the basin before reaching M, carrying cool moisture. Q walked over to the basin without asking permission or even acknowledging with her body language that M might stop her, dunked her head in it, and came up shaking her hair out. That was much better. "Besides, it takes two to tango. Q didn't start the war; a Q who died minutes after the war started fired the first shot, at Q, and it killed a different Q, and then everything went to hell. You could as reasonably accuse Q, or Q, or Q... or Amanda, for that matter... of having started the war."
M shrugged, although her casual posture was belied by the widening of her eyes and slightly rapider breathing as her eyes fixed on Q's body. She might have been tormenting Q's ex with pleasure to humiliate him and anger Q, but Q's guess had been correct... M still wanted her, and being stuck down here in a physical shape was having an effect on her despite her powers. "Would any of them have started a war, if Q hadn't been agitating?"
"Would Q have been agitating, if one of our number hadn't killed himself?"
"Yes, well, the apathy and general dysfunctional nature of the Q is well known to the M, but that doesn't justify having a war. The rest of the universe's Powers are concerned. And since they see us as similar to you, the fact that they're looking at you with grave concern has turned their attention on us as well... attention we neither want nor deserve."
"No. I don't believe it," Q said decisively, shaking her head and shoulders vigorously... and watching M's eyes drop to her torso before jerking back up to her face. M probably didn't spend a lot of time in mortal shape, and if she'd taken a humanoid form... the humanoids were positively obsessed with sex, and being in their form generally afflicted Q minds with their obsession. M had had prurient reasons for stripping both her captive and her visitor, Q was sure of it now. And if M wasn't used to the power of humanoid sex drives, that was a weapon Q had to use against her. "Our war was an internal affair, and no more serious than the cold war between the Prophets and the Pagh-wraiths, or the Lightbringers of Earth and Selvor, or any other internal conflict within a Power's ranks."
"Are you joking? Those conflicts didn't destroy stars in the matter dimension."
"They most certainly did. They just didn't do so by accident." She cupped some water from the basin and dumped it over her chest, enjoying both the coolness on her sweaty, overheated skin and the way both M and her ex suddenly riveted their attention on her. "I think there's another reason," she said, taking a step closer to M. "I think you engineered this whole thing so I would come."
"As I said, you flatter yourself," M said. "This isn't about what you did to me, or what he did to me." She jerked her head back at Q's ex to indicate who she was talking about, as if there was another "he" she could possibly be referring to. "But you're right. It's not about the war, per se. It's about what you did to end it."
"Brought mortals into the Continuum with weapons?" She had rather expected that if the M were going to charge any Q with anything, they'd have gone after her for that reason. It had horrified even the Q on the side she'd been supporting, let alone the enemy.
"No. Had a child."
Q blinked. She hadn't expected that. "You imprisoned Q because we had a child?"
"The balance of the universe has always depended on there being more M than Q, and on the fact that both our Continuums have always been careful in the creation of new ones," M said. "You and Q created a child at random."
"It wasn't random. We chose his traits from amongst the traits both of us had to offer."
"And you're so pleased with how he turned out?"
Q scowled. No, she wasn't pleased at all. "What does that have to do with anything?"
M stood up. Her gown fluttered open in the breeze she was still standing in, revealing that she wasn't actually wearing anything under it. "The most chaotic element in your Continuum has replicated himself directly. You stopped bringing new Q into existence a billion years ago, and within the past six billion you created less than a hundred. Now, you have two new Q within the space of decades, both created not from the will of your entire Continuum, but the way mortal humanoids do it, with two parents contributing only their own traits. It's a recipe for extremes, for defective Q and Q who exhibit the worst traits of your Continuum, and believe me, the rest of you are bad enough."
Q smiled thinly. "And the M don't know how to do the same thing. And anything the Q do, the M want to be able to do better."
"At the very least, as well, or it'll destabilize the balance between our two Continuums," M snapped. "And you may not care about maintaining the balance, but we do. The M are very concerned with maintaining the harmony of the universe."
"Which is why you have kept producing new M long after we stopped. M, you yourself are only as old as our youngest sister, who was the baby of the Continuum for a billion years until the new generation started being created. Your Continuum has no reason whatsoever to be concerned with our reproductive abilities and no excuse to feel threatened by our children; you've been making new children all along. Close to a third of all the M in existence are younger than all but the new generation of Q."
"But we've created them the old way, the traditional way, a carefully designed project of the entire Continuum. We wouldn't be concerned if you'd made new Q in the same fashion... but you started this frankly radical new trend of Q being made by only two Q, on the basis of your own whims. And when you killed the first two Q who tried it, we thought your Continuum recognized the danger and would be reasonable about it. But no, now you've legitimized the technique. You created a new Q, just the two of you, and declared him the future of your Continuum. We can't allow such a danger to go unchecked."
"So you kidnapped Q to what, get the secret of creating children out of him? Our entire Continuum knows how to do it now; you could have taken anyone. It didn't have to be him."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the chains that bound her ex loosening, the stone of the stalactite it was fastened to beginning to give way. So he wasn't completely powerless, after all. Which meant she wasn't either. She kept talking, trying to distract M so she wouldn't notice what Q had just noticed. "Are you absolutely sure there was no element of jealousy or revenge in your decision to take this Q? And did you ever possibly consider coming to us and asking?"
"I have every reason to want revenge," M snapped. "And every reason to want revenge on you." She turned, stepped over her stone dais, and walked around Q's ex's bound form. "But I knew he would know how you Q have learned to make children. And I thought he was the one who invented the technique." Her hands went around him, one stroking his chest, one running along his thigh. His eyes went wide, and he made a high-pitched noise like a muffled scream, cut off by losing his breath. M sighed, and licked her lips, as his whole body went rigid, his male genitals jumping to attention, his muscles plainly straining so hard at his bonds that he was probably going to hurt something.
Q thought M was inflicting pleasure, not pain, especially when his eyes rolled back and his head sagged even as the rest of his body remained taut, but it was hard to be sure. "What are you doing to him?" she demanded.
"Just taking a little taste," M said. "Q's getting just a trifle too energetic for my purposes. You don't mind, do you, Q? I know how pain is your weakness... I could be hurting you to keep you under control, instead of this. Isn't this much better?"
She was draining him, taking his energy. Both Q and M were designed to enjoy sharing energy with others of their Continuum even more than taking it; one of the most intense pleasures they could feel was the sensation of another drawing on their energies, depleting them. And Q knew from personal experience that the Q and the M could share with each other in the same way that they shared with others of their own kind. But it normally worked by fully mutual taking and giving, the parties exchanging energies between them. What M was doing was non-reciprocal, and therefore exploitative. Her comment about pain being Q's former lover's weakness implied that she had threatened or coerced or tortured him into dropping his shields enough that she could do this. And he was shaking his head even as he moaned and writhed.
M harassing him physically, stimulating the flesh he wore, was just M being annoying as shit. M penetrating his Q essence while he was helpless to stop her, and draining the energy he'd been using to try, however uselessly, to escape, was an act both the Q and the M would perceive as rape. And the fact that he'd had that energy, that he'd been trying to use it to escape, and that it existed for M to drain meant that he wasn't actually completely powerless, and therefore, neither was Q.
Jealousy had always made her see red. But what swept over her now wasn't jealousy, but protective rage, and it was cold and sharp and focusing. "And this is your idea of revenge? Tie him up naked, stimulate him against his will, and then invade him to feed on his energy? You've been observing too many mortal vampire fantasies."
"This isn't my idea of revenge at all," M said. "My idea of revenge would have been to drop him in a hole and pave it over. If I truly wanted to hurt him, I'd have left him alone down here. We all know he'd have been screaming for mercy, begging for someone to come torture him so at least he wouldn't be alone, within less than an average solar cycle on a life-bearing world." Her voice was harsh. "I could have broken him so he wouldn't resist, but I didn't. So he tries to escape, and I feed on him to stop him, and he gets to retain his will to resist at least, even if I won't permit him to actualize his desire." She released him. This time, his gasps for air sounded suspiciously almost like sobs.
"So if this isn't revenge, what is it? I fail to see how any of this accomplishes the goal you claim to want to achieve. What does torturing Q have to do with creating children?"
"The M consigned him here because he claimed that he had invented the technique of reproduction, independently... that when your Continuum killed the two Q who first developed the technique, you wiped out the knowledge as well. Therefore, we thought, depriving your Continuum of a disruptive influence who is capable of coming up with such inventions would keep you from inventing the next idea to disrupt the balance of our Continuums on a massive scale." She walked around Q's ex, who hung limply from his bonds now as if he were exhausted and only semi-conscious, and toward Q, her thin smile predatory. "But I learned very quickly that he wasn't the one who invented the technique at all. That was you."
And that meant she had broken or battered down his mental shields enough to force a partial joining on him, because he wouldn't have let her read his mind and he wouldn't have voluntarily admitted he hadn't been able to create their son without her ideas. He loved their son more than he loved anything else in the universe, and the idea to create a child had been his... but he hadn't had any idea how to do it. Even the two who had created Amanda had had to anchor their child into mortal flesh for sixteen years before she grew into a viable Q. An infant Q would in theory be instantly destroyed by the powerful energies of the Continuum unless it was sheltered in matter and kept out of the Continuum. It was the knowledge she had brought that had enabled the two of them to create their son, stabilize him, and keep him alive and growing within the Continuum, and that was the technique the M apparently feared and wanted enough that they were willing to look the other way as this M had violated a Q's mind.
Ironically, she hadn't actually invented the technique, just come up with refinements. It had been mostly invented by the child created by the earlier technique, Amanda, in a time that hadn't happened and wouldn't happen now. She had merely been given the memories by a mortal time traveler who'd been entrusted with them by her future self. But she was the only Q who knew that.
"I could have told you that," she said. "Are you telling me you imprisoned Q at the bottom of a dimensional well just to lure me in?"
M shrugged. "The decision had been made to imprison him already."
"But when you learned that he didn't actually have the skill at inventing entirely new activities for the Q that you'd imprisoned him for having, you left him here because you thought that if you kept him here, sooner or later I would show up."
"It worked," M said, stalking up to Q, the predatory smile on her upturned face becoming wider and fiercer. "Here you are."
Q laughed. "You're an idiot, M. I almost didn't come."
"You would do anything for him! You always have!"
"That was before his irresponsible behavior ruined our son and made him into a delinquent Q who will probably have to be destroyed one of these days. The only reason I came was because my son was going to... And, I admit, partly because I thought you'd have put yourself in charge of guarding Q, and I wanted to see you again."
That threw M off balance. She lost the smile. "You... wanted?"
"I don't know why, but I've been thinking about you a lot lately. Maybe I've actually felt..." She looked away, as if ashamed. "...guilty. I was cruel to you, wasn't I."
"You seduced me. You told me you loved me." M began in a deadly quiet tone, but as she continued to speak her voice got louder and more anguished. "You said no one had ever made you feel this way before. You told me you wanted to be with me forever. We talked about defying our Continuums for the sake of our love! And then he lied to my Continuum, telling them all the things I had told you in confidence and telling them I was planning to defect to the Q! And when I told you, and I asked you to run away with me, and we would defy our Continuums and forge a new path for ourselves, together... you laughed at me! You told me you'd only ever been with me because you wanted to make him jealous, and now that it had worked, you were going back to him and you never even cared about me!" By now she was shouting. There were tears in her eyes.
Q winced. Most of that was true. She'd never actually told M she loved her or wanted to be with her forever or would defy the Q Continuum for her, or anything like that... M had said those things, and Q hadn't refuted them. But she really had laughed in M's face when M had suggested they leave their respective Continuums. Without their Continuum, either Q or M could only be mortal, doomed to slow decay and death, and there was never anything that could be worth risking that. And she'd felt guilty at the time because M was so naïve and M had sincerely loved her and she'd been using M all along, and in those days M had been so sweet and loving and it had hurt to think of betraying someone so innocent... so she'd taken her hurt out on that innocent, mocking her naïveté, telling herself that she was being cruel for M's own sake so M didn't get suckered again.
The Q did not apologize. Q had never, ever admitted to M that she did feel guilty about that, that it haunted her sometimes.
"I'm sorry," she said now, breaking yet another long-standing Q tradition.
"You're sorry?" M sounded frankly skeptical.
"It doesn't mean very much to you now, I'm sure," Q said. "But I did it because I was obsessed with him. And I've come to realize, after what he did to our little boy... he was never worth it." She saw her ex drag himself up in his chains to pay attention, eyes narrowed, the beginning of anger on his face. And probably fear, although he wouldn't be quick to show that. "I hurt you, terribly, and what did I get for it? Another eternity with an entity who's chaos incarnate, who delights in romancing worthless little mortals just because he knows how angry it makes me, who gets himself thrown out of the Continuum, starts wars, and ruins absolutely everything he touches. And I'm so sorry."
She reached a hand out toward M, letting herself remember M as the sweet entity she used to be, letting herself feel the pangs of guilt she'd felt even then at hurting M so terribly. Letting herself remember all her anger at her Q, all the jealousy, all the fighting, all the times he'd overruled her attempts to discipline their son. Letting herself remember how her adorable baby boy had turned into an impulsive juvenile delinquent brat, and how his father had aided and abetted that transformation until it had hurt so badly she couldn't stand to look at either of them. Her mental shields lowered slightly, letting M see the pain and anger and guilt.
"If you're sorry... why did you come to the gates with such hostility?" M asked skeptically.
"You kidnapped a Q. As long as my Continuum could see me, I had to observe the forms. And..." She looked down. "You know how I am. You know my flaws, my weaknesses. I saw you giving him pleasure and it made me so jealous and angry I couldn't see straight... but it wasn't because of him, it was because of you. Because if you're going to tie someone up and stimulate their physical form and suck on them to take their energy, I wanted you to do it to me." She threw her head back, letting her chest thrust out. "M, ever since I came down here I've been so angry and frustrated over wanting you, and watching you touching him, I haven't had the opportunity to even tell you how I feel. But if the whole reason the M imprisoned him was you fear our ability to create children... He ruined my son, and I want another."
She realized as she said it that it was true. A baby Q, half her, half another, to look at her with adoration as her son had once, to need her and look up to her and love her, someone she herself could love unreservedly. A chance to rectify the mistakes she'd made with her son, to do it all over again and do it right this time. "I never thought of this before, but if you want to truly understand how we created children, and why, and what it means to us that we have... I'll teach you. I'll have a child with you, M. Think of it! You talk about bringing harmony to the universe... what about bringing harmony to our Continuums? If Q and I could end a civil war by having a child, then couldn't the child of you and me end the conflict between the Q and the M, forever?"
"How am I supposed to believe you?" M asked. Q thought she was trying to sound aggrieved, but it was coming out as plaintive. "You lied to me last time."
"You have far more power than I do right now. We're surrounded by the power of the M, and when I came down here you stripped everything from me. This is me, M." She spread her hands. "Naked and powerless. I have nothing but what you left me. How could I possibly deceive you under these circumstances?"
"I don't know..." M whispered.
Q finished closing the gap between them, and put her hands around the smaller woman, reaching under M's robe to rest her palms on the small of M's back. "I'm so sorry, M. I know it's difficult to trust me, but you can read my mind. You know everything I'm saying is true."
Q's ex stared into emptiness, a look of grim hopelessness and resigned despair in his eyes. Of course, if she took up with M again, if she turned on the Continuum that had to all intents and purposes rejected her when she'd saved them from civil war by bringing mortals in with weapons that could kill Q, her ex would end up being left here to rot. And for everything he'd done, he'd probably deserve it. Their son would be better off without such an awful role model in his life. She looked away from him and down at M, who was tentatively embracing her back. "Your shields are still up," M said. "I can read your surface, but I can't tell if you're really telling the truth. If you want to join with me, why don't you lower your shields?"
"Because I want to do as much for you as you do for me," Q said in a sultry voice. "You know me, M. I like to be generous."
"Didn't you just say you wanted me to tie you up and do to you what I did to Q over there?"
"No, I said it made me insanely jealous to watch you doing that to him because I'd rather you do it to me. But if I had my preferences, I'd be pleasing you."
"I can't trust you enough," M said. "This could all be an elaborate ruse."
Q dropped her hands. "If you don't want me unless you're in total control, let him go and lock me up in his place. You know the Q Continuum won't tolerate you holding two Q, and the M would prefer that you imprison the one of us that actually presents the danger you're afraid of. I invented reproduction and I invented the way to make the weapons usable by mortals. You know the rest of the M will agree that I'm the one you want... and if you're going to spend eternity guarding someone, I don't want you wasting it on him." Her voice dripped scorn for her ex.
"It's true," M said, "but I don't want to let him go unless I know that you're telling the truth. He hurt me too, you realize. He's the one who made me look bad to my Continuum and made my Continuum forbid me to see you. I spent thousands of years recovering my face and my status after that."
"And how much status would you lose if the M thought you were endangering them by holding two Q prisoner?"
"I don't want to take you prisoner. I want you to join me."
"Then give me just enough power that I can join with you, and you can see how I feel."
M sighed. "I'm afraid I'll regret this," she whispered, "but I love you too much. I always have."
The matter of this prison was in the form of a cave, but not one that would ever have existed on a planet shaped by natural forces. The roof of the cave was thirty meters high, the cave itself roughly circular and about ten meters in diameter. The walls were largely smooth obsidian, with ragged veins of silver, gold and various exotic crystals running through them, and an occasional spot of rough granite. The floor was smooth, water-polished feldspar. Stalactites of igneous rock hung from the ceiling in shapes remarkably similar to limestone stalactites, which simply wouldn't happen under most planetary conditions, and occasional stalagmites of the same substance poked up through the floor.
Up to that degree, the substances being used to make the cave were at least substances that naturally occurred in caves. But all the light in the room came from brilliant liquid streams, a viscous, nearly gelatinous substance radiating with the spectrum, though not the full lumens, of a yellow sun, flowing down the walls of the caves in narrow trickles. The radiance coming from so many trickling lines on the walls made the room into a checkerboard of shadow and light. It was infuriating that without access to her powers, Q couldn't tell whether M was employing a natural substance or was just showing off.
Her ex was in his own preferred mortal form, so presumably M hadn't forced him into a form he didn't like as she'd done with Q, but she'd found other ways to humiliate him. He was naked, arms shackled apart and above his head by chains attached to two different stalactites, legs chained to two separate stalagmites. M was half-sitting, half-reclining in a stone chair piled with ornate pillows, wearing a standard humanoid form herself -- her favorite, the short, pale, slender woman with close-cropped red hair -- in a green silken robe edged with gold-colored filigree. She was sipping from a tall glass of a liquid in layers from red at bottom to gold at the top, with ice. There was a cool breeze blowing over her, making her short hair and the edges of her gown flutter slightly. Elsewhere in the room, such as where Q was and where presumably her ex was, the air was still and stiflingly warm. Sweat was breaking out on Q's forehead already, and she could see her ex was drenched with it.
What a disgusting way to eliminate excess heat. And why were they all in baseline humanoid forms anyway?
"So glad you've come to visit us, Q," M said. "I'm surprised, actually. Q here didn't think you'd come."
"What Q doesn't know would take several thousand years to describe," Q said sharply. "Why, exactly, did you think it was a good idea to kidnap him anyway?"
"Q has been a massively disruptive influence on the universe. You know this."
"He's always been. That doesn't mean the M have the right to try and imprison him."
"Well, the Q haven't been able to control him, so someone's got to."
"And your ideas of control are so masterful, darling," her ex said, his breathing slightly labored. "I haven't forgotten you gagging me with a metal clamp. Have a few secret kinks you can't get the M to indulge in with you?"
"I never gagged you with a metal clamp. Although it's tempting."
"Oh, you don't remember it either. No one remembers it. I'm finding that difficult to believe."
Q froze. Her ex had mentioned running into M, in the surreal experience they'd had when the universe was ending. He hadn't mentioned her gagging him with a metal clamp, but that had to be what he was talking about, because there was no other experience he talked about that no one else remembered. She'd tried her best, herself, to pretend that it hadn't happened, to go along with the rest of the Q -- who as nearly as she could tell, genuinely didn't remember any of it happening -- and convince herself that none of it had been real. She didn't want any of it to have been real.
"I do have to wonder," she said, trying to cut off any further discussion of that horrible event. "Why do you have him chained up and naked in a form sexually compatible with the one you're wearing?"
"Perhaps I thought I'd try out a different Q. What do you think, sweetheart?" M asked Q's ex, letting her voice turn into a parody of sultriness. "Have you been enjoying yourself so far?"
M didn't touch him physically, but he moaned, shuddering. A spike of hot jealousy stabbed into Q. She forced it down. "I thought so. You've been pining for me ever since I left, haven't you?"
"You flatter yourself," M said. "It's just that being here to watch a prisoner for eternity so he doesn't lose his mind in isolation is incredibly boring. Anything that can pass the time is an improvement." As she spoke, she was obviously using her powers to do something to Q's ex; the male humanoid body he wore was displaying signs of arousal, and he writhed and whimpered in his bonds.
Q was furious, but didn't know who to be angrier at. It was entirely possible that if her ex had gotten bored enough, he might have consented to let M touch him, in which case she was angry at him, and angry at herself for being angry at him because she had left him and she wouldn't have had the right to be jealous anyway if she hadn't. The Q weren't monogamous. The fact that she wanted to be, and wanted him to be, was a character flaw. Everyone said so. But it didn't change the fact that when she saw him giving or receiving pleasure with someone that wasn't her, it infuriated her, even if the person he was with had once been her lover.
And the truth was, it was likely that he hadn't consented or had only consented under duress, in which case it was entirely M she wanted to be furious with. She didn't perceive what M was doing as criminal or heinous, even if her ex had not consented -- many mortals would consider forcing pleasure on someone against their will to be rape, but the Q had very few taboos about pleasure and considered inflicting it on one another to be an irritating power game but no more serious than mortals considered tickling children to be. M's actions were not in the range of what Q considered evil or even seriously immoral, but she did recognize that what M was doing was a power game probably intended to humiliate Q's ex and definitely intended to make Q herself angry.
"If it's so boring why did you elect yourself to do it? You never had to take Q captive in the first place, and you didn't have to volunteer to be his jailer." She was trying to remain calm, but she was trapped in flesh, without access to her powers or many of the tools she'd have used to hide her feelings, and it was unpleasantly hot and stifling in here. Despite herself, her hands were clenched at her sides into fists, fingernails digging into her palms.
"I know him better than any other M," M said.
"And that's why you're so interested in feeling him up, I presume?"
Q's ex laughed, although it came out as more of a gasp given what M was evidently doing to him. "Oh, very good, M. Get her where it hurts. You notice, she comes down here and she doesn't ask for my release, she doesn't demand an explanation as to why you even think you have the right to take a Q prisoner, she doesn't even pay attention to the fact that you've taken her powers... all she cares about is you molesting me. If you're trying to piss her off, I think you're succeeding admirably."
"Is that a request for me to continue?" M asked.
"I don't really see the point to requesting anything of you," he said, panting. "Since the whole reason you're doing this is that I'd rather you didn't, and if I actually wanted you to touch me, you wouldn't go anywhere near me. But if you're actually taking requests, I'd like a glass of water."
His sarcasm cut through the haze of jealous rage that had been blurring Q's perspective. Of course, he was right. M was doing this to make her angry, and there were more important things she should be focusing on. "You're an idiot, Q. The first thing I asked was why M kidnapped you."
"Yes. Maybe it would be better if you were seen and not heard," M said, and tapped his mouth. His eyes went wide, and he tried to wrench his head away, but there was no outracing M's power; a strip of adhesive materialized over his mouth, effectively silencing him. He protested, but with the gag on Q couldn't tell if he was pleading, demanding, or just cursing at M.
"Let's not play these games, M," Q said. "You took Q for a reason, and it had nothing to do with something as general and vague as him causing disruption to the universe... which he's been doing the whole time you've known him, and in fact the whole time I've known him, and that's never been adequate justification for an M to kidnap and imprison a Q before. So what's your real reason?"
M left off tormenting Q's ex... not that she had her powers to tell, but from the way he suddenly sagged in his bonds, the way his breathing changed from panting to something as deep as a sigh of relief, it looked like M was no longer stimulating him. "Q started a war within your Continuum. You, one of the oldest and greatest of the Powers, reduced to warring with one another like infantile mortals. And we are your counterparts, the reality that you reflect. What affects you has the potential to affect us as well."
"If you were the reality we reflected, how could we affect you? Reflections go the other way around," Q said. "Are you finally admitting that you descend from us rather than the other way around? Because if you're not, I don't see how you could possibly be so afraid that what we do would have an effect on you that it justifies kidnapping a Q."
There was a large, rectangular stone slab behind M's seat, with a depression in it holding water that seemed to be coming up from an underwater spring, judging from the ripples on the surface. The breeze that fluttered over M and bypassed the two Q in the room blew over the basin before reaching M, carrying cool moisture. Q walked over to the basin without asking permission or even acknowledging with her body language that M might stop her, dunked her head in it, and came up shaking her hair out. That was much better. "Besides, it takes two to tango. Q didn't start the war; a Q who died minutes after the war started fired the first shot, at Q, and it killed a different Q, and then everything went to hell. You could as reasonably accuse Q, or Q, or Q... or Amanda, for that matter... of having started the war."
M shrugged, although her casual posture was belied by the widening of her eyes and slightly rapider breathing as her eyes fixed on Q's body. She might have been tormenting Q's ex with pleasure to humiliate him and anger Q, but Q's guess had been correct... M still wanted her, and being stuck down here in a physical shape was having an effect on her despite her powers. "Would any of them have started a war, if Q hadn't been agitating?"
"Would Q have been agitating, if one of our number hadn't killed himself?"
"Yes, well, the apathy and general dysfunctional nature of the Q is well known to the M, but that doesn't justify having a war. The rest of the universe's Powers are concerned. And since they see us as similar to you, the fact that they're looking at you with grave concern has turned their attention on us as well... attention we neither want nor deserve."
"No. I don't believe it," Q said decisively, shaking her head and shoulders vigorously... and watching M's eyes drop to her torso before jerking back up to her face. M probably didn't spend a lot of time in mortal shape, and if she'd taken a humanoid form... the humanoids were positively obsessed with sex, and being in their form generally afflicted Q minds with their obsession. M had had prurient reasons for stripping both her captive and her visitor, Q was sure of it now. And if M wasn't used to the power of humanoid sex drives, that was a weapon Q had to use against her. "Our war was an internal affair, and no more serious than the cold war between the Prophets and the Pagh-wraiths, or the Lightbringers of Earth and Selvor, or any other internal conflict within a Power's ranks."
"Are you joking? Those conflicts didn't destroy stars in the matter dimension."
"They most certainly did. They just didn't do so by accident." She cupped some water from the basin and dumped it over her chest, enjoying both the coolness on her sweaty, overheated skin and the way both M and her ex suddenly riveted their attention on her. "I think there's another reason," she said, taking a step closer to M. "I think you engineered this whole thing so I would come."
"As I said, you flatter yourself," M said. "This isn't about what you did to me, or what he did to me." She jerked her head back at Q's ex to indicate who she was talking about, as if there was another "he" she could possibly be referring to. "But you're right. It's not about the war, per se. It's about what you did to end it."
"Brought mortals into the Continuum with weapons?" She had rather expected that if the M were going to charge any Q with anything, they'd have gone after her for that reason. It had horrified even the Q on the side she'd been supporting, let alone the enemy.
"No. Had a child."
Q blinked. She hadn't expected that. "You imprisoned Q because we had a child?"
"The balance of the universe has always depended on there being more M than Q, and on the fact that both our Continuums have always been careful in the creation of new ones," M said. "You and Q created a child at random."
"It wasn't random. We chose his traits from amongst the traits both of us had to offer."
"And you're so pleased with how he turned out?"
Q scowled. No, she wasn't pleased at all. "What does that have to do with anything?"
M stood up. Her gown fluttered open in the breeze she was still standing in, revealing that she wasn't actually wearing anything under it. "The most chaotic element in your Continuum has replicated himself directly. You stopped bringing new Q into existence a billion years ago, and within the past six billion you created less than a hundred. Now, you have two new Q within the space of decades, both created not from the will of your entire Continuum, but the way mortal humanoids do it, with two parents contributing only their own traits. It's a recipe for extremes, for defective Q and Q who exhibit the worst traits of your Continuum, and believe me, the rest of you are bad enough."
Q smiled thinly. "And the M don't know how to do the same thing. And anything the Q do, the M want to be able to do better."
"At the very least, as well, or it'll destabilize the balance between our two Continuums," M snapped. "And you may not care about maintaining the balance, but we do. The M are very concerned with maintaining the harmony of the universe."
"Which is why you have kept producing new M long after we stopped. M, you yourself are only as old as our youngest sister, who was the baby of the Continuum for a billion years until the new generation started being created. Your Continuum has no reason whatsoever to be concerned with our reproductive abilities and no excuse to feel threatened by our children; you've been making new children all along. Close to a third of all the M in existence are younger than all but the new generation of Q."
"But we've created them the old way, the traditional way, a carefully designed project of the entire Continuum. We wouldn't be concerned if you'd made new Q in the same fashion... but you started this frankly radical new trend of Q being made by only two Q, on the basis of your own whims. And when you killed the first two Q who tried it, we thought your Continuum recognized the danger and would be reasonable about it. But no, now you've legitimized the technique. You created a new Q, just the two of you, and declared him the future of your Continuum. We can't allow such a danger to go unchecked."
"So you kidnapped Q to what, get the secret of creating children out of him? Our entire Continuum knows how to do it now; you could have taken anyone. It didn't have to be him."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the chains that bound her ex loosening, the stone of the stalactite it was fastened to beginning to give way. So he wasn't completely powerless, after all. Which meant she wasn't either. She kept talking, trying to distract M so she wouldn't notice what Q had just noticed. "Are you absolutely sure there was no element of jealousy or revenge in your decision to take this Q? And did you ever possibly consider coming to us and asking?"
"I have every reason to want revenge," M snapped. "And every reason to want revenge on you." She turned, stepped over her stone dais, and walked around Q's ex's bound form. "But I knew he would know how you Q have learned to make children. And I thought he was the one who invented the technique." Her hands went around him, one stroking his chest, one running along his thigh. His eyes went wide, and he made a high-pitched noise like a muffled scream, cut off by losing his breath. M sighed, and licked her lips, as his whole body went rigid, his male genitals jumping to attention, his muscles plainly straining so hard at his bonds that he was probably going to hurt something.
Q thought M was inflicting pleasure, not pain, especially when his eyes rolled back and his head sagged even as the rest of his body remained taut, but it was hard to be sure. "What are you doing to him?" she demanded.
"Just taking a little taste," M said. "Q's getting just a trifle too energetic for my purposes. You don't mind, do you, Q? I know how pain is your weakness... I could be hurting you to keep you under control, instead of this. Isn't this much better?"
She was draining him, taking his energy. Both Q and M were designed to enjoy sharing energy with others of their Continuum even more than taking it; one of the most intense pleasures they could feel was the sensation of another drawing on their energies, depleting them. And Q knew from personal experience that the Q and the M could share with each other in the same way that they shared with others of their own kind. But it normally worked by fully mutual taking and giving, the parties exchanging energies between them. What M was doing was non-reciprocal, and therefore exploitative. Her comment about pain being Q's former lover's weakness implied that she had threatened or coerced or tortured him into dropping his shields enough that she could do this. And he was shaking his head even as he moaned and writhed.
M harassing him physically, stimulating the flesh he wore, was just M being annoying as shit. M penetrating his Q essence while he was helpless to stop her, and draining the energy he'd been using to try, however uselessly, to escape, was an act both the Q and the M would perceive as rape. And the fact that he'd had that energy, that he'd been trying to use it to escape, and that it existed for M to drain meant that he wasn't actually completely powerless, and therefore, neither was Q.
Jealousy had always made her see red. But what swept over her now wasn't jealousy, but protective rage, and it was cold and sharp and focusing. "And this is your idea of revenge? Tie him up naked, stimulate him against his will, and then invade him to feed on his energy? You've been observing too many mortal vampire fantasies."
"This isn't my idea of revenge at all," M said. "My idea of revenge would have been to drop him in a hole and pave it over. If I truly wanted to hurt him, I'd have left him alone down here. We all know he'd have been screaming for mercy, begging for someone to come torture him so at least he wouldn't be alone, within less than an average solar cycle on a life-bearing world." Her voice was harsh. "I could have broken him so he wouldn't resist, but I didn't. So he tries to escape, and I feed on him to stop him, and he gets to retain his will to resist at least, even if I won't permit him to actualize his desire." She released him. This time, his gasps for air sounded suspiciously almost like sobs.
"So if this isn't revenge, what is it? I fail to see how any of this accomplishes the goal you claim to want to achieve. What does torturing Q have to do with creating children?"
"The M consigned him here because he claimed that he had invented the technique of reproduction, independently... that when your Continuum killed the two Q who first developed the technique, you wiped out the knowledge as well. Therefore, we thought, depriving your Continuum of a disruptive influence who is capable of coming up with such inventions would keep you from inventing the next idea to disrupt the balance of our Continuums on a massive scale." She walked around Q's ex, who hung limply from his bonds now as if he were exhausted and only semi-conscious, and toward Q, her thin smile predatory. "But I learned very quickly that he wasn't the one who invented the technique at all. That was you."
And that meant she had broken or battered down his mental shields enough to force a partial joining on him, because he wouldn't have let her read his mind and he wouldn't have voluntarily admitted he hadn't been able to create their son without her ideas. He loved their son more than he loved anything else in the universe, and the idea to create a child had been his... but he hadn't had any idea how to do it. Even the two who had created Amanda had had to anchor their child into mortal flesh for sixteen years before she grew into a viable Q. An infant Q would in theory be instantly destroyed by the powerful energies of the Continuum unless it was sheltered in matter and kept out of the Continuum. It was the knowledge she had brought that had enabled the two of them to create their son, stabilize him, and keep him alive and growing within the Continuum, and that was the technique the M apparently feared and wanted enough that they were willing to look the other way as this M had violated a Q's mind.
Ironically, she hadn't actually invented the technique, just come up with refinements. It had been mostly invented by the child created by the earlier technique, Amanda, in a time that hadn't happened and wouldn't happen now. She had merely been given the memories by a mortal time traveler who'd been entrusted with them by her future self. But she was the only Q who knew that.
"I could have told you that," she said. "Are you telling me you imprisoned Q at the bottom of a dimensional well just to lure me in?"
M shrugged. "The decision had been made to imprison him already."
"But when you learned that he didn't actually have the skill at inventing entirely new activities for the Q that you'd imprisoned him for having, you left him here because you thought that if you kept him here, sooner or later I would show up."
"It worked," M said, stalking up to Q, the predatory smile on her upturned face becoming wider and fiercer. "Here you are."
Q laughed. "You're an idiot, M. I almost didn't come."
"You would do anything for him! You always have!"
"That was before his irresponsible behavior ruined our son and made him into a delinquent Q who will probably have to be destroyed one of these days. The only reason I came was because my son was going to... And, I admit, partly because I thought you'd have put yourself in charge of guarding Q, and I wanted to see you again."
That threw M off balance. She lost the smile. "You... wanted?"
"I don't know why, but I've been thinking about you a lot lately. Maybe I've actually felt..." She looked away, as if ashamed. "...guilty. I was cruel to you, wasn't I."
"You seduced me. You told me you loved me." M began in a deadly quiet tone, but as she continued to speak her voice got louder and more anguished. "You said no one had ever made you feel this way before. You told me you wanted to be with me forever. We talked about defying our Continuums for the sake of our love! And then he lied to my Continuum, telling them all the things I had told you in confidence and telling them I was planning to defect to the Q! And when I told you, and I asked you to run away with me, and we would defy our Continuums and forge a new path for ourselves, together... you laughed at me! You told me you'd only ever been with me because you wanted to make him jealous, and now that it had worked, you were going back to him and you never even cared about me!" By now she was shouting. There were tears in her eyes.
Q winced. Most of that was true. She'd never actually told M she loved her or wanted to be with her forever or would defy the Q Continuum for her, or anything like that... M had said those things, and Q hadn't refuted them. But she really had laughed in M's face when M had suggested they leave their respective Continuums. Without their Continuum, either Q or M could only be mortal, doomed to slow decay and death, and there was never anything that could be worth risking that. And she'd felt guilty at the time because M was so naïve and M had sincerely loved her and she'd been using M all along, and in those days M had been so sweet and loving and it had hurt to think of betraying someone so innocent... so she'd taken her hurt out on that innocent, mocking her naïveté, telling herself that she was being cruel for M's own sake so M didn't get suckered again.
The Q did not apologize. Q had never, ever admitted to M that she did feel guilty about that, that it haunted her sometimes.
"I'm sorry," she said now, breaking yet another long-standing Q tradition.
"You're sorry?" M sounded frankly skeptical.
"It doesn't mean very much to you now, I'm sure," Q said. "But I did it because I was obsessed with him. And I've come to realize, after what he did to our little boy... he was never worth it." She saw her ex drag himself up in his chains to pay attention, eyes narrowed, the beginning of anger on his face. And probably fear, although he wouldn't be quick to show that. "I hurt you, terribly, and what did I get for it? Another eternity with an entity who's chaos incarnate, who delights in romancing worthless little mortals just because he knows how angry it makes me, who gets himself thrown out of the Continuum, starts wars, and ruins absolutely everything he touches. And I'm so sorry."
She reached a hand out toward M, letting herself remember M as the sweet entity she used to be, letting herself feel the pangs of guilt she'd felt even then at hurting M so terribly. Letting herself remember all her anger at her Q, all the jealousy, all the fighting, all the times he'd overruled her attempts to discipline their son. Letting herself remember how her adorable baby boy had turned into an impulsive juvenile delinquent brat, and how his father had aided and abetted that transformation until it had hurt so badly she couldn't stand to look at either of them. Her mental shields lowered slightly, letting M see the pain and anger and guilt.
"If you're sorry... why did you come to the gates with such hostility?" M asked skeptically.
"You kidnapped a Q. As long as my Continuum could see me, I had to observe the forms. And..." She looked down. "You know how I am. You know my flaws, my weaknesses. I saw you giving him pleasure and it made me so jealous and angry I couldn't see straight... but it wasn't because of him, it was because of you. Because if you're going to tie someone up and stimulate their physical form and suck on them to take their energy, I wanted you to do it to me." She threw her head back, letting her chest thrust out. "M, ever since I came down here I've been so angry and frustrated over wanting you, and watching you touching him, I haven't had the opportunity to even tell you how I feel. But if the whole reason the M imprisoned him was you fear our ability to create children... He ruined my son, and I want another."
She realized as she said it that it was true. A baby Q, half her, half another, to look at her with adoration as her son had once, to need her and look up to her and love her, someone she herself could love unreservedly. A chance to rectify the mistakes she'd made with her son, to do it all over again and do it right this time. "I never thought of this before, but if you want to truly understand how we created children, and why, and what it means to us that we have... I'll teach you. I'll have a child with you, M. Think of it! You talk about bringing harmony to the universe... what about bringing harmony to our Continuums? If Q and I could end a civil war by having a child, then couldn't the child of you and me end the conflict between the Q and the M, forever?"
"How am I supposed to believe you?" M asked. Q thought she was trying to sound aggrieved, but it was coming out as plaintive. "You lied to me last time."
"You have far more power than I do right now. We're surrounded by the power of the M, and when I came down here you stripped everything from me. This is me, M." She spread her hands. "Naked and powerless. I have nothing but what you left me. How could I possibly deceive you under these circumstances?"
"I don't know..." M whispered.
Q finished closing the gap between them, and put her hands around the smaller woman, reaching under M's robe to rest her palms on the small of M's back. "I'm so sorry, M. I know it's difficult to trust me, but you can read my mind. You know everything I'm saying is true."
Q's ex stared into emptiness, a look of grim hopelessness and resigned despair in his eyes. Of course, if she took up with M again, if she turned on the Continuum that had to all intents and purposes rejected her when she'd saved them from civil war by bringing mortals in with weapons that could kill Q, her ex would end up being left here to rot. And for everything he'd done, he'd probably deserve it. Their son would be better off without such an awful role model in his life. She looked away from him and down at M, who was tentatively embracing her back. "Your shields are still up," M said. "I can read your surface, but I can't tell if you're really telling the truth. If you want to join with me, why don't you lower your shields?"
"Because I want to do as much for you as you do for me," Q said in a sultry voice. "You know me, M. I like to be generous."
"Didn't you just say you wanted me to tie you up and do to you what I did to Q over there?"
"No, I said it made me insanely jealous to watch you doing that to him because I'd rather you do it to me. But if I had my preferences, I'd be pleasing you."
"I can't trust you enough," M said. "This could all be an elaborate ruse."
Q dropped her hands. "If you don't want me unless you're in total control, let him go and lock me up in his place. You know the Q Continuum won't tolerate you holding two Q, and the M would prefer that you imprison the one of us that actually presents the danger you're afraid of. I invented reproduction and I invented the way to make the weapons usable by mortals. You know the rest of the M will agree that I'm the one you want... and if you're going to spend eternity guarding someone, I don't want you wasting it on him." Her voice dripped scorn for her ex.
"It's true," M said, "but I don't want to let him go unless I know that you're telling the truth. He hurt me too, you realize. He's the one who made me look bad to my Continuum and made my Continuum forbid me to see you. I spent thousands of years recovering my face and my status after that."
"And how much status would you lose if the M thought you were endangering them by holding two Q prisoner?"
"I don't want to take you prisoner. I want you to join me."
"Then give me just enough power that I can join with you, and you can see how I feel."
M sighed. "I'm afraid I'll regret this," she whispered, "but I love you too much. I always have."