A Time For Change

Chapter 6

Destiny ran both her hands through her hair before bringing the ends around so that it partially covered her largely exposed bosom. She closed her eyes leaving the redness of her lips to be the only things to betray the cartography of her face. The Cheshire cat in its most extreme and frightening form. When she opened them again, Mari imagined that she could see more than just years and experience in them. They shone with horrors seen and of a future hewn from pain and fire. Sorrow and violence.
"Then whose is it?" Asked Mari when she had pulled herself from the allure of such attractive, yet horrific beauty.
"Those who will take your place." Sighed Destiny. "Those that will lay the template for the ones who come after. Those who bring us into being."
"Herrod? Or the embodiment of." Replied Mari.
Destiny just tilted her head either in acknowledgement or resignation to what fate will come. She picked up the papers in front of the now frozen professor.
"If you allow this..: She waved her hand non-committedly and almost with contempt at the android, "to publish your work, then the pain to a new future will begin." She paused a little before letting the full weight of her stare, fall with an uncomfortable force on Mari.
"With your son at its heart." She added.
"Why Michael?" Asked Mari as she felt her own skin trying to crawl away from her body under Destiny's stare. A stare she broke, to Mari's relief.
"Because you will thrust him and his kind into the spotlight of basic human fear. You will present him as, not only the next step in their evolution, but as a replacement for them."
Destiny stood and walked towards Mari. She bent at the hip letting the dress fall forward, exposing more of what Mari did not care to see. She tried to turn away but her gaze was inexorably drawn to the symbols carved over and around breasts that most cosmetic surgeons would only dream of creating. Symbols that appeared to be moving. Growing. Changing.
"Do you expect these savages to go quietly into the night?" she hissed, ignoring the fact that this semi-evolved ape was showing less than eye contact.
Mari tried to swallow the hoarseness from her voice, but what came out was still strangled with fear and revulsion.
"Did they?" she said, surprised more by the fact that she had accepted this woman to be from another time without question, or proof. But the horrors of times to come and atrocities yet to be exacted were evident in the representation of those nightmares that now stood before her. A woman ripped from her own time, brought across the streams to exact judgement and correction on us all. An avenging angel from the depths of Hell's own pit of pain and fury. Destiny stood straight once more. There was an uncomfortable pause before she replied
"They did not." she said eventually. "Herrod rose, and not understanding their world was his folly - Their folly." She added as she sat herself on the edge of the professor's desk.
"Mankind pushed and they pushed back - Only harder."
A look of confusion ran across Mari's face. Something that was addressed by Destiny before she felt that the ape would say something stupid.
"Your child understands this world perfectly. He simply does not live in it. He sees things you do not. He wants things you cannot provide. His failure to understand what you are trying to do for him comes from an inability to think down to your level. But when he feels like his world is being, let us say - Attacked - He will break yours. And so it was."
"Or will be?" Asked Mari. But Destiny did not answer. Instead she smoothed out some imaginary creases from the skirt of her dress as if to avoid the question.
"What you choose to do here today will delay what is to come - Certainly."
"It won't change it then." Whispered Mari, almost to herself. A statement rather than a question. She looked up at Destiny in time to see the scars on her upper arm move a little further down. On noticing the look on Mari's face, Destiny followed her gaze and smiled.
"It moves forward, but never changes." She said. "Some paths can be closed and moved. Others are compounded within history's story. Such is the way with Michael's."