Umar sat on the Azure Throne, pulling a steady stream of golden power from the woman trapped in the Sphere of Cyttorak rotating slowly in the air beside her. She was using the siphoned Power Cosmic to both maintain the sphere and to test out the effects of different offensive spells when amplified by its energy. So far, she had been delightfully pleased with the results of the experiment.
She was simultaneously projecting two images in the air in front of her through mystic gemstones, one for each of the rebels’ attacking forces. Clea’s spell signature had been detected with each group, as well as at the G’uranthic Guardian, but Umar had yet to catch sight of her. She suspected her daughter was not actually at any of these places, but somewhere inside the palace with her group of witches, making their slow way toward Umar via stealth and trickery. She was almost impressed by the deviousness thus displayed, except that she suspected it wasn’t actually Clea’s. Her daughter tended to be revoltingly forthright and would no doubt have preferred a frontal assault, given her druthers.
Umar wrinkled her nose in distaste. The fact that she even had a daughter still made her squeamish at times. She had done her best to block out the memory of the birth, but it had driven her to the brink. The unrelenting pain that she could not stop, her body beyond her control, obeying some instinct deeper than magic as it fought to eject the child it had incubated. Clea deserved to die for putting her through that alone, never mind all the trouble she’d caused since.
But when she’d had the chance to kill her, Umar had refrained, choosing to save her daughter and her daughter’s lover, the most irritating Doctor Strange, instead. And she couldn’t say for certain why she had done that. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t killed family before. She and Dormammu together had destroyed their Faltine progenitor, Sinifer. And she’d certainly tried to kill Dormammu many times, though he always came back.
Umar didn’t like not knowing things, their whos and hows and whys. You had to know a thing to manipulate it. You had to know yourself to keep from being manipulated. That this “why” question existed in her mind and remained unanswered was a source of both perpetual disquiet and annoyance.
Which made her all the more determined to get rid of Clea for good this time. Umar couldn’t afford softness, whatever its source. She would do away with Clea and crush her petty little rebellion here and now, and then there would be nothing standing in the way of her conquest, external or internal.
Umar turned her focus back to the images of the rebels that moved in the air before her. She had already sent spells that opened the earth up in front of the ground troops and sent their front ranks plunging deep into the abyss, as well as drained the power from their ranged weapons and swapped out the forms of about half a dozen of the rebels with the bodies of Mindless Ones. She could not help but laugh as she watched the remaining rebels turn on the lumbering cyclopes, not realizing that the minds inside of those creatures were those of their friends. By the time they figured it out – if they ever did – it would be too late. The Mindless Ones outside the shimmering wall would have destroyed the swapped rebel bodies on sight, so even if the rebels did realize their mistake and cease trying to murder their hapless companions, those companions would have no bodies to return to. It was all just too delicious.
As for the aerial assault, she had already buffeted them with super-powered Winds of Watoomb and made the clouds congeal around them so they couldn’t see to avoid the attacks of her warriors or mount their own reprisals. She particularly liked that last one and thought she would add it to her campaign repertoire, though she would need to modify it for dimensions without clouds, or even skies.
She was contemplating which spell to send against the hapless rebels next when an alarm began to blare throughout the palace. One of the two constructs she’d created to look like Orini – the younger version – hurried up to her. She’d made an older one as well, but he reminded her too much of Clea, so she had sent him away to another part of the palace.
“The castle has been breached, mistress,” the Young Orini construct reported.
“Obviously, you dolt,” Umar snapped. Why this one was even in the throne room, she wasn’t sure. Still, if he knew something she didn’t, that intolerable situation needed to be rectified. Now. “Where? By whom? More rebels? And why hasn’t my guard been summoned here yet?”
“I don’t know about your other questions, but I can answer the first two,” said another voice behind her. “Second one first: your daughter, Clea.”
Umar turned to see the Dreamqueen, her own throne room visible through the dimensional window. Umar considered pulling her through the window and freeing her from her pocket dimension, because having the demoness here in the Dark Dimension would make it easier to kill her once their alliance had ended. Which Umar fervently hoped was soon; the demoness was just as annoyingly obsessed with Earth as Dormammu had ever been. Umar suspected that, while the pasty-skinned wretch had asked for her father’s realm, it was, in fact, Doctor Strange’s domain that she ultimately wanted for herself.
Not that it mattered. Umar had no intention of handing over Nightmare’s realm to the Dreamqueen once she had conquered it. Once the demoness had served her purpose, then her life, pitiful as it was, would be forfeit.
The object of Umar’s scorn was currently watching her own gazing pool, which she’d been monitoring for signs of Clea or her friends. The pool, which had been displaying rotating images of the palace interior and its immediate surrounds, now showed an overhead map of the palace.
“I’ve detected her magical signature in your palace. It’s the same as the one with the rebels, and the one that was at the gate,” the Dreamqueen said.
“Excellent,” Umar replied. The sooner her brat of a daughter got here, the sooner Umar could finish this unpleasant business and get on with conquering the Archipelago of Anguish and Redemption. And then, who knew? Now that she had an endless power source, the universe was the limit. “Where is she?”
The Dreamqueen looked at her, her bright red lips twisted into a scowl that stood out starkly against the white landscape of her face. Umar found it a bit disconcerting.
“Apparently,” the Dreamqueen said, gesturing at the map, which suddenly sported a multitude of glowing purple dots, “she’s everywhere.”