The wisdom of the Oracles

Landing at the entrance of the mountain face entrance of her people’s oracles, Diana looked back to the city below and took her first steps within the carved and decorated entrance. The temple was as much a place to seek answers to the future as was to seek answers in the past. By that… It was also the burial place of some of their greatest, fiercest, and wisest warriors. Entering the dark chambers and picking up a lit torch to light her way through, she passed by the tombs and plinths that lined the interior of the mausoleum. Hundreds lined the great chambers, small tributes, and shrines to the warriors of the past. Looking to each one, every livery she passed by told the illustrious tales and exploits of former queens, champions, and heroes of the Amazonian people from centuries and millennia past. She had hoped and feared that she too would be amongst these greatest of greats in her future. But her mind cleared of those thoughts, and she went deeper into the temple.

Making her way further through the halls of her honoured dead, she came to enter a chamber lit by torches and matted with fine rugs and pillows for seating. Here, her people would commune with their most gifted of sisters, the oracles. Each a child of the gods, each gifted with the powers to foresee the past present and future at will. The domed structure, held up by arching marble buttresses with carvings and painting that lined all around the walls, told the stories of her people. Their journeys, their hardships, their missions, and their exodus from man’s world to their paradise of the present.

There at the center sat a trio of women chanting around the smoking embers of a fire. The wisping plume of the smoke circling the three and filling the air with a scent Diana recognised every time she came here for advice. The scent of burning flower pedals and spices that made her head feel heavy and her mouth dry.

“Who comes to speak with the Oracles?” Asked one with a raised, leathered hand. The oracle raised her hooded head and stared back at Diana as she approached and set her torch to the wall.

“My sisters, I am Princess Diana, daughter of Queen Hippolyta. I come to you in our hour of need, I seek answers, and wisdom to face the…”

“We KNOW why you are here.” Spoke up one of their own in a raspy voice, Calliope raising a gnarled hand that sported chipped, overgrown nails when the woman pointed up to get Diana’s attention. “You seek to know if the wish, granted by our Goddess of Justice has reached to the far corners of the world, to OUR people.”

“Yes. Has it?” She asked, anxiously.

Grabbing a small handful of blue, glittering powder from a wooden bowl by her feet, one of the oracles threw it into the hot embers of the fire where a spark of blue light flashed and filled the chamber with more smoke. Again, the scent filled the air until it was almost too heavy to breath in, and the three oracles raised their arms up, where the smoke concentrated and began to take shapes. Overhead, Diana could see a vision of the other tribes of the amazons. Like molded clay, the smoke formed a moving, living representation of a vast dessert where the hidden village of the Bana-Midghell resided. It’s people hidden in shame and horror of their current appearance, their wails heard even across the sands. Then the illusion changed again, to that of a lush, tropical jungle where the trees were like a city above the earth. There, the amazons of the Esquecida wept, covering their faces both to protect against the rain and to shun the sight of each other’s appearance. Once lithe and graceful, they had all become wracked and gnarled, twisted into broken shapes, and robbed of their beauty and vigor.

“We see them, we see them all. The daughters of Themyscira, the dispossessed of the Bana-Midghall and the secluded of the Esquecida are all afflicted by the ghost’s wish. Even now we hear their cries of despair, even now we see their looks of sorrow.”

Clasping a hand to her heart, Diana looked away from the heady illusion and back to the three oracles before her. “Is there a way to undo this?”

“Indeed, even now our people wither and rot in reflection to our…” Pausing, she and the other two oracles darted their gaze back and forth almost looking offended. Calliope muttered silently, her face one of annoyance and confusion before she resumed her mantra and breathed in the fumes of the smoke. “Hmm, tricky business undoing the wish of a goddess, especially one that represents justice. To undo such a terrible fate, our people must… YOU DARE MOCK OUR WISDOM?”

Leaning back, slightly confused of the woman’s outburst, Diana watched the three look up at the upper corner of their personal sanctuary before returning their gaze to the smoke and embers. “Bah… The MAN left the wish vague enough to encompass ALL amazons, and not just those who sought to punish him for his transactions.”

“Yes, but that may be where the solution lies, for… OF COURSE, WE CAN HEAR YOU! WHO DARES TO INTERRUPT US IN OUR DIVINE FORESIGHT?!” Called out Castelia, pulling back her hood to show she was just as elderly and dishevelled as her sisters in the city.

“Castelia, do not let the spirit bait you.” Calisto calmly gestured to her sister, seeing her get to her feet while Castelia pointed an accusing finger to the ceiling. “His actions have already caused us to… What in Hera’s name is Why Fie?”

“NO! We DO NOT have the scores to this game between the Giants and Broncos you speak of! Cease your maddening dribble! You taunt the daughters of Zeus! We who have been gifted the knowledge of… Oh I am going up there!”

“Sister!”

“No! He DARES to call me a ‘two-bit fortune teller’ and go unpunished?!” Quickly crawling her way across the room to a straw broom and pail, Castelia grabbed the cleaning tool and ran back to the center of the chamber, waiving the broom over her head up in the air as if to shoo away a bird, wafting the smoke away more and more while her two sisters tried to calm her down. “BEGONE VILE SPIRIT! DEPART FROM THIS MORTAL REALM!”

“Castelia, please calm yourself. You only make your condition wo… WHAT THE HELL DID YOU CALLED ME?!” Jumping to their feet, the other oracles scrambled with activity, yelling, and threatening up at the air above them, and flailing their arms as if to swat at a fly buzzing over their heads. “No! No, I am not a… WHOOPIE! You take that back you scoundrel!”

Back-to-back, the trio of oracles darted their paranoid eyes all around them, completely ignoring the princess who stared watching their behaviour with a baffled expression.

“You think you can HIDE from us? We who foretold the fall of Pompei, the sinking of Atlantis and the sundering of Crete? No! We shall find you spirit, and we shall EXORCISE you from our paradise.”

For a moment there was a pause, the three acting as if they were listening to something, and slowly tilting their heads in confusion. “What does he mean, we’re like the three stooges?”

“BASTARD!!!!!!”

Confused, and feeling awkward for having seen her people’s greatest advisors reduced to a trio of elderly witches chasing their visions like they were trying to shoo a hornet out of their home, Diana promptly turned and made her way back out of the temple. Blinking and shaking her head as she made her way out of the temple and looked back at the entrance, still hearing the oracles scream and dole out threats and war cries to the smoke around them. Resting her fingers to her brow, Diana could only make a face of fatigue before looking back to her home and making the way back on foot.

“Perhaps this has afflicted our people worse than I had assumed?”

*

Staggering her way back to her tribe’s encampment, Artemis hissed in anger as she stumbled again, unused to her hunched stance after her outburst in the royal gardens, Artemis picked herself up and looked back over her shoulder to the palace grounds she came from. Off at the distance she could see a small battalion of Themysciran Amazons marching down the path in her direction, obviously to keep an eye on her after her little stint with the royal stable keeper.

Looking down at her hand, it wasn’t hard to understand why. Once her hands were smooth, delicate, yet strong. Now they were gaunt, the fingers long and misshapen with chipped, overgrown fingernails. Legions and boils riddled the back of her hand and up her forearm where the skin hung off her despoiled flesh. Why did he curse them? Why? Why make them all frail and feeble looking, spitting in the face of their strengths? And why did he give it back to the weakest of them?! She could see it in that Episteme’s eyes. She was no warrior, there was no steel in her gaze or edge in her stance. The Themyscirans were even more soft than she realised if she let some of their weakest be used in the most mundane of tasks just to keep them around. Her tribe was strong because they removed their weaknesses. Her people were WARRIORS! Not these nebbish cowards whose only value was in their animal husbandry.

Clenching her hand into a fist, she picked herself back up and hobbled her way back to her sisters. The moment she had made it to the tents and campfire of her Bana-Mighdall eating their meal, she curled her lip and stopped dead in her tracks to find them all surrounding Kalla… A now beautiful and youthful Kalla who continued to trace her delicate fingers over her features, still in disbelief. Looking up to their leader, the rest of the amazons gestured for her to join them, offering bread and fruit. Gritting her teeth to the point of bleeding down her lip, Artemis remained silent, and returned to her sisters to have her breakfast.