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There is something to be said about these chains.
She doesn’t know what, yet. Her mind is too young and too full of new futures and buried pasts and destined dreamers turned martyrs. She sees flashes of people - no, children - light in their eyes, before it's snuffed out and so are they. She doesn’t know their names.
She doesn’t even know her own.
“Jinn,” calls a man that she will soon know intrinsically, if not by his body than by his soul. He will call to her in each new body each new century and she will give him some answers, but never all. This comes to her newborn brain in a flash. He, too, is newborn in a way. He stumbles in his physical body like it’s not quite his own, like he’s never had to run, only walk. In years to come he will grow into each body like a second skin and bury his soul into its flesh so that it can’t escape. He will carve a home into their unfamiliar flesh and call it mercy.
But for now, he is barely more than a boy, and he is new, and uncertain, and so is she, and he’s calling that word again like it should mean something to her.
“Jinn. I summon you.”
That’s her name, she thinks. No. She knows. She didn’t choose it. She thinks it would have been nice, to choose. She gets a feeling she won’t get to choose anything in this life. If you could even call it that.
So she appears to the man like a god to an unbeliever and smiles as he stares at her like she’s something sacred. She lets him gape and sputter and studies him, really looks at him, and suddenly she sees his future laid out before her in a tragic play. This poor boy. Touched by the gods just like her, though he chose to fight a near impossible war while she was made for the very purpose of aiding its soldiers.
“What are you?” The boy gasps out the question and immediately slaps a hand over his mouth as he realizes his mistake. One question, just like that, down the drain until it can be fished out for next century. She can’t help but laugh.
“An impossibility,” she says despite her own wondering. She goes to dismiss the question as one of three, but her mouth is clamped shut by an invisible force. She shoots him what she hopes is an apologetic look.
He doesn’t ask another question. Not for another fifty years. But she has never seen a human before, has never known another person and right now she wants nothing more than to be anything but alone now that she has seen the horrors of this world that is still so new.
So, for the very first time, Jinn asks a question of her own.
“What’s your name?”
He hesitates for just a moment. She already knows his name, but waits with bated breath for his answer. Perhaps he’ll surprise her. (He won’t. It’ll be centuries until he does that.)
“Ozma.”
And though it was a name she already knew, she smiles as she is given an answer. She’ll see him almost exclusively three times every hundred years. Sometimes others are intermixed; doomed heroes or villains, only once before they’re swept away by time’s currents. She never forgets them, though.
Jinn doesn’t have friends. She barely even knows herself. But she likes to think that this man, this Ozma, is someone she could get used to seeing.
She doesn’t think she has a choice.
Centuries in, Ozma tells her that there are others. Other beings like her.
She asks to meet them.
He says it’s too dangerous. He says they send their regards.
She wants to argue. But she blinks and she sees futures where their being brought together results in the destruction of all things. Maybe she and the other three would survive. But she doesn’t want to test it. She doesn’t want to risk the world and people she has grown to love over the past years. She’s only seen glimpses of it in the times they’ve met - in Oz himself and the people he shares a lifetime with.
So she waves him off and asks him their names instead. There are so many presents in her head. So many uncertain futures. Too many pasts. So many that she never came across the knowledge of her siblings - if she could call them that. She likes to think that she can.
But now she knows their names, and she knows their stories now like her own.
It’s enough. Only because it has to be.
She sends Ozma on his way.
She doesn’t see him for a while. But she hears him.
She can always hear people call her name, even if the questions are dried up, even if she can’t answer. In times like these, she truly believes that she was born to be cursed.
Because he’s screaming.
He’s in agony from the slashes covering his entire body, his fragile, frail, breakable human body. There’s an unbreakable spirit in there that doesn’t have a choice, and an unbreakable spirit that is meant to be tossed aside.
He’s screaming for her - they both are. Because they were caught with the lamp on their way to transfer it to a new, secure location, but they never made it there. The Grimm were waiting for them, and only more came, each one attracted by her. This was her fault.
He’s whispering, now.
Jinn. Jinn, please, just a second. Just enough time to get us both out of here. I can’t lose this one. He’s so young, Jinn. He has a son. I can’t do this again.
But the Grimm keep coming, and suddenly they’re moving and she’s going with them, and there’s a woman’s voice that she won’t hear for another few centuries. Ozma doesn’t say her name anymore. Not even when she makes him scream until his throat is raw and his voice is gone.
It’s another lifetime before she hears Ozma’s voice again. He calls for her out loud and without abandon. She must be safe, then. She appears and it's then that she realizes how much time has passed. It’s then that she realizes Ozma and Ostin died in that prison. Ozma remains in a different body, another question on his lips. She answers, and marvels at the spirit still burning inside of him. She wonders if she’ll ever see it burn out.
She decides she never wants to live to see that day.
Ozma’s getting more desperate. She knows for a fact that Salem is, as well.
Jinn can’t help but think about that boy she first met all of those years ago, barely twenty years of age and still believing that he could win. He still does, in a way. Now, he’s just walked this earth for hundreds upon hundreds of years, and no mortal mind is meant to last that long, and he’s tired and wants it to end and is tired of sacrificing others for a future they will never live to see.
He’s asked her many questions throughout his visits.
Some purely business.
Where are the other Relics?
What powers do they possess?
Are the Gods afraid of anything?
Others, more selfish.
Is there any point in trying?
Did she ever love me?
And then, the point of no return. She didn’t know what led up to it. She could have, if she had wanted to enough, but she decided it was probably one of those things she never wanted to see. But at one point from the last visit and this one, Ozma had finally decided that he had to end the very person he had dedicated his life to trying to save.
How do I destroy Salem?
That’s the first time she sees him angry. It’s the first time he catches her off guard. She doesn’t see him for a while after that.
He didn’t like the answer she gave him. She didn’t either.
But he was a lonely man, and only thought of himself at times, and had no idea that he couldn’t defeat Salem alone. But it’s been years since she saw a glimpse of that boy he had been on the first day of the beginning of their lives, and she thinks she might never see it again. There’s a small, sick pleasure in telling him that he can’t defeat her. It’s what he asked for, after all.
She wonders how he’ll get out of this one.
Ozma used to bring people with him. His chosen, mostly his colleagues or students or even his own children, all of whom he trusted not quite with his life, but something close enough to it to matter. Through them she was able to see the world changing. Each of them had new clothing, mannerisms, names. She would see each of them only once. But she cherished them all the same.
She never could quite understand humans. Such fragile creatures, such bold minds. She had never been human. But she knows that if she was, she wouldn’t be nearly as brave as those she’s met.
Because they’re so eager. So willing to fight and so trusting in their cause, so optimistic in their success and survival, because who could win if not them? Not even half of them knew the true story. At least, not the full one. They had what Oz deemed they needed to know at the time and they died with it. She would answer their questions with a smile and send them to slaughter. She hated herself for it every damn time.
So she would stall. It wouldn’t matter, in the end, not even in the frozen moment. But she tried. She’d ask them questions she already knew the answer to if only to give them a few more moments of life and wonder.
Tell me, child, are there still kings?
What ever happened to the Bringer of the Dawn?
Does the City on the Cloud still stand?
She already knows the answers. She knows everything. It’s too much and it’s not enough, it will never be enough, not for these children and their blinking lifetimes spent as ticking bombs.
But she asks anyway.
Maybe one time they won’t have to walk away.
Maybe one day she’ll send them to a triumph instead of a tragedy.
(They are dreamers, all of them.
Jinn allows herself to dream, too.)
There comes a time where she stops asking people questions, and herself what-if’s. What if this is the last time, what if I steered them the wrong way, what if we’ll never be free?
But, in time, she finds herself with another question on her mind. Another what-if.
What if this is how we win?
There’s a child calling her name, softly, hesitantly. Jinn watches as she becomes the first besides Oz to ask her a question in years, as she asks her what Ozma is hiding from them. She sees in those silver eyes a rare fire only heard of in legends. She knows that this girl fits among their ranks.
Jinn can’t predict the future. It’s one of her few mercies - she’d drive herself insane otherwise. But she thinks that this girl is the closest she might ever get to a guarantee. The feeling only grows when the girl uses her - her! to stop time. She appears and surveys the situation, sees the girl standing tall in front of a thing from nightmares, and smiles. Clever girl. There’s something special about this one.
And since time has worn her down, and her lips have grown looser, and her rules even less-upheld, she allows it. The world keeps turning. The Gods don’t rain fire down upon her. And perhaps this means that the Gods are farther than ever before, perhaps they’ve forgotten about her and their ruined world they threw away, but she can’t bring herself to care at that.
Because she believes that these children can stop her.
She’s lived for centuries. She’s seen lifetimes pass in the blink of an eye and heroes fall like flies. She’s seen wars fought for pride and lives lost for less. She’s seen the horrors of Remnant, and she’s seen the good. (It’s a shame for Salem that she can’t see what she does. Maybe she did once. But that woman is long gone.)
She’s seen it all.
But she’s never seen a girl like this.
She’s never seen a team with this much of a chance.
She’s captured with Ozma. Again. She is not summoned, but she hears as the boy calls her name, and she hopes that this time will not be like the last and this boy will make it out alive with both pieces of his soul intact. But he’s there when she’s summoned, so she takes that as a good sign that history won’t repeat itself just this once.
She’s summoned without a question. Again. It serves to get more on their side.
(When did she pick a side?)
So she allows it. The invisible girl amuses her, at first. Not so much when she’s summoned the next time. She watches as the false maiden learns of her champions’ plans. She watches as they plot a plan against her chosen few. She fights for her hope to not slip through her fingers, grasps it tight, tight, tight, not allowing it to escape.
She’s done this for centuries - watching without being able to interfere, being shut inside her prison for a century until someone utters her name, knowing the last heroes will be long gone by the time someone remembers her again. But it’s never hurt quite like this.
Jinn knows the next time someone summons her will be a century from now. It will pass for her in the blink of an eye as they always do. When she wakes again either the war will be over or it will have never been won. She will answer their futile questions and nudge them in the right direction as much as she can, and she will sleep not knowing their fates. She will make cynics out of dreamers and soldiers out of youth.
She will listen to their prayers in place of Gods who created them both to be damned. She will listen, and though she cannot help them, she will not forget.
(There is something to be said about these chains.)