Salomeh answered immediately, without hesitation:
— Why not. I mainly came to see all this with my own eyes… and to understand how to prepare.
The goddess Shylty 3 gave a sly smile.
— You, the Apostle of Morlük — the one of whom we are only fragments — you think you need preparation? Normally, you could annihilate them all with a mere snap of your fingers…
She stretched out her hand toward the cages of the Abominables.
— Every time a scale explodes, Abominables appear by the billions. And they spread across all possible space-times to sow apocalypse: slaughtering humans, devouring creatures… even Great Mythical Beings whom they can quite easily strike down.
Niyus⁵ was speechless.
— They can kill a Great Mythical Being?
Shylty 3 nodded slowly.
— Their levels vary: some are simple great mortals, others Great Mythical Beings. And we even captured one possessing the power of a minor god. To keep it here, we had to enlist the help of a primordial god.
She paused.
— But that's not even the worst…
She moved a few steps down the infinite corridor.
— Each scale of Raktabīja Rāvana certainly contains billions of creatures. But… each scale also holds a unique entity, far more powerful, far more conscious, capable of speech and reasoning.
Isissis 3 added:
— Ordinary Abominables are… rather stupid, but terribly dangerous. However, one of them, in each scale, is different: intelligent, conscious, and capable of controlling the others in coordinated destruction. We call them Queens. Curiously, they are always female… and all the others are males, whom we have named Workers.
Salomeh squinted.
— So… since you have captured the equivalent of sixteen scales…
Shylty 3 nodded, an almost satisfied smile on her lips.
— Yes. That means there are more than sixteen Queens captured here.
She turned her back to them, contemplating the sealed cages.
— Unlike an ant or bee colony, the death of a Queen does not stop the Workers. An outside Queen can very well control others — even if they don't come from her original scale.
Bakuran frowned.
— And if all the Queens died… what would happen?
Isissis 3 replied gravely:
— The attacks of the Abominables would become more predictable. The Queens are the strategists. They make their offensives unpredictable, impossible to anticipate.
— Without them… their Workers would act as a brute pack. Still dangerous, but less… destabilizing.
Shylty 3 resumed walking, their steps echoing in the immense gallery where the cages vibrated with dark energy.
— You must be wondering, she said, how the Queens manage to command billions of Workers without ever being detected.
Salomeh nodded. Bakuran and Niyus⁵ took a more cautious step forward.
— The Queens, the goddess continued, do not communicate by voice, nor by telepathy in the classical sense. Their link is… a conceptual thread. An innate authority, which the Workers perceive as an instinct engraved in their very existence. They don't need orders; their mere presence in a space-time is enough to influence the destructive decisions of the Workers in all others. They radiate a will field that crosses dimensions as if they were breathing.
Isissis 3 added:
— And to avoid exposure, they blend into the mass by reducing their physical manifestation. A Queen can take the same form as a Worker, or disappear entirely into a semi-abstract state. She can only be distinguished by her signature: a sense of order amid chaos, because all orchestrated destruction bears her mark.
Shylty 3 approved.
— They are strategists. They never appear on the front lines. Their priority is survival, because their death temporarily disorganizes billions of Workers.
Salomeh frowned.
— Temporarily?
Shylty 3 sighed.
— Yes… because the Workers are ready to die to regenerate them. When their Queen is about to die, thousands, sometimes millions of Workers literally throw themselves on her and dissolve to rebuild her body. Instant regeneration, fueled by mass sacrifice.
Bakuran swallowed.
— And if none succeed?
This time, Isissis 3 spoke.
— Then come the Kings.
The tone had changed, almost charged with terrified respect.
— The Kings, he continued, are not Queens. They are… the most colossal Workers. Aberrations so huge that their mere body could fill countless Delzluhud or even realities. They have no sense of direction or purpose; they are reality corrupters, moving like living storms, drifting, devouring, distorting.
Shylty 3 concluded:
— Their intelligence is partial, but sufficient to understand a Queen's order: protect. Nothing and no one can stop a King launched to save his sovereign.
She pointed to a row of objects suspended on a wall.
— Here, we have locked them in sealing pendants. They are too massive to be housed in a cage. Their mere presence would distort this entire domain.
Salomeh stared at the pendants in amazement. Each vibrated as if containing a cosmic storm.
— I understand better now… she murmured. This fits perfectly with Raktabīja Rāvana. He is so immense that he himself ignores his own size. So… the bigger an Abominable, the more it inherits the power of the body it comes from.
Isissis 3 smiled, pleased with the deduction.
— Exactly. And that's not all.
They reached another section, where the air pressure seemed to change. Gigantic silhouettes rested in reinforced cages — some the size of galaxies, others vibrated like living nebulae.
— Here are the Soldiers, explained Shylty 3.
— They are less powerful than the Kings and Queens… but far superior to the Workers. Their strength ranges from Monitors' level… up to that of Great Mythical Beings.
Bakuran burst out laughing nervously.
— You call those "soldiers"?!
— In the Abominable hierarchy, yes, replied Isissis 3.
— They lead assaults, break laws, rip open realities. They are the main army of the Queens.
Each cage vibrated, as if the creatures sensed the presence of visitors.
Shylty 3 suddenly stopped.
— Prepare yourselves.
She raised a hand: a titanic door began to unlock slowly, with a cosmic rumble.
— You have seen the Workers… the Soldiers… the sealed Kings.
She turned her head toward Salomeh.
— Now, here is what you came to see.
— A Queen will take the stage.
Silence fell.
A cold breath swept through the room.
The door opened.
When the massive doors slid with a heavy rumble, the room opened onto sixteen colossal cages, aligned like the tombs of a overturned pantheon.
They were no ordinary structures: each more than eight meters tall, forged of divine metal charged with moving runes, saturated with fairy chains and primordial seals.
Shylty 3 slid her hand along one of the walls, as if to remind her guests that even an accidental touch could condemn an entire world.
A god, specially charged with this task, stretched his arm toward a cage's lock. The mechanism unlocked in an avalanche of runic lights.
The door creaked.
And the Queen came out.
She was… horribly thin.
Her body had humanoid proportions, but instead of feet and hands were only smooth, elongated extremities ending in bone-white points.
Her skin seemed made of otherworldly wax, stretched over bones too long.
From her mouth — a pseudo-slit sewn shut by a divine black thread — a continuous thread of dark blood escaped, falling to the ground with a viscous sound.
Her face was completely covered with a thick bandage, like a shroud.
Bakuran stepped back.
— Why are their faces covered?
Shylty 3 answered without hesitation, in a tone too calm for such horror:
— Because their mere gaze can corrupt your essence, to your conceptual core. A Queen who sees you… remodels you into a Worker. Their corruption passes through the soul, the will, through the very story of your being.
She crossed her arms and continued:
— Their power varies according to their King. And the Kings… are Abominables as powerful as a tertiary god like me, sometimes close to a secondary god. They are the ultimate weapons. The Queens are their brains.
The words left a silence broken only by the threads of blood falling drop by drop from the masked creature's face.
Salomeh breathed in, regaining her composure:
— How would you describe the intelligence of the Abominables?
Isissis 3 replied with an almost clinical detachment:
— Workers have the intelligence of a four-year-old human child.
— Soldiers reach five or seven years.
— Kings sometimes reach the equivalent of a thirteen-year-old child.
Just enough to understand orders.
But the Queens… Their intelligence cannot be measured by your criteria. They reason like mythological gods. Their thought is structural, conceptual, strategically absolute.
Niyus⁵, eyes trembling before the Queen's immense and silent silhouette, asked:
— Why keep them… alone? And here? Why not with their own troops?
Shylty 3 gave a joyless smile.
— Because if a single Queen passes through a corridor filled with Workers, she will instantly control them, even those from foreign scales.
She will force them to free her, to destroy the walls, to devastate the entire sector.
The mere mental contact suffices to trigger monstrous agitation.
Millions of Workers then become frantic, uncontrollable, a tidal wave of blind and deadly obedience.
She took a few steps toward the other cages, where the distorted silhouettes of fifteen other Queens waited, motionless but terribly aware.
— And if, by misfortune, a Queen reached the Soldiers' level… or worse, the sealing pendants of the Kings, it would be over.
A single thought from them, and a awakened King could pulverize countless universes by mere movement.
Isissis 3 nodded.
— That's why they are isolated. They are the brains of the entire swarm. Their will is a strategic contagion. Here… we limit their thoughts, their impulses, their correlations. Elsewhere… they would become the end of everything.
The Queen before them imperceptibly turned her head toward Salomeh.
Even blinded, even restrained, something in her looked.
Not with eyes, but with something older, hungrier, more structured.
Salomeh felt a shiver run down her spine.
— They still think?
Shylty 3 simply answered:
— They always think.
And they wait for only one thing.
She paused.
— For someone to make a mistake.