Ok, on to the magic of Ishtar.
"Listen to me, boy, for I will tell you the secret of magic," said a woman in strange robes, "and the secret of life." Even though she was lounging at the top of the bleachers and Jay was in the middle of the field, her voice purred in his ear as if she were right next to him. He was currently being hoisted in the air by his victorious teammates, right in the middle of one of his favorite dreams about winning the World Cup, so he tried to ignore her, but she persisted.
"You see, magic only works when you really want something, and life is about those things you want so much that you'd die to have them." The dream faded, as dreams do, from one into another. This one was in a temple, the cheering of fans becoming the sussurus of many voices chanting. "Shall I show you what you really want?"
Ishtar is the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love, Fertility, Sex, and War. Above all she is a being of passion, whether it is the ardor of a lover or the rage of battle. Ecstasy, in the religious sense, is her agenda for the world, the kind of feelings that catapult the mind beyond the mundane into the magical and beyond to touch the divine. The true, honest, and deep desires that come from a person's soul itself are the spark of the divine within humanity and above all, Ishtar seeks to have all realize their soul's desires, despising repression and inhibition. Ritual sex was often performed in Her temples, as she joined with her worshipers through her priests and priestesses in holy matrimony, or hierogamy as the Greeks called it. Her magic is tinged with desire and passion, but can also cause satiation, the feeling of having one's desires fulfilled. Her magic excels in psychomancy, worldwalking, and a bit of biomancy. One of the rituals of Ishtar, the Dance of the Seven Veils, is actually a subtler method of crossing over into the Nevernever without tearing a hole in the Veil, though the caster does end up naked on the other side.
"Remember what I told you," Ameena's voice spoke in Jay's mind while he psyched himself up to walk into the bar, "we may spark the flames of desire and fan them into a blaze, but we do not direct how they burn, that is the path of the daeva, the demons." With one last breath to calm himself down, Jay pushed open the door and walked into the bass beat.
A note on the Third and Fourth Laws of Magic: I'm going to say that Ameena has had dealings with White Court vampires in the past. She knows them as Daeva, demons that lead people astray instead of toward divinity as they are meant. Babylon was rife with them and they feasted on the ashes as the great empire fell. I'll take that as a cautionary tale as to why she probably straddles the line of Lawbreaking, but never quite crosses over. Empathy, both receptive and projective, doesn't count as mind reading or enthrallment.
