We’re back inside Quantum Jump today, dropping from a shack at Popham straight into Bronze Age Ireland. The boys are trying to explain giant pythons and archangels to Rom Bari aka Roger Boswell aka Elena’s partner in “crime”, and Elena is learning—again—that quantum jumping, is not a service which comes with basic amenities.

This is an edited slice from Book VI, plus a short field note for readers who don’t automatically file “Lake Fundudzi” and “Airmid” under “obvious.”

Scene: Popham airfield shack to Old Ireland

“Uhm, recall the almost shoot-out in Elena’s kitchen? The Estonian man is the other father.”

Silence.

“Bloody hell. A dinilo Russian. Blimey.”

Asdar swallows. “We went to Lake Fundudzi in South Africa—”

“What business did you have at that lake fondue?!”

Asdar steadies himself. “The babies had to be born there. Elena gave birth there – in Lake Fundudzi. It’s a sacred lake. There’s… there’s a Python god. A great serpent that guards it.”

Roger’s eyes narrow. “A holy python. You’re having a laugh.”

“No. It’s—he’s old. Ancient. The lake belongs to him.”

Harry shifts behind him. The dog’s ears prick forward.

“So you went into this lake,” Roger says slowly, “with a giant snake, to get me grandson.”

“And the girl. Yes.”

“And?”

Asdar’s hands clench. “We did the ritual. We got both babies out. But then—” He stops.

“But then what, boy?”

“The other man from the kitchen, the bodyguard, turned out to be an archangel. Mikhail. He had wings.”

Silence.

“Wings,” Roger repeats flatly.

“Yes. Massive. Like—like an angel. He took Elena. Lifted her up and they vanished. Just… gone. Into thin air.”

Roger sets his drink down very carefully. “Vanished.”

“Yes.”

“And the Russian?”

Asdar’s voice drops. “The Python took him. Dragged him under the water. We couldn’t—there was nothing we could do.”

The men in the shadows shift. One mutters something.

Roger stares at Asdar for a long moment. Then he looks at Harry. “You hearing this?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“Wings. Giant snakes. People vanishing.”

“Yeah.”

Roger turns back to Asdar. His voice goes very quiet. “Where. Is. Elena.”

“I don’t know. I swear to you, I don’t know. One moment she was there, the next—gone.”

“Where in the bloody hell are we now?!”

I sit up, grass beneath us instead of dust. The air is different—wet, green, alive. Mist clings to rolling hills dotted with standing stones.

Mikhail rises beside me, wings half-folded, looking around warily. “What is this place?”

My anthropologist brain starts cataloguing: the quality of light, the untouched landscape, the feel of the air. Pre-industrial. Ancient. The standing stones in that configuration…

“Ireland,” I whisper. “Old Ireland. Bronze Age, maybe earlier.”

A woman kneels a short distance away, her back to us. Her shoulders shake with grief. As I watch, something impossible happens: where her tears fall, green shoots push through the earth, rising fast and unnaturally.

My breath catches. I know this story.

“Mikhail,” I breathe. “I think that’s Airmid.”

He looks at me blankly. “Who?”

“Wonderful,” I mutter. “Still no toilet paper. Or toilets, for that matter. And heaps of cattle and warriors mad as cows. Pfff.”

Field note – for the curious heathen

If you’re not secretly in love with obscure mythology, here’s the cheat sheet for what just happened:

• Lake Fundudzi
  A real sacred lake in Limpopo, South Africa, venerated by the Venda people. It’s tied to legends of a powerful python deity associated with fertility, rain, and abundance. In The Mutamba Chronicles, that python is not a metaphor; he is an actual ancient serpent being with agency and a lake to guard.
• The Python as someone, not something
  When Asdar talks about a great serpent that guards the lake and then calls him “he,” that’s deliberate. This is a personified being, closer to a local god than to wildlife. When he takes the Estonian Tarmo under, that’s not “nature red in tooth and claw,” that’s enforcement.
• Bronze Age Ireland & standing stones
  Elena reads landscape for a living. Rolling green hills, mist, untouched terrain, standing stones in that particular configuration—her brain files it under “Old Ireland,” somewhere in the deep pre-industrial layers. This is not tourist Ireland with pub crawl; it’s herds, warriors, and whatever gods haven’t yet been snuffed out or rebranded.
• Airmid (Airmed)
  Airmid is an Irish / Celtic goddess of herbs and healing, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. In one of her best-known stories, she weeps over the grave of her brother, and where her tears fall, healing herbs spring up from the earth. In the scene, Elena recognises her exactly because of that: tears → instant vegetation. Myth, spotted in the wild.
• Why Elena knows and Mikhail doesn’t
  Elena’s head is a crowded shelf of myths, ethnographies, and pantheons. Mikhail’s domain is more “celestial contracts and statecraft.” So of course he’s the one going “Who?” while she does the quiet, exhausted “Oh, I know this one,” before complaining about toilets.

I’m slowly editing Quantum Jump like this: tightening the scenes so they read cinematically and adding these small notes so readers who didn’t grow up on Venda stories and Irish goddesses still have a foothold.

If there’s a particular myth, goddess, or location you’d like a future field note on—Airmid’s family, the Python’s rituals, or the next place Elena crash-lands—tell me and I’ll pull that thread next. And rest assured — sex and bullets, as ever, are never far behind.

Welcome to my world, may my universe enlighten or at least entertain you,

Irena Phaedra

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.