Chapter 495
And amidst the laughter still lingering at the edge of her lips—a laughter she had not felt in a very long time, a laughter that even felt foreign to herself—Lilith HaRish'a lowered her head.
Her single eye, the one that never blinked, never changed, never ceased seeing, was now directed downward.
Toward the place where the results of her cultivation grew in perfect silence.
Those plants never complained.
Never screamed.
Never apologized for their existence.
They simply grew—lush, green, pulsating with a life she had never asked to protect, yet continued to protect because there was nothing else she could do within this space that had never truly been whole.
Lilith observed them with an empty gaze, but empty in a different way than usual.
Not empty from boredom.
Not empty from indifference.
But empty from exhaustion—an exhaustion that could not be explained through words, an exhaustion that could only be felt by a being who had lived far too long among shards of glass that never stopped spinning.
"I almost killed one of them," she whispered suddenly, her voice emerging like a sigh that had been trapped at the bottom of her throat for far too long.
"The Forgivers. A group of bootlickers who think they are the holiest among the holy, believing that the mandate of the Gods is a ticket to do whatever they want in the name of faith."
She let out a breath, and that breath felt bitter—bitter like memories she did not wish to remember, yet still kept because hatred was the only thing that made her feel alive amidst the boredom that killed her slowly.
"But you didn't kill him," replied a voice from the depths of her consciousness—the voice of Bes, who was always laughing, always noisy, but now sounded serious in a way that felt unusual.
"You left him behind. You avoided him. You chose not to touch him at all. Why, Lilith? Since when were you afraid of little creatures who can only hide behind mandates granted by their masters?"
Lilith did not answer immediately.
Her single eye remained fixed upon the plants beneath her—upon the golden-colored leaves, the softly pulsating stems, the roots spreading across land she had never truly owned.
"Because if I kill him," Lilith finally answered, her voice soft, far too soft, like someone explaining something to a child who could not understand why the sky was blue, "then the Gods will know. Not because they are intelligent. Not because they see everything. But because those Forgivers... they are antennas. Every touch, every wound, every death inflicted upon them is immediately reflected into the ears of the Gods—like bells hanging around the necks of cattle lost within a forest."
She clenched her hand, then slowly released it, allowing her pale fingers to touch the empty air before her.
"The Gods grant them mandates. Thrones to pursue. Authority to hunt. But all of it can be revoked at any moment—as easily as turning over the palm of one's hand. And because of that, they cannot use their power recklessly. They are controlled. Watched. Bound by the same leash that makes them feel special."
She smiled bitterly—a smile that never reached her eyes, because that single eye of hers was far too busy staring at the plants below with an unreadable gaze.
"They are slaves given whips, then ordered to whip other slaves. And they gladly do it—because they believe that by whipping others, they are no longer slaves themselves. How amusing. How... boring."
And amidst the silence filled only by the gentle rustling of her hair and the endless pulse of the plants beneath her, Lilith HaRish'a felt something she had not felt in a very long time.
Not a tremor, not a premonition, but a calling.
A calling that came not from outside, but from within—from the place where the boundary between herself and the void had begun to blur, from the place where her five deceased sisters rested at the bottom of her consciousness.
The voices came all at once—Asherah, who was usually full of curiosity, now sounded stammering; Mammon, who was always confident, now sounded uncertain; Ashmedai, who never grew tired, now sounded exhausted in a different way; and even Bes—Bes who always laughed, who was always noisy, who was never silent—now sounded silent in the most unusual way possible.
"Lilith," whispered Asherah, her voice sounding like someone walking atop cracked glass, "we received something. A transmission. Not from the Gods. Not from the High Angels. But from... the Nothingness."
Lilith fell silent.
Her single eye no longer stared at the plants beneath her, but looked straight ahead, piercing through glass, through space, through something she could not see yet could still feel—a thread connecting her to something older than herself, something that had slept for years within the body of a child named Ilux.
"I felt it too," Lilith finally answered, her voice flat, far too flat, like the surface of a lake concealing a tsunami beneath it.
"But I need to confirm it first."
She closed that single eye of hers—the eye that never changed, never blinked, never stopped seeing—and for several moments, she simply listened.
Not with ears, because ears were far too primitive to perceive something without frequency.
But with her essence, with her nature, with the emptiness she had carried all this time as a residue of the Nothingness.
And there, amidst the deepest fractures of reality, amidst layers of time that never moved in the same rhythm, she heard it—a voice.
Not a voice emerging from a throat, because the Nothingness had no throat.
Not a voice emerging from a mouth, because the Nothingness had no mouth.
But a voice born from everything that did not exist, a voice that could only be produced by the entity that had birthed Lilith and her thirteen sisters from the same nature.
"It's real," Lilith whispered, and when she opened her eyes once more, boredom no longer remained within them.
There was no more exhaustion.
What remained was certainty—cold certainty, sharp certainty, certainty that caused her pitch-black hair to move faster, as though winds from an uncertain future had already begun blowing through this space that had never been whole.
"This is not deception. This is not a trap. This is a summoning ritual carried out by Ilux as the Nothingness—and only the one who birthed us could produce a transmission like this."
She raised her hand, and within her open palm, the shadow formed once again—but this time it was not shaped like mist, not shaped like shattered glass, not shaped like another hand, but shaped like a face, a face she had never seen yet still recognized, the face of the Nothingness that had never truly possessed a face.
"I will go," she declared, her voice suddenly loud, echoing from glass to glass, from fracture to fracture, from emptiness to emptiness.
"We will all go. Cut off communication between us. Keep your distance. Do not let the Gods know that we are moving. And if anyone tries to stop us..."
She did not finish her sentence.
There was no need to.
Because her eight sisters—both those still alive and those who had died and now resided at the bottom of her consciousness—understood perfectly the meaning behind the silence at the end of that sentence.
To be continued…