Chapter 491
She opened her eye, and within that single eye was something she had long tried to bury beneath layers of thick boredom: confusion.
Not confusion born from ignorance, but confusion born from knowing that something was wrong while never being able to find the answer.
"We tried searching for it. For days. Weeks. Years, according to the time of certain universes. We traveled across the Multiversal Pathways, leaping from one box to another, tracing every remaining vibration, every possible trail left behind."
She raised her hand, and within her open palm, the shadow formed once more—but this time it was dimmer, fainter, like a memory beginning to wear thin from being touched too often.
"But there was nothing. The Nothingness disappeared. Or rather, it was dragged back into its seal, deeper than before. And we… we could only stand in the middle of nothingness, staring at one another without knowing what to say."
Within that fractured silence, Lilith HaRish'a did not hear only her own voice.
There were other voices flowing beneath the depths of her consciousness—not as disturbances, but as threads connected from eight different directions, from eight Multiversal Pathways separated by distances that could not be measured by numbers.
Asherah, Mammon, Ashmedai, Baal-Zevul, Chemosh, Apollyon, Rahab, Apophis.
Her eight surviving sisters, each with a unique voice, each with a different way of telling stories, yet all leading toward the same conclusion.
A confession that caused Lilith's brow—one that almost never furrowed—to tighten slightly.
"They said they were close friends with the Archangels," she muttered, her voice half-joking, half-disbelieving.
"Not merely acquaintances. Not merely cold diplomatic ties. But friends. Friends who genuinely cared."
She slowly shook her head, her deep black hair moving like waves that never reached the shore.
"Asherah told stories about Deltusia—the guardian of Heaven and Hell's gates—who taught her how to read stars in a sky that had no night. And Mammon…"
Her voice paused slightly, as though carefully choosing the right words.
"Mammon spoke of Emhtartako—the one who manifests prayers and plants hope—who once even lent her light to protect him from an energy storm in a dimension called Apocrypha."
Her smile was faint.
It never truly reached her eye.
"Ashmedai even spoke of Rearomh—the deliverer of revelation to humanity—who… cried."
She paused for a moment.
"Cried in his lap. Because she was too exhausted from delivering messages that those granted faith did not always wish to hear."
Her eye narrowed.
"And Baal-Zevul…"
Her tone shifted, becoming softer, heavier.
"Baal-Zevul spoke of Ahael—the keeper of balance among the universal boxes. The one said to be the firmest. The most unwavering."
"But even she…"
Lilith fell silent for a brief moment, as though chewing on something she did not wish to admit.
"… Harbored doubts. Doubts she never shared with anyone—except a Disturbers who lived in the place she hated most: Earth."
Hooh!!
"They all said the same thing," she continued, and her voice now carried a tone she could no longer hide.
A genuine confusion.
"That the Archangels—all twelve of them—never hated the existence of the Disruptors. That they were actually… curious. Interested. Even, according to Apophis…" Lilith murmured softly, almost like whispering to the void itself,
"Anh-Bu-Sisi once said—"
She stopped.
For the first time, there was a pause that felt… human.
"'The emptiness you carry is not a threat.'"
Her eye slowly lifted, staring at something that was not there.
"It is a mirror."
Lilith exhaled, and that breath felt like releasing something nameless.
"I do not know whether to believe it or not. But my eight sisters would not lie. Not because they could not—they could, very much so, we are all Disturbers after all, and lies are part of our nature—but because they have no reason to. What would they gain from inventing stories about friendship with beings who are supposed to be our natural enemies?"
She closed her single eye, allowing her sisters' words to echo within her mind, ringing one after another like bells that never stopped tolling.
Yet there was one name that always appeared at the end of those threads, one name she could never avoid no matter how hard she tried not to think about it.
Silvia Cantika Putri.
Matriarch.
Mother of Angel.
"Back then, before she was sentenced, before she was no longer acknowledged as part of the Archangels, we often spoke," she said, her voice suddenly quieter, more cautious, like someone walking atop already cracked glass.
"Not as friends. I would never call her a friend. But as two entities equally bored of the worlds they inhabited, equally exhausted by dogmas repeated endlessly without ever being questioned."
She opened her eye again, and within it flickered memories—of long conversations held between the cracks of reality, in places beyond the sight of the Gods.
"Matriarch had a dogma she created herself. She called it 'Faith, Devotion, and Betrayal.' I never agreed with it. According to her, faith must be blind, devotion must be absolute, and betrayal is the price paid by anyone daring to question."
Lilith smiled bitterly.
I told her, 'That is not a dogma. That is a recipe for collective suicide.' She merely stared blankly. She was always like that whenever I said something harsh."
Fhhh!
"But there is one thing that still keeps me questioning even now," she continued, and her tone became more serious, deeper, like someone about to reveal an anomaly she could not simply accept.
"Matriarch always referred to the other twelve Archangels as her 'brothers.' Men. She always used masculine pronouns. She spoke of Warsh as 'the one who safeguards the continuity of the realm of resurrection with masculine hands.' Of Anity as 'the one who guards the center of knowledge with a masculine voice.' Of Anh-Bu-Sisi as 'the one who judges and executes with masculine eyes.'"
She raised her hand, pointing toward the mirrors surrounding her as though pointing toward somewhere far away.
"But my eight sisters—Asherah, Mammon, Ashmedai, Baal-Zevul, Chemosh, Apollyon, Rahab, Apophis—they all swore that the Archangels they knew were women. Heavenly maidens. With gentle faces, voices flowing like rivers, and wings that were not merely white but rainbow-colored like light shattered after rain."
She clenched her hand, then released it once more.
"How is that possible? Do the Archangels change form depending on who sees them? Or did Matriarch—who is supposedly the Mother of Angel, the mother of them all—not know that her younger siblings possessed different faces in different eyes?"
She floated there silently, her single eye staring straight ahead, piercing through the mirrors, through space, through something she could not see yet could somehow feel.
A lie that had never been spoken, or perhaps a truth far too strange to believe.
Lilith HaRish'a suddenly fell silent.
Not an ordinary silence, nor the silence born from boredom that had long become her companion. This was a different silence—the silence of someone listening to something no one else could hear except herself.
Within the depths of her consciousness, where the boundary between herself and emptiness had begun to blur, those voices returned once again.
Not as whispers.
Not as echoes.
But as screams.
As prayers.
As curses emerging from five throats that should no longer have any form at all.
To be continued…