Chapter 492
"Bes," she whispered, speaking the name with a voice that barely trembled, even though her chest felt as though it was being pressed down by something weightless yet unbearably heavy.
"Enlil. Lamashtu. Ahura Mazda. Mictlantecuhtli."
She closed her remaining eye, and within the darkness, she heard them all clearly—as if the five sisters who had died decades ago were standing right beside her, shouting, praying, cursing, raging, complaining, and laughing.
"They never truly left," she continued, her voice now carrying a tone she could no longer hide.
A mixture of bitter relief and a burden she had never asked to bear.
"Their souls… did not disappear. Not completely. They reside here."
She pointed to her chest with her pale index finger, indicating the place where the essence of her power pulsed in the same rhythm as her eight remaining sisters.
"In my consciousness. Within the essence of our living power. Like remnants of fire that refuse to die even after the wood has already turned to ash."
"We didn't realize it at first," she said, reopening her eyes and staring at the shards of glass slowly rotating around her, as though searching for confirmation from reflections that had never once been honest.
"But after the deaths of our five sisters—after the hunt subsided and we finally had time to breathe, to think, to listen—we began hearing something. Not with our ears. But somewhere deeper, within the gaps between the heartbeats of our existence."
She raised her hand, and within her open palm, the shadow formed once more—but this time, it moved, pulsed, and spoke.
Not with words, but with vibrations she could interpret as Bes' ever-boisterous laughter, Enlil's overly serious grumbling about trivial matters, Lamashtu's secret fondness for flowers, Ahura Mazda's endless questions in search of answers, and Mictlantecuhtli's silence—the most mysterious, the hardest to understand, and perhaps the most painful of all because he said nothing, yet his presence still felt like a hole in the center of an already fractured room.
"Every few hours—or whatever qualifies as hours across the different Multiversal Pathways—we hear them. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes angry. Sometimes irritated because they feel underestimated."
She smiled, and for the first time, the smile was not bitter.
It was warm.
Warm like the memory of something that had once been whole, even if that wholeness itself had only ever been an illusion.
"Bes once shouted inside my head, 'Lilith, you know I hate silence! Why are you just standing there doing nothing?!'"
She slowly shook her head.
"And Enlil, with that serious voice of his, argued back, 'Silence does not mean doing nothing, Bes. Silence is strategy.' Then Lamashtu interrupted, 'Strategy for what? To become even more bored than we already are?' And Ahura Mazda, with that philosophical tone that always made me want to throw something, said, 'Boredom is the doorway to wisdom, Lamashtu. You simply have not been bored enough yet.'"
She let out a small laugh.
A laugh so faint it was nearly inaudible.
A laugh born from something she had not felt in a very long time.
Togetherness.
"We—myself and my eight surviving sisters—once discussed this," she continued, her voice returning to its flat tone, though this time it was a different kind of flatness.
Not cold, but like the surface of a lake concealing violent currents beneath it.
"We believe their souls cannot leave because they are part of us. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. But literally."
She clenched her hand before slowly opening it again, allowing the shadow in her palm to shatter and scatter like purposeless mist.
"When the Gods killed them, when their bodies were destroyed and their consciousnesses were on the verge of vanishing, something happened. Perhaps because of our nature as remnants of the Nothingness—because we were born from the same void—their souls had nowhere to go. Heaven rejected them because they were too chaotic. Hell feared them because they were too empty. And the ordinary realm of death… was never designed for entities like us."
She exhaled, and the breath felt like the release of something she had held inside for far too long.
"So they returned. Not to their origin, because their origin is nonexistence itself. But to the place most similar to home: our consciousness. The essence of our power. Into ourselves."
And amidst the silence that shattered like the glass surrounding her, Lilith HaRish'a felt something she had never expected—something she had never once imagined within her eternal boredom.
The existence of the nine of them, their presence too dense for any space within the Multiversal Pathways, had not merely left traces behind.
It created.
Not intentionally.
Not through prayer.
But through something more primitive than all things.
Through the nature flowing from their bodies like underground rivers that had never once seen sunlight.
From behind their backs—from the place where even shadows feared to fall—began to emerge creatures unrecorded in any scripture, unforeseen by any prophecy, unwanted by anyone.
Lilith only realized it one day amidst yet another wave of endless boredom, when she heard tiny whispers coming from a direction she had never paid attention to before.
Not the whispers of her dead sisters.
Nor the whispers of her eight living sisters.
But whispers from something new.
Something born from herself.
"What is that?" Asherah asked at the time, her voice echoing from across the Multiversal Pathways, curious like a child discovering a strange insect beneath a rock.
"I don't know," Lilith answered, and for the first time, the boredom in her eyes was replaced by something unfamiliar.
Genuine wonder.
They named that first race the Rebels—not because they chose the name, but because it was the very name that escaped the Rebels' own lips when asked who they were.
"We are those who stepped away from the path that had already been decided," one of them declared, its voice not echoing, yet somehow still far too immense for the space it occupied.
"We know of the world's beginning from the realm of chaos. We know of the origins of Heaven and Hell. We know of the birth of the thirteen Archangels who would later be placed within Heaven. But we do not care. That knowledge does not make us submit. It only makes us realize that we are accidents—and accidents have no obligation to obey."
Yet of all the surprises born from behind their backs, none was stranger than what later became known as the Sinners.
Strange because the Sinners were not born directly from the Disturbers like the Rebels were.
They were born from something even more unexpected: sweat.
From the soles of one of the oldest Rebels—the most exhausted one, the one who had wandered endlessly across the Multiversal Pathways without purpose—drops of sweat fell upon land that had never belonged to anyone. And from those droplets—from moisture that should have been nothing more than residue of exhaustion—emerged creatures unlike the others.
They did not speak like the Rebels.
They did not shout like the Rebels.
They barely existed at all.
To be continued…