Chapter 507
Lilith closed her eyes.
Not her remaining eye—because that eye had already been shut since she fell—but her other eye, the eye that had never opened, the eye that had long served as a hiding place for hopes she had never dared to acknowledge.
Goodbye, she whispered inwardly, and she did not know to whom that farewell was directed—to Bes who laughed, to Enlil who questioned, to Lamashtu who loved flowers, to Ahura Mazda who spoke like a philosopher, to Mictlantecuhtli who was the quietest and most mysterious, to the eight sisters who had vanished before her eyes, or perhaps to herself, to Lilith HaRish'a, who had never asked to be born from nothingness, who had never asked to become the residue of something that had never cared, who had never asked to endure the pain of loss over and over again without ever being given the chance to stop.
Goodbye.
She let out a breath—her final breath, the breath that would become the boundary between the self that still breathed and the self that would become nothing more than dust scattered among the cracks of reality.
Yet just as that breath was about to leave her, just as the Nothingness's Sa was about to complete its task, just as the darkness around her was about to become the only thing she knew—something happened.
She could no longer feel her body.
Not destroyed.
Not erased.
But empty.
Empty in a way different from before.
Empty as though she were floating between existence and nonexistence.
Empty as though she were being held by an unseen hand, a hand pulling her somewhere she could not see, somewhere beyond the reach of the Nothingness's Sa, somewhere that might—just might—be called salvation.
The Nothingness blinked.
A small motion that should have meant nothing.
Yet in a situation where Lilith—who only a second ago had been lying before it with a shattered body and fading consciousness—was now gone, that motion became a kind of acknowledgment, an acknowledgment that it did not understand what had just happened.
It stared at the place where Lilith had lain.
Empty.
No blood.
No traces.
No fragments of mirror-glass remained.
Only the widening cracks of reality.
Only the deepening void.
Only a nothingness incapable of remembering who had once stood there.
"Hm," muttered the Nothingness, its voice sounding like someone who had lost the last leftover meal in the refrigerator—not hungry enough to be angry, yet not satisfied enough to be indifferent.
"Interesting.
Very interesting."
It did not search.
It did not investigate.
It did none of the things a creature would normally do after losing its prey.
It simply stood there, both hands still in its pockets, no longer holding the pose it had abandoned when it began consuming Lilith.
For a moment, it merely thought—or something resembling thought, for the Nothingness possessed no brain, no neurons, none of the things living beings used to process information.
What it possessed was certainty.
The certainty that it had witnessed the deaths of Lilith's eight sisters with its own eyes.
The certainty that it had nearly consumed the ninth.
The certainty that even though Lilith had disappeared at the last second, she could not possibly have survived, could not possibly have escaped, could not possibly still be breathing somewhere within the uncharted gaps of reality.
"They are dead," it said to itself.
The words emerged not as a question, but as a statement.
As a decision.
As something it chose to believe because seeking a more complicated answer would require energy it had no desire to spend.
"No less.
No more."
It closed its eyes.
Not because it was tired.
Not because it wished to rest.
But because closing one's eyes was the simplest way to say that a chapter had ended, that there was nothing left worth seeing, that whatever came afterward belonged to a different story with different characters, different conflicts, and sacrifices that might prove just as meaningless.
And when its eyes closed—eyes that had never truly been visible because it had never truly possessed eyes—a transmission arrived.
Not a sound.
Not an image.
Not a vibration explainable by any branch of physics.
But a message.
A message that leaped from one dimension to another, from the Land of the Gods to where the Gods stood, from one member of the Bathee family to a minor deity tasked with guarding the gateway between the human world and the divine realm.
The message was brief.
It contained no flowery language.
No metaphors.
Nothing living beings usually used to make bad news sound sweeter than it truly was.
Erietta Bathee, the message read.
And the Nothingness, upon hearing it, neither moved nor blinked nor displayed any reaction, for it had never displayed reactions.
The illegitimate child adopted from an orphanage—yet treated like a toy by the entire Bathee bloodline—was now ready to be offered as part of the Inverted Crucifixion agenda.
"Ah," said the Nothingness.
Its voice sounded like someone who had just been reminded of a promise long forgotten, a promise never considered important yet still necessary to fulfill because promises were the only things that kept those small creatures spinning around the same axis without asking why.
"So it has begun."
It raised a hand—not the hand it had used to punch Apophis, crush Rahab, or batter Apollyon, Chemosh, Baal-Zevul, Ashmedai, and Asherah—but the other hand, the one it never used because its sole purpose was to open paths.
The air before it split apart.
Cracked.
Opened like a curtain being drawn aside to reveal a new stage.
From within that opening, a light different from the rainbow light before began to seep through—a pale light, a sickly light, a light born from a place that had never dreamed of being beautiful.
"I will go there," whispered the Nothingness.
It stepped into the portal without looking back, without glancing at the cracks in reality slowly sealing behind it, without thinking about the nine women it had killed, nearly killed, or perhaps failed to kill because they vanished before death could claim them.
"And I will destroy whatever stands before me."
The portal closed.
The silence that remained after the Nothingness's portal shut was not a peaceful silence.
It was a silence holding its breath.
A silence too afraid to move, fearing that even the slightest motion might summon back the entity that had just departed.
A silence that felt like a thin layer of skin stretched over a still-open wound, waiting to tear apart once again at any moment.
To be continued…