The black sun drifted across the sky, swallowing the moon in its hollow glow. As darkness settled over the cliff, the Jester rose to his feet, face carved with a rare, humorless expression.
"You can come out now, Lust," he said quietly. "I can feel you breathing."
At first, nothing moved.Then a silhouette stepped from the shadows — tall, graceful, and unbearably beautiful. Her hair devoured the light. Her torn garments hung from her body like the remnants of a ruined temple.
An archangel's eyes.A demon's presence.
Lust.
She hesitated, her voice soft and deceptively fragile.
"I wasn't spying. I… often sit here myself. May I join you?"
The Jester tilted his head."Then why hide?"
She dropped the innocent act immediately.
"Fine. I heard you two talking and became curious."She approached me with steps like drifting silk. Her fingers traced my shoulder."We're comrades now, Sammail. No secrets between us… right?"
Her touch sparked something inside me — a burst of heat so intense I nearly gasped.Then, just as suddenly, the flame died.
I pushed her hand away.
"It didn't work," I said. "Whatever you tried."
Silence.The Jester chuckled under his breath.Lust stared at me as if I had just broken a law of nature.
"That's impossible," she whispered. "No one resists Lust."
I turned to the Jester for help, and for once, he cooperated.
"He's genderless."
My breath caught."What?"
The Jester shrugged casually.
"Your body is shaped like a boy. But your soul? It doesn't recognize gender. It can't respond to Lust because it doesn't possess the concept at all."
Lust looked shaken.
"Corruption hollowed you out," she murmured. "Stripped away the last human thing inside you."
We sat down upon the cliff, the black sun casting long shadows across the stone.
I exhaled slowly."So tell me. What exactly are Fallen Humans?"
Lust's face softened. For a moment, she didn't look like a sin — just a woman remembering a wound that never healed.
"We were people who suffered sins too monstrous for mortal hearts," she said. "The torment drove us mad… and in the end, it killed us."Her eyes dimmed."My captors stole everything from me. When I burned them… I burned myself too. Lucifer found my soul in the smoke."
She looked away as if ashamed of being honest.
The Jester picked up the story.
"Lucifer chooses the ones broken beyond repair. Innocents twisted by cruelty — humans driven into corruption not by wickedness, but by despair."His smile vanished."Your mother, Lilith, was the first. The strongest of us. The embodiment of Corruption itself."
My chest tightened painfully.
"And resisting Lust's power?" I asked.
Lust answered quietly.
"It confirms what we suspected. Your soul has no gender, Sammail. No desire. No fixed shape. You are not bound by the rules of human flesh."Her voice trembled with awe — or fear."You are Corruption incarnate."
A chill crawled through me.
I didn't know what that made me.I wasn't sure I wanted to.