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Was it you who called me here?
The audacity stuns. Her fury, so often distant — as if it is yet another spirit to haunt her — bludgeons her over the head with such intensity that all of her thoughts white out into high-pitched screams, wordless by nature of having too many words to say.
The Echo washes through her, and siphons it down to the earth.
At times you will stand with us. At times you will stand against us.
…the star…the true course…
Lilith emerges from the vision with a sickly hangover, mildewy and thick. Grave dirt in her mouth. She spits; blood comes out in a rusty mottle. She had bitten her tongue.
“So you peered into my memories,” Elidibus says — still standing there, weapon at his back, even if he’d been given the perfect opening to end her utterly. “No matter. You will have found little of import.”
“Die,” she says, voice a burbling creek stuffed with debris. “For once in your pitiful existence, do one thing that I ask.”
His gaze is empty and blue — not his own, but that of a man who should have been left to rest, whose poor soul is now glued to her own. An unfairly bright and beautiful man Ardbert was, and his final fate is to be a golden passenger to her meandering train of catastrophe, watching while the thing that sent said train on its merry way stares at her like he doesn’t know her at all.
“Such is the burden of hope,” Elidibus sneers.
Die. Die. Die. “What are you planning?”
“To kill you.” He tilts his head, gaze a dead mirror. “You, who have murdered my brothers.”
She recoils to see her thoughts reflected back at her, twisted around until they barely make sense. Such is his way with her. “Is that right,” she drawls, unable to help herself. “Your brothers, who killed uncountable millions.”
The leather in his stolen gloves snap from the force of his fists clenching. His eyes burn so hot she wonders if they’ll pop in their orbital sockets. “I see you for what you are,” he hisses. “You are death, and only in death shall you serve any purpose.”
Her arms go slack.
The echoes of heartbreak reverberate through her in well-trodden paths — but the rule of this broken, mortal life is that the pain will always, always leave new marks, inspired by her faith in love’s ability to maim and her desire for it to mend.
“So that’s what it was all for,” she says.
Elidibus sets her through a trial. He makes her kill facades of her friends that bleed and scream with considerable verisimilitude. He makes it so she can feel their blood drying on her skin as she follows him on a string, as she always has.
They are merely monsters, he says. But even a monster could be someone’s beloved.
She throws out a gauntleted fist to his face, but he disappears into so much smoke.
By the time she makes it to the supposed end, remarked by walls in forgotten patterns of gilt, she does not stop running. She charges at him, weapon aloft.
“You did this to me first!” she screams at him — screams at him as she has never screamed at another, not even the Exarch. The Exarch didn’t pulse like a brand inside of her body, even if the thought of him aches. “You made me into this woman you hate!”
His stolen axe clangs in a minor key against her scythe. “Your choices have always been your own,” he says, teeth flashing as he pushes against her strength. “You did this to yourself.”
She spins and kicks him across the face with her sharp-heeled boot. His blood scatters like rubies, but it is too shiny to be real.
“I would never choose this,” she snarls, fangs bared.
She throws her scythe to the ground in a clatter and charges him out of the sheer animal desire to feel her weight topple his. She shoves him to the ground, air knocked out of his useless lungs in a low grunt. His hands seize her hair, her wrist. She screeches, her nails leaving gashes across a face that no longer bleeds.
Thick, dark miasma leaks out. Blood that no longer beats.
They struggle and roll in the dead, dead dust of this mausoleum with no keeper. The whole of Elidibus’s weight presses her into the ground, and her heart sings in a high aria that makes her want to kill him and then herself. This isn’t his body. They cannot slot together at all.
Desire, an old curse, churns low in her gut anyway. A chain she can’t break. A creature she will always belong to.
He clangs her skull with his spiked knuckle of a fist. She gasps in agony and then nearly chokes on the blood slipping down her throat. His palms come up to seize her about her jaw, perhaps to break her neck or kiss it, but even through a gaze slippery with agony, she pummels his nose with her palm. She feels something soft give.
She spins him beneath her one final time, knees at his hips. She slams his arms down with her supernatural strength, hard enough she can feel the tendons at his shoulders creak and groan. Dust turns his skin gray, as it should be. She contorts so that her knees press his biceps to the ground and then she wraps her hands around his neck.
“You made me love you.” Her hands squeeze around his dead windpipe. Meaningless. Feels good. “You snuck into a little girl’s mind and made sure of it.”
His eyes bulge. He cannot speak for the force upon his neck, but the voice in her head shouts anyway, rattling like marbles in a bowl. Why would I ever have done that?
Her fury turns pitch black. “That is all I have wanted to know since the day we fucking met!”
She leans down and bites his ear. Bites the whole dead softness of it and is not even granted the reprieve of tasting his pulsing lifeblood. Whatever is left is thick, coagulated and vile, enough to make her spit, and enough to give him the chance to toss her small body off of this one.
But she is unbeaten, unbowed. She rolls like water, picks up her scythe off the stone tile and charges him again. Her scythe blade cups his ankles. He falls, lest she cut his feet clean off, armor or no.
She pounces on him.
She presses the whole of her weight into him with her weapon, forcing him to grip the scythe handle with his hands or lose his head. She is unbent, but honestly, she has no shape. She is a formless being made of hopes misplaced, calls never answered and someone else’s dreams.
And she will never be happy. Not even when she bares her teeth to try and bite his neck. Not even when he finally blinks up at her, knocked off the pedestal of the Emissary.
She will remake him into the penitent, and even that will not be enough.
“You deserve this,” she hisses down at him.
A tear prism splatters on his face, dripping from her nose. Blood, real and alive, follows after. His mouth opens like a fish. He could teleport away, like an Ascian always does, and yet he submits.
“You deserve this and you know it,” she says. “You want it. You want this.”
“What?” he asks. His voice, to repeat it in her head. What?
She’ll always have this pain to remember him by.
“Lilith.” Her name, choked out of his throat. “What did I do?”
And he won’t remember a thing.