The World Is Mine For The Taking

Chapter 972: Prologue 1 - A Talk With Lilith

When I woke, I was swallowed by a white so absolute it erased edges. There was no horizon, no ceiling, and there was only a flat, humming emptiness that felt less like space and more like a held breath. The first time I’d come here it had stunned me. This time the wonder had been peeled away by familiarity until the place felt like an old room I’d forgotten I owned.

I lay there for a moment, trying to place myself. There was something firm beneath me, a plane of resistance that said "floor," but when I glanced down my eyes found nothing to grab onto. It was as if I floated on a surface you couldn’t see. There was something that was solid enough to stand on, but ghostly enough to deny substance. The oddness of it made the skin on my arms prickle.

When I stood and let my eyes travel the blankness, there she was, the figure I’d been seeking, seated at a small round table as though the void were a parlor. She raised a cup to her lips with the casual grace of someone who belonged in a hearth-lit room rather than in this impossible whiteness. Steam curled from the cup like a thin, deliberate question.

"It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Thou tak’st thy time," she said. So she was still talking in this archaic style of talking? At first, I find her hard to understand, but for some reason, I could understand her clearly now. Perhaps I had gotten used to it?

I looked at her.

Lilith. The name landed in me like a memory I’d always been carrying around in a different shape. She was my maker in the truest sense. The architect of this body I wore, the thing that nested inside me like a thought that refused to be only mine. If she ever returned fully, this flesh would be hers, and she would reclaimed it, not shared. The idea sat in my gut like a slow, sour wine.

Or maybe — and this thought had burrowed in since I remembered how I’d come here in the first place — maybe the body was never truly mine. I’d been placed inside it, an occupant of a home built by another. Borrowed, perhaps. Temporary. The thought stitched a thin, uneasy smile across my face and I let it hang there for a moment.

"Yes," I said, and the single word felt small in the vast quiet.

"Here," she said, the corners of her mouth lifting. "Come and take a draught with me." The chair she gestured to was ordinary in a way that hurt. It was wooden, simple, the sort of thing you might find in a countryside kitchen. I sat and the weight of me seemed to anchor the place for a heartbeat.

She poured the tea like a ritual, deliberate and slow, as if each motion were a syllable in a sentence she refused to finish. "Thou hast laboured well. Good lad," she said, and set the cup into my hand as if bestowing a token.

I sipped without thinking, feeling the warmth spread through me. "You must already know the question I’ll ask," I said. There was no use dressing it up. We both knew what hung between us like a shadow.

A faint, amused narrowing pressed at the edges of her eyes. "Thou wilt not dallie with small things, dost thou?" she replied with a sly arch of her brow. "Thou cuttest straight to the marrow. But verily, ’tis natural, thou art afeared. Which of us shall hold sway o’er this flesh when the time of my rising cometh? Such worries are meet for one in thy place."

Her voice was honey and razor both, smooth while it set my skin on edge. The smile never left her, and I couldn’t decide if she was mocking my fear or pitying it. Either way, the uncertainty lodged like a splinter I couldn’t pick.

"But I must needs confess," she went on after a sip, her tone slipping into something almost sleepy, "I ken not fully how my rising shall unfurl. I wot not if I shall return in mine own guise. Forsooth, what thou conjurest in thine mind may not come to pass, thou might’st be overmuch given to foreboding."

Her words had the lightness of idle tea talk, but underneath them there was a current that tugged at me. It was a deliberate ambiguity. I couldn’t tell if she was being honest or playing a deeper game. The doubt tasted metallic.

She set down her cup and watched me with an expression that was half-coy, half-ominous. "Sit thee awhile and take thy ease," she said. "I deem thou makest scant headway in mastering the other shards of me."

It was true. I hadn’t the stomach to hunt down the other fragments. Elise was already a knot I wouldn’t undo. I mean, she’d clasped to me like a favored thing, and walking away was no longer an option. The rest, however, I’d rather have left untouched. Fate, it seemed, had other designs. Our encounters kept arranging themselves like stepping stones I had no wish to tread.

"If it were within my power, I would shun resurrection," she said suddenly, a softness in her voice that didn’t belong to the woman who smirked and toyed with meanings. The confession landed with unexpected force.

The notion took me aback. "Why?" I asked. "You don’t want to be resurrected? Then why? I mean, isn’t that the whole reason you created us in the first place? What was the point if you didn’t want to come back?"

She chuckled, a shiver of sound that made the air feel colder. "Fufufufu. Why, indeed?" she murmured, adopting a tone that was both theatrical and oddly rueful. "Perchance I sought atonement? Nay. I am past such reckonings. I cannot cleanse certain stains. Perchance I wished to perform one last deed ere I vanish utterly."

Her riddling reply left me circling for purchase. There was a sense of something she wouldn’t — or couldn’t — say. That omission felt deliberate, like a door left only ajar.

"Fear not," she added, the smile returning with practiced ease. "Should fate decree my return, thou needst not fret unduly. Attend to thy business, and if such a thing should come to pass, ignore it still." The words were flippant, but the meaning behind them felt heavy.

Then, as if delivering a tease as much as a command, she tilted her head. "Yet do not be slack in amusing me. I delight in thee, in thy conquests, in thy carnal excursions. To see thee take woman after woman and revel in the act giveth me a thrill unliken’d to aught I have known afore."

Even saying it aloud, the phrase wrapped itself around me like a spell. Her gaze held, and I felt the world narrow until it was just the two of us with her smile, the steam of her tea, the way her voice coaxed images into bloom, and nothing else. There was a seductive pull in her amusement, a low hum that made my thoughts clumsy.

I found myself wanting to know more, not just what she planned, but why she had given rise to this whole curious arrangement in the first place. "Why did you reincarnate me?" I asked quietly.

She shrugged, a casual motion that belied the gravity of her creation. "Mayhap ’twas but the work of fate," she said. "No great design need be read into it. Had thy soul not taken root in this frame, my return had been fordone. The body was wrought without a soul — a husk that could scarce breathe. Perchance providence itself—if such a thing there be—dealt the matter so that I might be near."

I turned the idea over in my mind, tasting its possibilities. Perhaps she speak is the truth. That it was just coincidence that had threaded into consequence. Or perhaps some other hand — hidden, potent — had steered the course.

Either answer sat heavy in me. I couldn’t tell which held more truth. For now, all I had was the woman across the table, the warmth of the tea in my palms, and the uneasy sense that whatever the cause, the wheel had started to turn.