“Thank you, Stacina,” Lithilia said as she slid off the huge bed.
Lithilia stood up and took a step towards Stacina. She inclined her head upwards to meet Stacina’s gaze.
“I accept your friendship and offer mine to you as well,” Lithilia said and bowed her head.
Stacina’s eyes lit up. She took a short step towards Lithilia, which was a large step from Lithilia’s perspective, and gently hugged Lithilia. Lithilia’s head was just below Stacina’s bosom. She really is a giant! Lithilia thought as she returned Stacina’s hug.
“I heard that,” Stacina said via telepathy.
The two women shared a laugh and separated from each other.
“So, where am I, Stacina?” Lithilia asked as she slid on the bed.
“You are in Inner Earth Realm, below Earth Realm,” Stacina replied.
“Below?” Lithilia asked with a tone of surprise. “As in underground?”
“Yes and no,” Stacina grinned at Lithilia’s childlike curiosity.
“So you cannot see Solara?” Lithilia asked. “You have no natural light?”
“I can answer all your questions, Lithilia,” Stacina replied with a mischievous grin. “Or I can show you.”
Stacina watched Lithilia dash out of the chamber before she could finish her sentence. She laughed kindly at Lithilia’s excitement and thirst for knowledge. She noticed Lithilia’s fear and caution were gone, as well as whatever issue that was weighing on her psyche. Stacina followed her out of the chamber and eventually out of the house. She watched as Lithilia gawked at the marvel of the realm before her. Stacina, or better yet The Scribe, smiled at his good fortune. He was going to groom Lithilia in his light. He was going to make her special. Lithilia was not a part of his grand plan, yet. But The Scribe imagined he could always find a role for someone as remarkable as unique as Lithilia was.
She would require an upgrade, albeit a major one for a creature with a form as primitive as hers was. Her ‘yearnings’ were anything but yearnings. They were the awakening of the essence of a creature from a much higher dimension than that of Solaris; and this essence was trapped in the primitive physical form that was Lithilia. Most importantly, this trapped essence was also a key, or part of a key, to something he, The Scribe, needed in order to unlock the master catalyst of his grand plan in this part of Creation. Patience was all he needed, and ever since he was spawned from Akasha, patience had become his middle name!
CHAPTER SIX
A KISS OF REVELATION
“WHAT DO YOU think?” Stacina asked.
“About what?” Lithilia asked.
“Everything,” Stacina replied.
“I cannot say for certain,” Lithilia grinned. “I just know I am having an amazing time being in control.”
“Time,” Stacina muttered.
She had a blank stare as if her body was present in the moment with Lithilia, but her mind was everywhere else but there.
“What about time, Stacina?” Lithilia asked and turned around to face her.
It was close to dusk in Inner Earth. Dawn and dusk in Inner Earth were still notions Lithilia had to become accustomed to, even after living with Stacina for over three years. In this realm, there was illumination and darkness in cycles that mimicked the rising and setting of Solara on Earth Realm. Even the notion of a realm within Earth Realm was still a brain-wracking concept for Lithilia. As it turned out, Inner Earth Realm was the first of the realms to be populated by visitors from other realms within the Dimension of Solaris and beyond. Some of these visitors even came as far as the Realms of Siryus and Sirya.
Back then, Earth Realm was dangerously unsuitable to accommodate their humanoid anatomy. Terraforming the realm was an option, but historical data revealed that terraforming a realm was not always the best route in the long run. As such, these creatures preferred to let Earth Realm go through its evolution naturally. Surprisingly, Inner Earth Realm was accommodating. It would take tens of thousands of years before Earth Realm would become habitable. Over that course of time, these colonists from other realms made Inner Earth their new home and, with the geology of the realm, their physiognomies had changed as well, rendering them giants when compared to other creatures from Earth, or ‘surface dwellers’ as they sometimes referred to the humans of Earth Realm.
“Nothing, Lithilia,” Stacina replied and turned to face Lithilia. “I was lost in wondering contemplation.”
“I can tell when you are bearing false tongue,” Lithilia said.
“Very perceptive of you,” Stacina spoke with mild sarcasm.
“You are different from everyone here, Stacina,” Lithilia blurted.
It was an unexpected change in subject, which Stacina did not mind.
“I can neither read nor hear you and your countenance is,” Lithilia searched for the right word. “I do not know. All I can think of is ‘different’.”
Lithilia reached for Stacina’s hand. Her left hand could barely grab Stacina’s right index and middle fingers.
“You have been good to me, Stacina,” Lithilia spoke with deep appreciation. “You saved my life and took me in as a friend and I feel like we have become more like sisters.”
“You are correct,” Stacina interjected.
“So, why do you not trust me?” Lithilia asked.
“What do you mean?” Stacina asked in a monotone.
“You are hiding something from me,” Lithilia replied and inched closer.
Stacina regarded her with an expressionless face for a moment, as if deciding how to proceed. Over the past three years, Stacina, or The Scribe, had indeed formed a bond with Lithilia, a bond which The Scribe chose not to be a part of. He still did not have a purpose for Lithilia. Yet, under the guise of Stacina, he was dedicating so much ‘time’, a ridiculous concept from his perspective, to nurturing Lithilia, a creature not worth a speck in the grand scheme of Creation. But why? That was a question he never cared to answer until now. Lithilia was the only creature in Creation he had reached out to for whom he had no purpose.
“Come!” Stacina said and stood up.
Lithilia stood up and followed Stacina away from Stacina’s front porch.
“Where are we going?” Lithilia asked as she tried to keep pace with Stacina’s huge strides.
Stacina stuck out her hand and Lithilia reached for it. The moment her hand touched Stacina’s, Lithilia was teleported along with Stacina. Lithilia was used to teleporting, but Stacina’s teleportation felt very different. There was an immense form of ‘power’, as Lithilia had come to describe the feeling that took over Lithilia’s essence, making her feel like she was nothing.
They appeared somewhere that Lithilia had never visited. It still vibrated to Inner Earth Realm’s frequency, but this area was a far better paradise that any she had ever witnessed. The flowers were of so many colors, the creatures were so beautiful, most of which she had never seen, their scents made her soul melt, the scenery was resplendent, and for the first time in her life, she was without words. Her knees buckled, and her jaw dropped.
“A waterfall flowing from down to up!” Lithilia exclaimed and pointed in the direction of the strange phenomenon. “And so sparkly!”
“It is a waterfall of flowing diamond,” Stacina replied.
Lithilia opened her mouth to say something but her vocal chords failed her. Then, she felt the looming presence of her best friend and sister. Lithilia lifted her eyes and met Stacina’s. She felt Stacina’s huge hands on her tiny shoulders before her legs gently left the ground until she was at eye level with Stacina. She gazed deep into Stacina’s eyes and was transfixed by what she saw, or rather, what she felt. The longer she stared, the less she felt. It felt like her being was falling into a formless void and she was losing herself in that void. Stacina was absolutely not a creature of Inner Earth Realm.
“What are you?” Lithilia asked, unable to formulate the words with her lips.
“Let me show you,” The Scribe replied.
Lithi
lia witnessed Stacina morph into the image The Scribe had chosen as a default for himself. She felt her esoteric makeup tingle to the presence of power like she had never felt before. She felt her protoplasmic constituency melt to the feel of his touch. She succumbed to the seduction of this entity’s essence. a seduction that had nothing to do with sex but everything that had to do with the being. Even before The Scribe closed his eyes and angled his head, Lithilia had already closed her eyes and angled her head in total surrender to this entity that made her feel so meaningless and yet so full of… purpose?
Lithilia parted her lips in submission to The Scribe’s command, she reached for his face, in a plea for… more? Of what? Irrelevant! That was how she felt and that was all she cared about in that moment. She felt his hands slide from her shoulders to the back of her neck. It was a touch of esoteric electricity that caused every ether of her esoteric makeup to resonate to a vibrational frequency much higher than anything she had ever experienced consciously. She hovered in the air, under the telekinesis of The Scribe. Her arms were in the way and she slid them away from his face to around his neck. And when her lips met with The Scribe’s, Lithilia knew her life was never going to be the same again after that.
The esoteric makeup that was Lithilia was disintegrated into its fundamental etheric constituency. She was every-where and no-where, she was every-when and no-when, she was every-energy and no-energy and she was ether all at once. For a moment, the notion of Creation that identified itself as Lithilia was without an identity. That notion of Creation was now formless, boundless, and timeless. That notion of Creation called Lithilia was free! Free! Free! A freedom accompanied by a feeling of omnipotence and omniscience. It was a feeling that was as fleeting as eternity, until The Scribe broke the kiss and the notion of Creation that was Lithilia reconstituted itself into the creature representative of that name.
Lithilia crashed to the ground. For a moment, she was dazed and delirious. She spoke rapidly and in several alien tongues at the same time as she morphed between several different forms as well. The Scribe crouched in front of Lithilia. He placed his left index finger between the eyes of the scaly, genderless creature she had assumed and the point where his finger touched the creature glowed. It collapsed on the soft, purple grass and morphed into a peaceful, sleeping human called Lithilia. The Scribe snapped his fingers and Lithilia’s eyes snapped open. She sat up, alert and in consternation borne out of a comprehension of some of what she had just experienced.
“You call yourself The Scribe,” she said confidently and rose to her feet.
The Scribe also stood up and Lithilia took a step towards him. He was of average human height, but that was just the height he had chosen for himself, as well as the form that Lithilia was looking at.
“What you experienced was a taste of the Dimensions of Space, Time, Energy and Ether,” The Scribe spoke calmly but with authority.
“I was…” Lithilia started saying but trailed off.
“I know,” The Scribe said. “I showed you.”
Lithilia slowly reached for his face and gently touched The Scribe’s lips with her right fingertips, as if his lips were the most delicate things she had ever felt.
“You are… Chaos,” Lithilia said, almost to herself and let her hand rest on his chest. “You describe yourself as a purveyor of purpose.”
Lithilia regarded The Scribe from head to toe. She ran an esoteric scan over him. Nothing! She could not read anything from him.
“I saw what you plan on doing,” she said as if in a trance. “I saw you write and rewrite the story of Creation to suit your ultimate plan. Even now, as I speak, you are in many locations and times in Creation.”
Lithilia let her hand hang freely and she met The Scribe’s eyes. His eyes burned with a heatless, dispassionate flame, full of purpose and an assurance of a desire come to fruition.
“You want to undo it all,” Lithilia said. “You want to undo all of Creation.”
“You are not afraid,” The Scribe spoke with a tinge of curiosity. “Why?”
“Should I be afraid?” Lithilia asked with a hint of confusion in her voice. “Is fear the normal reaction of the others you have revealed yourself to?”
The Scribe clasped his hands behind his back and paced purposefully, but slowly, back and forth. It was a gesture exhibited by humans, a gesture for which he had no use. He knew Lithilia was watching him. He least expected her to respond to his question with a question of her own, a question that was as loaded as it was innocent. Finally, he ceased pacing and turned around to face Lithilia. He decided he would answer the question, regardless of the outcome after that.
“Throughout Creation, I am known as many different things,” he said. “A myth, a god, an adversary, a savior, and so many other things. I have met many a creature and purveyed purpose to many more ever since I was spawned by Akasha. But you, Lithilia, are the only creature in Creation I have revealed myself to in this manner.”
Lithilia’s jaw dropped in shock. She did not know how to feel. Honored? Cursed? Special? Doomed?
“I inspire a wide range of emotions within Creation,” The Scribe continued. “The most common of which is fear. But you, Lithilia, are the only aberration I have encountered. I have no purpose to purvey to you because I do not see any purpose to purvey to you, and that is… an anomaly! And after all I have shown you, you neither judge me nor are afraid of me.”
The Scribe walked towards Lithilia and took her left hand in his right hand. His touch made her essence melt to his and, as Lithilia placed her right hand on his chest, his eyes bored into hers, exposing her soul in all its purity.
“I was moved to reveal myself to you as such because…” The Scribe trailed off. “Because… For the first instance in my existence, I developed a sense of attachment to a creature other than Akasha.”
The Scribe then took Lithilia’s face in his hands and spoke from his core.
“Your existence eludes me in every sense of the word,” The Scribe said. “Your existence is an aberration in the scripts I have written for Creation. Perhaps all will become clear eventually. But for now, I accept that I am no longer of any use for you.”
Tears rolled down each of Lithilia’s closed eyes as her essence ached with a deep sadness she had never experienced before. She had never said goodbye to anyone before, not even to her family in Aiden. This… This situation was the epitome of hurt and the hurt was at an etheric level.
“I have trained you well, Lithilia,” The Scribe said. “I have exposed you to what you are and what you can become. Your path from here on out is yours to carve out as you see fit. Perhaps our paths will cross directly again in your future. Until then….”
Lithilia felt The Scribe’s lips press against hers and she responded in kind. She expected to be thrust yet again into a similar experience like she had the last time he kissed her. Alas, the kiss was as fleeting as a cry in a wilderness. Lithilia opened her eyes. She knew he was gone. Gone as in Stacina being erased from the memory of Inner Earth Realm. Gone as in she had just lost a friend, a sister, a… something she had no word to describe. Lithilia sank to the purple grass and wept from her soul. As she wept from her soul, she unconsciously infused the ethers around her with her pain and sorrow, turning the purple grass brown, the waterfall of diamond to red clay and every lifeform within a two-mile radius into an external manifestation of what she was experiencing through the tears that stained her vanishing garments.
Lithilia teleported to an empty home eventually. Everything felt different. Nothing within her home contained an esoteric imprint of Stacina, let alone The Scribe. Lithilia lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She was truly alone now. Suddenly, Lithilia bolted upright from the bed. She remembered The Scribe’s plan to unravel Creation. She may not be afraid of this… multidimensional entity, but may she be damned for all eternity if she sat back and did nothing to protect the one and only thing she truly cared about; her family. She was ready to be the mother Cahen deserved.
She was ready to be the partner Adamou deserved. And nothing was going to stop her from making her family whole again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A whore of essences
LITHILIA STARTED PAYING visits to her son, Cahen, by the stream in the Garden of Aiden. At first, she cloaked herself in invisibility; one of the many things she had learned from The Scribe. It took a while but Cahen started warming up to her eventually. Still, that was not enough. She had to snatch her son away from the clutches of that new woman who had taken her family away from her. Cahen loved this woman, albeit even more than he loved his birth mother, Lithilia. And then, to make matters worse, her man and this woman had given Cahen a younger brother, who was also taking Cahen away from her.
The jealousy was real and very hurtful. Lithilia had to win her son back no matter the cost, despite her son being happy with a family without her, Lithilia, in the mix. As such, Lithilia resorted to poisoning Cahen’s fragile and innocent mind with false tongue and loathsome rhetoric regarding that woman, Lithilia hated to say her name, and the woman’s son, whose name Lithilia also hated to say. Alas, her tactic did work, but the result of her tactic was something she never expected. Her son, Cahen, struck his younger brother to death in a moment of rage and the death of that innocent child also awakened certain traits of both Eva and Adamou that made Lithilia wish she had never polluted Cahen’s psyche as such. There was no going back, though.
Lithilia saw Eva transform into an otherworldly creature. She saw what Eva did to Father, his team and every living thing around her. She felt Eva’s power; unhindered and unmatchable. And even before she heard Eva curse Cahen and then her, Lithilia knew that if this… creature did not end her where she stood, then it was only a matter of time before this creature made her pay for what she made Cahen do. Lithilia also saw Adamou’s transformation and, by Creation, he too was from another world. He looked like the winged creature called Luciel, but the flames indicated that he was much more powerful than Luciel was. And why did the power from Eva’s cry of pain and anguish have no effect on him?
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