Lillith

by Kate Gallwey

  The Earth was also altered that day. Rifts in time and space opened up all over the planet. Beings from these dimensions filtered through these doors, spicing the genetic mix and creating the ‘demons’ or the modern day ‘aliens’ that human stories are so full of. The Veil makes Earth a crossroads and safe haven from my Creators. Earth a very interesting place to live with all the different species living together, but that was much later, and I am getting ahead of myself again.

  Lucian and I had been changed from the fundamentals up. We couldn’t fly anymore, and though earthbound we could now teleport, instantly flicking to anywhere on the planet. We can talk and understand all sentient beings on this world, and read their writings. I can also heal them with a touch as long as they are not too close to death or their wounds haven’t been inflicted by Lucian and vice versa.

  I can create anything made out of natural substances with just a thought.

  I also need to sleep about every three or four days, I take water when I need extra energy, but most food disagrees with me. But I do love the tastes and flavours sometimes. The smells of the different coffees are wonderful but they taste foul and my body can’t tolerate the stuff. But strawberries and raspberries are intoxicating sometimes, as is the fermented liquid called ‘ Mother’s milk’ which can get me drunk as a skunk if I choose.

  And then along came Humans.

  CHA

  PTER EIGHT

  huMans

  Gaia had started experimenting with life long before we arrived. The huge reptiles that had died out before we came here were her first experiment and she had learnt huge amounts since, but the high points were still to arrive. She was looking for intelligence and was developing the Neanderthals to a level of community and society above the level of animals. She was impatient and it was taking too much time.

  I imagine that she has a laboratory somewhere full of DNA, where she cuts and splices. Just look around you there is no shortage of life on this planet. Animals, birds and fish she could create easily, as was the bug life, oh she loved to create bugs and spiders, and I think she went a bit nuts on the bugs; sentient life was harder for her.

  But she found her ‘missing link’ when we arrived.

  While Lucian and I frolicked in the grass, water, once painfully on the rocks, on the beach and a couple of times very precariously up a tree, Gaia was mixing in her lab. It was not long after that the first modern humans arrived.

  Gaia wanted to know about my experiences with other species and I mentioned the catlike people and once a creation is established letting nature take its course but she disagreed and wanted her humans to survive, so she tampered with the reproductive system and made conception really hard to prevent. Not many other species breed as well as humans do. I have heard them being compared to a virus but that is a bit harsh I am very fond of my adoptive children. Like most mothers, I choose only to see only the best in my children.

  Gaia is still tampering and tweaking to this day. If you are human, it probably is your destiny to take over the universe one day, if you can survive my Creators.

  Lucian had discovered horses and riding them was his passion. So he disappeared for many months with his herd of horses.

  Four villages of humans were created and I moved into the largest of them. Some humans’ chose the nomadic life; some joined me in the villages. I settled into a house, of sorts, and learnt about the ups and downs of human community life. I learnt how to find food for humans and we taught each other how to plant and harvest. They hunted animals and then domesticated them. Delivering babies and healing the sick and wounded was my task for a long time. But what hurt me the most, and still does to this day, was their short lives. I have watched far too many beloved humans die. Each time it is like a part of me dies with them.

  Lucian never liked humans; they irritated him with their constant needs and short lives. What was the point of feeding and teaching humans if they were going to die soon anyway? He came back once or twice in those early years only to leave in disgust with my fascination with them all. The fact that many of them shared my bed was not a problem as he considers humans non-entities and only just one level above animals.

  He has killed so many of them.

  Society was formed through trial and error. We had to band together against the demons that roamed the wilderness, killing the weaker humans. They came through the many rifts that opened up regularly on this beautiful world. Demons spread across the valleys and into the plains where we settled. They haunted the deep woods and dark places. The hunter/gatherer ways were a thing of the past for humans. No small group of humans could survive against the demons that were stronger faster and more organised.

  I had to build strong walled forts around the villages and man them day and night to keep the demon raiders out. We kept them out by my magic and the by the fact we out numbered them, but they were bigger, stronger and much better organised. In the early days many humans were eaten by the different kinds of demons in the wilderness, they became a delicacy of sorts. I drafted everyone into the human army and because of this society began to take the shape it did.

  The stronger male humans had to look after the weaker, mostly pregnant females and children. I didn’t make females so weak while they are carrying their young, Gaia did. If the male was killed or wounded the female had to know how to defend her young but mostly ended up dead. I trained many men and women to defend themselves and their children only to loose them as someone’s lunch, it was most upsetting.

  It was a perilous time, and after loosing two villages to a hoard of rampaging demons which decapitated and ate every man, women and child’s head, leaving rotting bodies everywhere. I went on the warpath and wiped that species out totally on this world. I built up a reputation that was finally enforced by Gaia of not tolerating the death of a single human without dire retaliation. Then she made it law that her children were not to be touched on pain of death or outlaw. We were off the menu, at least officially.

  This helped us but there were still many that ignored the law or just didn’t care.

  Human development was swift after the outright war between the demons and humans stopped and very soon we had spread out over a large area. We started in a fertile valley between two rivers in the centre of what would later become Iraq and Iran, we started to need more space and each family was stretched thinner and thinner trying to feed and protect itself with each new arrival.

  In the four thousand years we had spent there it was time to expand. I consulted with Gaia and she gave me directions to where to take our people to set up new towns and settlements around the world.

  I wanted to give each family the greatest chance of survival so I took about a thousand people from different families to the area of what is today Cambodia and Thailand and we built farmlands with great irrigation systems and great temples of fertility and lovemaking in the jungle. The people flourished and immense works of art were created.

  Women took the seat of power here and ruled with a Council of Twelve. There were very few demons and the ones that were here stayed in the darker places of the jungle as their eyes could not bare the light of the sun.

  This place was called Lemùria and the greatest of the human cities was called Mù.

  Gaia tampered with her genetic splicing and dicing and made the people of this area different from their kin in the Valleys of Two Rivers. They had a distinct polished Asian glow and features that got stronger as the people bred, even twenty thousand years later they are still a beautiful golden people.

  The men and women from the Valley of Two Rivers were pale skinned and had a hard time adapting to the heat of the sun and within a few generations differences between tribes were very obvious.

  We built great roads through the jungle and irrigated the fields and crops with complicated systems that were a wonder of the genius of mankind. I gave them the challenges to solve and within the generation they worked together to build what was needed. An age of great stone temples, s
tatues and artwork began and spread across the globe. Technological wonders and inventions were flourishing everywhere and this was the first Golden Age of Man.

  Cutting edge healing arts and herbal medicines were being developed. I was learning with my students in this Age of Marvels. Humankind at their best. Complicated songs and graceful dances were sung and danced every night accompanying the sounds of people making love.

  Happiness and beauty were our gods and we worshipped them as hard as we could. I was an informal Goddess in those days, teaching midwifery to the girls and love making to the boys, sometimes the other way around but each night most of the population ended up in large groups of very happy people pleasuring each other in every way you can imagine and probably quite a few you can’t. You live in such a conservative age.

  They spread out across the seas to what is now Indonesia and eventually to Australia via all the little islands of the Philippines, and into the Pacific they also spread up north to China and Japan and eventually Siberia and across the land bridge into Alaska and the Americas.

  Taking with them the legends of Lemùria and many building, medicine, farming and art knowledge. It was a time of wonders and they eventually spread across the human world.

  At the same time I went to Lemùria, I took about five hundred and fifty people to the Mozambique and Zimbabwe areas of Africa where they learnt to mine gold from the race of friendly but self-serving reptilian demons living there.

  These demons can shift shape and live and work among humans to this day they are a cold bunch and out for their own advantage every time, I will talk more about them later but they feed off strong emotions especially fear but have joined the humans and have mingled their bloodlines with them and are everywhere in human society today. Look closely at some of your leaders and rulers and you can’t miss the reptilian stain.

  Again Gaia tampered and the skin colours and features of the People and they began to adapt and darken due to the high temperatures of Africa.

  Over the next ten thousand years things humans spread over the southern part of continent but there were never any major cities in the south just small towns and villages.

  There was a good reason for this. Wild dimensional rifts open up without warning in many places in Africa and strange demons are sucked out of their home worlds destined to die lonely deaths here on earth.

  Cries of hopelessness and despair echo through the mountains and deserts. Many small human villages disappeared without trace through a wild African rift and were never seen again, it was a cruel harsh continent and the testing ground for all earth dwellers whether here voluntary or not, we worked hard to stabilize the rifts that opened and closed seemingly at random and eventually succeeded.

  The land was hard for the humans in Africa and they took thousands of years to claim the place for themselves. The amount of wild animals and poisonous snakes, spiders and killer bugs make living hard and civilisation took a long time arriving. The humans there split off into many different tribes and they often went to war with each other over safe territory; I hate it when my children fight with each other but it does make them strong.

  Eventually we spread to South America and all across Northern Africa and my Empire was born.

  CHA

  PTER NINE

  DeMOns

  Lucian became the leader of a large band of warlike demons from a far distant world called Hell. I got to know that world only too well later on. There were three permanent rifts from that world to this - that I know of. Lucian even went through one and established himself as their Lord and Master here on Earth.

  The beings from this world were called Hellions. Lucian wanted to rule them. Treaties were drawn up, agreements made and using demon technology; he built the first demon city, Babylon.

  Babylon was huge and had massive towers and the tallest walls in the world at that time. Built in the northern part of the Valley of the Two Rivers it slowly edged humans out of that area.

  I realised when it was finished that it was way ahead of its time.

  Lucian wanted to show it off to me that demons had a lot of knowledge to offer. Their technological skills were impressive, there were arches and spires and battlements, even an enclosed created lake where the non-combatants lived around its shores totally protected, or so they thought. The battlement and wall were at least two hundred meters high built on huge platforms of sheer rock. He built a string of forts stretching across to what is now the Mediterranean Sea. They also built great warships and dominated the known seas.

  Demons from all over the world, some refugees, some settlers, and some traders all mingled together on the streets of Babylon and Lucian was their Overlord and Leader. There were many magic users among them. All demons in Gulf deserts, and the Valleys swore a blood oath that they would obey him, or he killed them and their heads were put on spears and used to decorate the massive front gates as an example to the rest.

  He was, and still is, the Demon Lord of Earth.

  The blood sucking Vampyre demons were one group that I wiped out early on but not soon enough, the virus of Vampyrism survived and spread among the human population and to this day we are still trying to stamp it out. The tales of Dracula are beautifully crafted but they have a certain amount of truth in them that makes them uncomfortable to those of us that are keeping humans unaware of the existence of demons.

  This decision was made by Gaia, she wanted to make the humans self-sufficient and independent and not rely on the strength and magic of the invaders. This has worked to a certain degree but there has been a level of corruption of the humans that was not foreseen, like money and the lust for gold and also the trading of humans and sentient beings both in prostitution and slavery, these were not human inventions.

  Lucian’s demon army was the biggest in the world and spanned all of the Middle East and Asia and a big chunk of Europe. The main part of the army was made up by twenty thousand Hellions and they had a fearsome reputation.

  They raided a small human fishing village, torturing and killing every man and child, raping most of the women to death and carrying off five of them. The networking of my temples was in the early stages but eventually word reached me. I complained to Lucian and demanded the human women be returned.

  Our egos were quite inflated in those days. I had thousands of adoring worshipers that obeyed my every whim and he had the same. Power corrupted even us.

  He didn’t like my demand or the tone but he hadn’t seen me for a while and was pleased to see me. We had grown apart and for me it was nice to hold something that wouldn’t die soon. We made gentle love and then a frenzied passionate coupling that made us both laugh as the harmonies we created filled the city.

  I regretted this lovemaking as I only saw the Lucian I used to know not the one that had been influenced by his new friends. I didn’t recognise the change in him until it was too late. It was the last time we came together in love for about twenty thousand years.

  We went down to the Great Hall of Babylon and he took his place on the huge gold throne, looking down on the assembled horde of demons.

  “Where are the human women that were taken?” he asked. There was laughter and some rude jokes.

  A Hellion by the name of Triook was introduced to me and his manner was leery and insulting. They saw me a weak female to be used and then abused, they have since learnt respect.

  He gave the order for the human women to be brought forth.

  Five naked bruised and battered women were dumped on the floor in front of me most of them didn’t even stir; it seemed that all were dead. I saw red as one warrior joked that they were all dead lays before now they were just dead.

  One of the women moaned and the same warrior made more jokes about wanting more. He went towards her and started to undo his trousers. His head flew across the Great Hall and his body slowly slumped to the floor, I can move quite fast when I want something dead.

  Everyone went for their swords; warriors in the galleries above
drew bows and aimed them at me. My sword blazed with a peacock green and my magic filled the Hall. Just try me; I was in the mood for lots of Hellion blood.

  Lucian began to laugh and all his warriors relaxed some.

  He said I would have to learn how to control my temper, and he walked towards me and my magic went out at his approach. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and bent down to kiss me.

  He was trying to show his dominance over me in front of his warriors so I did what any self respecting female would do in this situation. I lifted my knee sharply and connected with his groin, he is built the same way as a human man is, just with different materials.

  He went down, doubled over in pain. I coolly stepped over him and gathered up the women on the floor and without looking back, teleported to the main healing temple in Mù.

  I was shaken by this encounter and began to put networks of information in place; many are still in use today.

  I had not foreseen this danger to my people nor had I seen the danger to myself.

  Four of women had been raped to death; this was unheard of in Lemùria. A crime like this had never been contemplated or achieved by humans before this. The one woman who survived had lost her mind; I knew where she had gone. It brought back uncomfortable reminders of my Creators.

  I went deep inside her fragile mind and brought her back taking from her all memories of the ordeal. I learnt how to work mind to mind and how to alter memories.

  She recovered slowly but never found her joy in lovemaking again, part of her always remembered, she died a few years later.

  I had learnt the art of shape shifting and turned into a human female infected with the vampyre virus and one night went through the gates at Babylon. I ensorcelled the gatekeepers so they thought they knew me and entered Lucian’s domain.

  I mapped the streets and made note of the different kinds of species that lived there. I went through the markets and they thought me a woman for sale. Selling sex was something I never come across before, I got a few offers but replied that was not enough for one such as me and tossed my head high in rejection, nearly causing a riot, females were not allowed to refuse here. This was another concept I had a problem with, sex for sale for what the traders called ‘money’ and ‘coin’, these were not human inventions, but they soon adopted them. I had to turn down my attractor factor to zero and talk fast while sliding into the shadows.