Sins of Eden

by SM Reine

  The falchions were in her hands. She cut through the rot, tearing a route for herself deep inside Ba’al.

  It was a safari through rot and memory. She passed through the canal to enter cranial tissue, and when the godsword sliced through the gray clumps, she was shocked with flashes of Ba’al’s thoughts.

  The avatar had walked the Earth in a time when there had still been other demons his size. Creatures like Volac, who had once held a House in Dis, but existed in another dimension without gravity where her tumescent body could flourish. Ba’al hadn’t even been the largest of them.

  It was a lightless world, and entirely inhospitable to humans. Its atmosphere had been liquid acid and its oceans flame. He had thrived there. He had been happy.

  Then he had become hungry.

  Elise hacked through another piece of tissue, and she saw Ba’al breaking through the walls between worlds to attack Earth. He had walked through ancient villages—no more than seasonal gatherings of nomadic mortals—and attempted to devour them all.

  He had been trying to exterminate humanity, and from what Elise saw in brief flashes, he had done fairly well.

  Until Lilith intervened. Until she and her compatriots slaughtered Ba’al and bound Belphegor.

  Elise’s falchion tore through a wall of tissue, and she stumbled forward with nothing on the other side to stop her.

  She found herself within a large chamber where blood dripped from the fleshy walls to echo hollowly around her, like a soft echo of Ba’al’s beating heart. His skull was hollow, a cavern.

  Yatam was already waiting for her in there.

  “He was always angry that we didn’t let him have the humans,” Yatam said. “He was among the movement—before the Treaty of Dis was instated—that believed mortals only existed as cattle, food for the infernal and ethereal.”

  “So he tried to conquer using one of his avatars,” Elise said. She was skeptical. “He’s only been a god for days. He couldn’t have had an avatar back then.”

  “Days, eternity. Nathaniel didn’t go insane over a span of mere years. He has walked the universe as long as Belphegor.”

  “By that rationale, I should have existed for eternity, too.”

  “You have,” Yatam said. “You have always been God. Your reach extends further into the past than you realize. Someday, you might recognize your influence on history.”

  Elise slipped down the curved floor of Ba’al’s cranial cavity toward the center. The veins all flowed toward spurs of bone jutting from the floor, as though Ba’al’s nasal bones had been shoved back through his skull. They would have pierced his brain if he’d had one.

  “I’ve definitely only been like this for a few hours,” Elise said.

  Eve appeared beside the bone spurs. Her long white gown was untouched by the blood and ichor within Ba’al’s skull. Aside from Elise’s godsword, she was the only light in the darkness. “You’re still focusing upon a mortal perception of time. When you let it go, you will find your omnipotence.”

  “You’re stubborn,” Yatam agreed, somewhat less flatteringly. “The fact that you still walk with a body and attempt to phase shows that.”

  Elise’s hands clenched on the falchions.

  Call her stubborn, call her determined—it didn’t matter.

  Whatever it took to kill Belphegor, she would do it.

  “He’s in there, by the way,” Eve said, gesturing.

  Elise stepped around the bone spurs, and there he was.

  Belphegor’s true body was sleeping inside Ba’al’s skull. How long he had been there, Elise couldn’t be certain. With the strange way that time flowed for gods, he could have been resting in there for millennia after taking over Eden.

  Maybe she could have waltzed down to Coccytus and slain Belphegor within the cranium of Ba’al years ago.

  Too late to worry about that now.

  It looked like Belphegor had already been slain, though. The skull was certainly a tomb. Belphegor’s shriveled corpse, resting on the stone dais, looked like it hadn’t moved for a long time. Mold had grown to consume much of his body, caking his arms and legs and neck, leaving only part of his face exposed.

  This form of Belphegor was far less human-like than either of the avatars. Tusks jutted through his lips. Tiny scales rimmed his eyes.

  Ba’al’s bone spurs formed a cage of bone around his body. Elise couldn’t reach him.

  She circled it, considering how she might be able to gain access. Belphegor had gotten in somehow. There must have been a way to do it.

  A beam of light radiated across the cavernous skull, splashing over the floor.

  There was a wide crack in Ba’al’s skull, through which Elise could see that the city was still walking. He had moved past a source of light. Some kind of fire. It briefly illuminated the entire skull.

  Elise climbed up the inside of his forehead to look out.

  Ba’al was breaking out of Malebolge. His massive hands ripped at the walls of the cavern, exposing a sinkhole that showed Earth on the other side. There were rolling hills, suburbs, a black sky.

  The trees and buildings were being sucked into a distant black hole. At least, that was what it looked like to Elise, though she had never expected to see a black hole on Earth.

  That was where Ba’al was going. He was trying to reach the black hole.

  “What is that?” Elise asked.

  Yatam appeared to stand beside her. “The genesis vortex. It will consume everything. That’s where it all ends, and where the next phase begins.”

  Ba’al was moving faster now that he had spotted it. If the avatar got inside—and took Belphegor with him—then they would both be beyond Elise’s ability to stop. Belphegor would control the genesis.

  She couldn’t let them get that far.

  Elise rounded on the cage of bone. There was still no obvious way to get inside; the spurs were too close together for her to slip through.

  If she had been able to do as Yatam said and let go of her stubborn adherence to linearity, maybe there would have been a way inside to kill him, but she couldn’t seem to place herself inside by sheer willpower.

  “Damn,” she said.

  She had come so far and sacrificed so much to get to this point. She had given up everything.

  Even James.

  A few bones weren’t going to stop her from killing Belphegor.

  Elise swung her obsidian falchion at the cage.

  Eve flung a hand toward her. “Wait!”

  The blade connected with the bone.

  It didn’t cut through. It struck the bone with a loud crack, sinking less than a millimeter into the hard surface, and sticking to it. Belphegor’s hand exploded from its moldy encasement, shooting out to grip Elise by the wrist.

  The world shattered around Elise. Pain coursed through every fiber of her existence, vast as it had become.

  And she immediately felt that existence begin to recede.

  Death loomed over her, dark and permanent.

  Yatam wrenched her out of Belphegor’s grip. She fell backward, collapsing in a wet puddle of rot. “Belphegor’s not the only one who can be killed by attacking his true body,” Yatam admonished. “You’re not an avatar. You’re still walking around with your vulnerable core exposed. You can’t go near him unless you want to die as surely as Nathaniel has.”

  As he spoke, Belphegor woke up. His hands stripped away the mold that had grown around him. He sat up, and though it was far less dramatic than Ba’al’s rise from Malebolge, it was somehow far more terrifying.

  He looked just as dead as the skeleton, just as impossible to move. But he radiated with power that neither of the avatars had. He blazed as bright as Adam had. Brighter, even.

  “Godslayer.” His rotten lips slid together, slicked by ichor. “I see you.”

  Yeah, she saw him too, and she wished that she didn’t have to.

  “Let me in,” Elise said. “You still have to give me that free shot.”

  Belphego
r glanced toward the crack in Ba’al’s skull. They were close enough to the genesis void now that Elise could hear its raging winds through the thick wall of bone. “All I have to do now is wait,” he said as Ba’al pitched toward the vortex.

  Elise steeled herself and lifted the falchions to attack again, but a gentle hand stopped her. “You must leave,” Eve said. “If you get within his reach, he will kill you.”

  “Not before I kill him,” Elise said.

  “But without any surviving gods, the genesis will never finish. Everything will die without rebirth. Everything will be lost. You must survive this, Elise.” Her name sounded so sweet on Eve’s lips, as though the woman were speaking the name of her favorite child.

  Elise understood Eve’s reasoning, but she was only a few feet from Belphegor’s shriveled form.

  She had almost gotten revenge against the thing that had killed everyone she loved.

  “He can’t enter the genesis alive,” Elise said, frustration twisting within her.

  “Yes, I know. We’ll address that issue, as we should have many centuries past,” Yatam said. “He will be dead before this avatar plummets into the vortex.”

  “And you two?” Elise asked.

  A smile touched Eve’s lips. “We are only ghosts. It’s inconsequential.” She brushed a kiss over Elise’s forehead. “It’s been an honor sharing your life with you.”

  The angel pushed hard.

  Elise felt something tearing as she stumbled backward, as if someone were ripping her soul down its axis, shredding her apart.

  She dropped to her knees, gasping.

  That had hurt.

  Now she was incomplete, her raw heart aching. She felt strangely empty and alone. The two other aspects of herself stepped away, standing independently of her body.

  For the first time in years, Elise was alone within herself—no longer a demon like Yatam, no longer conflicted with Eve’s tenderness.

  She was only Elise, a kopis become deity.

  Eve extended a hand to Yatam with a gentle smile. “Together?”

  “Don’t insult me,” he said with a sneer.

  That only made Eve smile more broadly, as though he had done something cute. She obviously loved Yatam the same way that she loved everyone else. Eve’s magnanimity really was boundless.

  Yatam took the obsidian falchion. Eve took the newly forged godsword. Together, they were day and night, and they turned to face Belphegor as though animosity had never divided them.

  “Go,” Eve said over her shoulder.

  Elise left Ba’al’s skull.

  Since she was God, she couldn’t truly leave. Her omnipresence touched the entire universe—what little of it remained. She could see the few patches of Earth, Heaven, and Hell shrinking away, sucked into the genesis vortex. She saw the last of the trees wrenched from the soil, roots and all, shedding their leaves and then becoming compressed into pinpoints of plant matter.

  Animals fell without oxygen; the last of the humans were wrenched away into nothingness.

  Elise looked for the place she had left her friends on Mount Anathema, and found that the mountain no longer existed. The same applied to the Himalayas and the gate that looked like Lilith.

  They simply didn’t exist anymore.

  Only a few anchor points remained: Rylie and Seth’s obsidian bodies, and a few miles of Earth surrounding the genesis vortex.

  There was nowhere for her to go.

  So she waited, and she watched Yatam and Eve.

  They shed the illusion of bodies as they approached Belphegor’s shriveled cadaver, leaving nothing behind but the light and darkness. The falchions swung. Blades severed the veins binding Belphegor to his avatar.

  He wrenched free of his dais and moved with impossible speed toward Yatam and Eve.

  The battle was short. They were two, and he was one.

  Both plunged their blades into him as he lunged. Their points joined deep within his belly, pushing through his back.

  At the same moment, Belphegor’s hands gripped their wrists.

  He looked over their shoulders at Elise, seeing her through time and space. She could feel it like silver nails raking down her spine.

  “Godslayer,” he whispered, blood dripping down his bottom lip.

  The three died together.

  Elise was no longer connected to Yatam and Eve, so she didn’t feel their deaths. She only watched them. Yet her heart wrenched with sudden, unexpected loneliness—the knowledge that the two people who had made her whole for so many years were gone.

  Dead.

  Even if it meant taking Belphegor with them, it was two more deaths than she wanted to face.

  Ba’al stumbled and began to fall.

  He collapsed over Los Angeles, sinking to his knees, crushing buildings and hills and roads underneath him. He was big enough that he smothered whole neighborhoods underneath his rot. The ragged hole he had torn between Earth and Malebolge blighted the valley as well—though that, too, was being sucked into the vortex.

  Everything was gone except for the land around Ba’al, and he didn’t have much longer, either.

  When his body finally settled, Elise stood on the ground beside him.

  The final survivor. The only soul left remaining within all the dimensions that had once existed.

  Belphegor and Nathaniel were dead, and she had survived. Genesis was almost complete.

  Elise would be the only one to see it through.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked Ba’al’s rotting corpse.

  Lilith had been a sculptor—an artist with a vision. She had probably known exactly what she was doing when she made a new universe. Even Belphegor had planned on taking that responsibility all along. He’d had plans.

  Elise had no plans. She had only thought to survive, and now she had. But she had thought that she would survive in a world that was still partially intact. She had never planned on changing anything—she’d just wanted it back the way it was before.

  She had no idea what to do from there.

  Staring deep into the depths of the genesis vortex, she realized that it wasn’t really complete darkness. There was faint light within it. Everything that had ever existed was now twisting inside—everything on Earth and Heaven and Hell, all of history and time, and every single soul that had ever lived.

  Elise wasn’t really alone. She could remake everything exactly as she wanted it, despite the fact she didn’t want anything at all.

  The idea was daunting. She was no Lilith, no master architect.

  “Might as well get started,” Elise said to nobody in particular.

  She stepped toward the vortex, away from the receding edge of crumbled road underneath Ba’al.

  Then she realized Ba’al was still moving.

  At least, something very small was moving on Ba’al’s body. A tiny figure was clambering from the ear canal, sliding down the collarbone, and leaping to the arm bones that were stretched toward the genesis.

  Belphegor had survived Yatam and Eve’s attempt to kill him. He was running for the vortex.

  If he got there first…

  “Fuck,” she hissed.

  Elise chased, and Belphegor ran, shockingly fast for such a shriveled little raisin of a body.

  She met him on the wrist, knocking him over with the full weight of her will. He fell easily. Her physical form was still that of a kopis, and as strong as she had ever been; he was an atrophied cadaver with sword wounds in his belly. It was almost pathetic how quickly he dropped.

  The genesis vortex was just a few feet away now, devouring Ba’al’s finger bones. There was no more roaring wind. Only silence. If she didn’t kill him before the vortex closed, then it wouldn’t matter who had the stronger physical body. Belphegor would win.

  Elise lifted her fists, feeling empty without her swords. “Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere near that void.”

  His rasping voice entered her mind directly. “I don’t need to. It’s comi
ng to us. You can’t kill me, and you can’t touch me without dying, too. We’re going into this genesis together. It’s over, Godslayer.”

  It couldn’t be over. This couldn’t be the end.

  Damn it, he was supposed to be dead.

  The other side of the genesis vortex was chewing its way through Ba’al’s spine now, as though they stood at the center of a contracting globe. Elise couldn’t see anything beyond its hips or the road underneath them. The entire universe had been reduced to the upper body of a demon.

  Belphegor smiled, and his lips cracked, gushing fresh ichor over his chin. He dragged himself forward a few inches toward the knucklebones.

  Elise didn’t have a choice.

  She grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him back.

  His hands immediately clamped down on her wrists, and an overwhelming sense of death swept over her. Belphegor’s face filled her vision, all scales and beady eyes and blood. “Wrong choice,” he whispered.

  The words echoed through her skull.

  He drained the life from her, drawing on the immense power of her godhood, dragging her down toward oblivion the way that he had ended Yatam and Eve.

  But Elise wasn’t just a god. She was the Godslayer. A weapon forged to kill Adam and Belphegor and any other sorry asshole who’d made the mistake of entering the Origin. And she was the last person who could protect the whole fucking universe from being subjected to Belphegor’s sick vision of eternity.

  She wasn’t going to die alone.

  Elise gathered the full force of her will and clamped it down on Belphegor, dragging him toward the darkness with her.

  Surprise registered in his eyes.

  He tried to let go of her, but she just gripped him tighter, digging her fingers into his shoulders and sinking her will into his. “You killed everyone I care about,” Elise whispered. “You’re coming with me.”

  “I killed them all. I shattered your willpower completely. You were broken.” He sounded like he was trying to convince her of it—not like he believed it himself.

  He didn’t realize that broken metal was always stronger where it was mended. The shattered link on a chain was the one least likely to snap under stress after its repair.

  Even if losing her friends had broken her, Elise had been forged into something much stronger than herself.