As her vision blurred, Mea forced herself to look around. She was pinned to the side of a great gray cliff. Get the stinger out. Below her was a great plain of green. Lush and fertile, it was quickly filling with water. Fight it, she kept telling herself. Intoxicated with Lilith’s venom, Mea could hear everything with a strange crystal-clarity; every raindrop, every crashing wave, every scream, every cry for help… She heard it all. Just get it out; I have to save them. Again she pushed at the onyx stinger, but again it only squeezed more venom into her blood. Fighting against the paralysis, pleasure, and euphoria of Lilith’s venom; she failed and was left to watch as the world drowned.
Days turned to nights, and then more passed. And then, even more days and more nights came and went. And with many more days passing and with Lilith’s venom coursing through her veins, blurring time and lucid, Mea eventually lost count of the days and all track of time.
Afar, rampaging floods wiped out cities, villages, and man and beast alike. Forests, savannas, and beaches became riverbeds. Green plains vanished beneath sloshing storms and dark, angry water. The horizon lit up with lightning and filled the ocean’s sky with golden tangles of electricity. Yellow flashes against purple plump clouds exploded with rain, the light serving only to reveal an armada of winged shadows that seemed to outnumber the stars, winged shadows that circled the drowning and dying like hungry vultures.
Giant boats, arks they were—four, five, six… seven of them—one for each continent. They swayed and rocked and then, when the waters grew deep and became angry, the arks rocked violently atop the mammoth waves and beneath black skies that were still bleeding rain.
Seven arks, at least it was not all of them, thought Mea through her haze, at least some were not slaughtered. And as more days blurred into each other, she finally noticed that one of them, one of the arks, had swayed ever so close to her.
Atop the boat’s soaked wooden desk and next to its lightning-splintered wooden cabin, Mea saw movement and narrowed her eyes to see them better. Mortals? The blurred figures waved at her and shouted distorted sounds. Then one person called to another mortal. Carrying wavy poles and limp vines, she didn’t understand what they were doing. Constructing a new mast, maybe? she thought. Then—just then, she noticed that the sun was out and had finally broken through the barricade of stone-colored clouds and the rain seemed to have stopped some time ago.
Atop the now-dry deck, three other mortals fastened long planks of wood together with rope and made an even longer wooden pole. Fastened and looped at the end of it was a rope made of water reeds—or hemp—she couldn’t tell for certain. Just get it out, she reminded herself as she then pawed weakly and helplessly at the spear that was still plunged in her belly.
Ever so close, and with considerable time and effort, they tried to help her. And Mea watched as the looped pole swayed in-front of her a thousand miles away and yet so close, just out-of-reach of the onyx spear sticking out of her stomach. Ever so close, it was. Just get it out. And as the rising morning sun and sunbeams turned everything to diamonds in her eyes, Mea’s ears were able to find a bit of clarity. She could hear them, the mortals. They were yelling as they stuck out the long wooden pole, but she still couldn’t understand them. But the voice next to her, that one was crystal clear.
“Look. It’s your newest subjects. Let me show them the way, the way to Elysium, your crystal kingdom.” Mea turned towards the voice, and the shimmering diamonds she saw turned into that of rubies, Lilith’s smug, glinting eyes. She was going to kill them, Mea realized. She tried to scream, to warn them, to stop Lilith; but she couldn’t. Wave them off. Mea tried, but her arms seemed to be missing any and every muscle that she knew should have been there. In the end, all she could do was weakly and drunkenly flail up her hand before it melted back into jelly. So she just hung there.
“Don’t worry. I’ll tell them you said hi,” Lilith said grinning. Then in a flash of black, she shot off the gray cliff and towards the ark. Her red ribbons tracing behind her like streamers as she exploded into the center of the boat. Then, in crimson swirls of silk, she exploded out of it.
And Mea watched the blurry ark sink. Looking up at Lilith, she thought she could hear her laughing, but Lilith was much smaller now and floating, and now, so very far away. Hovering on her midnight wings and with her blood-red ribbons dancing in the wind, Lilith looked down and admired her work, the shattered ark with its squirming and sinking contents. Not laughter, screams.
Still Mea could have sworn that she heard Lilith laughing, but it couldn’t be. Lilith was so far away, floating above the sinking ark and its dying contents. Mea chalked up the laughter and Lilith’s grinning lips and her sparkling eyes to the poison that was still pumping through her veins, and Mea continued to hang limply on the side of the cliff.
Mea thought about the people on the ark. They were dying, punished because they were trying to help her, and a tear fell from her eye. Yet, as it broke past her eye’s bottom lash, the tear froze before it could even reach the bottom of her cheek. The frozen teardrop looked more like a sculptured crystal glued to her cheek, and so did the next one. More frozen tears followed.
Then, below Mea, the waves that were crashing against the cliff and the ocean mist that splashed and splattered at her feet stiffened and soon turned to ice as well. Then the cliff she hung from frosted over, and her breath steamed in the air. Then the grass frosted over and died. The ground did the same. The ocean dried up and into ice and the Northern and Deep Southern lands grew cold. Innumerable days and nights passed. Ice grew into glaciers, and the glaciers drifted out to sea. And some time ago, the rain had stopped, but the ice didn’t. And Mea stayed where she was, half-frozen and half-numb.
More time passed. Days turned to years and then blurred together until time didn’t matter, like her eyesight had done some time ago.
Then one day, they didn’t. Green lights streamed past the other streams of light, and she felt a burst of warm steam hit her cheek. She heard a grunt and felt a sharp pain as her body jerked to the side. Then, with another grunt, another sharp pain sent a surge of venom through her chest. Then the onyx stinger fell from her stomach. For a moment, Mea’s stomach felt worse than when it was stuck, but the pain slowly subsided. Her lucidity began creeping back into her consciousness.
But her body was still limp. Like a ragdoll, she felt herself being slung over a large shoulder that lied just behind the blurry emeralds she saw. Then the emeralds swayed and spoke. Climbing down the cliff, his words sounded more like contorted whispers. “Even now, the corruption remains. The flood, the ice, it did nothing—didn’t make a damn difference, none of it did. The humans, they’re still unclean. The flood, it only stymied the infection. And me… here I am, even now. Even after everything.
“And the Dark One, where is he? Seven arks? Sounds like one of his deals—you know how he likes his deals. But now… where is he?”
Mea’s body flopped over and off the wide shoulder, and she slammed down on the tundra and watched as the dusted up ice crystals hang in the air before they began drifting to the ground. In Mea’s clouded vision, they looked like tiny stars.
“Do you know how long it’s been?” The emerald eyes bounced as he let out a throaty laugh. “Years, hundreds of years… A few thousand, actually. The Dark One, if I had to guess, I’d say that they didn’t like his deal as much as he thought they might. As for you…”
The emeralds streamed past her face again before growing smaller and smaller. “Don’t say I never did nothing for you.”
Eventually the warmth returned. Trees grew from the swamps and marshes turned to grass. Man multiplied and rebuilt. Dirt turned to roads. Roads turned to asphalt blanketed with cars. Still, a whisper remained inside her head. “The corruption remains. It is not the worms that corrupt the fruit; it’s the tree that is corrupted. And if the tree is tainted, the fruit will be tainted as well.”
Mea snapped awake, drenched in flop-sweat and fear. She glanced at the clock an
d saw that it was just a shade before midnight. Despite being drenched, she’d slept for not even an hour.
She inhaled her present reality and exhaled the fear, anxiety, pain, regret, and woe from her dream. She hadn’t had a dream that intense since her powers had first started returning to her, when she had just turned eighteen, when she was still in high school—a few months that felt like a lifetime ago. The sweat was sticky and annoying. Pinching the bridge of her nose and inhaling deeply, she focused. Then, with a puff of crisp cold air sliding off her thin lips, she popped open her hand.
The layer of sweat that coated her entire body crackled and the thin layer of ice exploded off her like a late frost in early Spring.
She knew what she had to do, and it wasn’t what she thought it’d be. It wasn’t to ask Blackwell why he bargained for the seven arks. It wasn’t to find Lilith and get revenge. Strangely enough those things weren’t bothering her. Something else was. Azazel.
Looking around her bedroom, she saw that it was empty (as it normally was). She whispered to the air, “Vincent.”
Then her room wasn’t empty. Almost on cue, Blackwell answered, “Hello, Mea,” and stepped out of the same dark corner that he always did. “You called?”
“Take me to Azazel.”
CH 23: Old School Funk
Armored and with her wings melded into a cloak of satin snow, Mea walked down the steps of the stone tower with Blackwell. Usually the center of attention, he was a shadow next to the silver-clad goddess. And as the pair descended the spiraling stone staircase, yellow and red eyes glowed behind the iron bars and stared.
“Are these…”
“Once gods, now monsters. Man and beast alike, unable to control their emotions and unwilling to let go of them, they are creatures neither human nor animal.”
“Monsters?” asked Mea.
“Yes. Monsters, myths, the nightmares of men. Once they walked the earth, haunting and feeding on man before becoming the monsters in the stories of men. And now they are imprisoned… here.”
Pausing, he waved a torch across a section of iron bars. Behind them sat a heap of pale skin and yellow eyes hanging just above a thin black sheet. The creature bared a set of long white fangs as it hissed at them.
“This one,” Blackwell explained. “He was once a man of wealth and beauty. But as he aged and after death, he became obsessed with his past, a joyous youth of luxury, lust, and wonder that he could never replicate or let go of. His obsession became his distortion. Once a ghost, his torment turned him into this.” He swung the torch closer to the iron bars.
As the flames streamed yellow and red lights all about, the creature cowered even further into the corner of his stone cell. Long fingers of thin pale skin lifted high into the air and pawed at the flickering lights on the stone wall. Then, the creature’s fingers traced over the bricks of his prison cell, and the black nails that tipped its fingers scraped against the mortar between the stone blocks.
Blackwell swept the torch away, and they continued moving. “Before it was captured, it would patrol graveyards, seeking the blood of those that longed for their own forgotten pasts… as it itself once had.”
Mea whispered in disbelief, “A vampire?” Grinning and curious, she asked, “What else is down here?”
“Many things,” he answered dryly before pointing towards their destination. “This way.” He led her down the black corridor lined with iron bars and that was only lit by the flickering flames of weak torches on the walls.
Soon something else grabbed her attention. A cat’s paw, an orange-tabby that looked just like Anna’s cat—looked like his paw at least. Coming from behind the pitch black and under the iron bars, the small striped paw was pawing at seemingly nothing on the cold stone floor— like it was playing and pawing at the shadows. Only seeing the tiny leg, Mea ran over. That can’t possibly be a monster. “Oh, what a cute cat. What’s it…”
As Mea bent down to pet it—her satin cloak swaying all the while, Blackwell wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her away. “Easy, Mea.” Then, as the torch light swayed over the blackness, the tiny tabby cat turned into something much larger. With a blood-curdling roar, the beast looked like a tiger but was twice the size of one. And now, its once-tiny paw was much more. The once innocent paw was much larger, more vicious, and much sharper. And now, it was also sliding between the iron bars and swiping at Blackwell—trying to slice him to ribbons. Tonight it would not succeed.
Smooth as always, as the tiger swiped at him, Blackwell whirled Mea away with one arm, while he held the torch in his other—and sliding just out of reach of the creature’s sharpened nails and away from its cage. “This way please,” he repeated.
And Mea, shocked, she looked back at the prison cell in disbelief as the darkness from Blackwell’s fleeing torchlight once again blanketed the creature and the stone cell it was locked in. And now, Mea saw its paw once again. And the monstrous tiger was much quieter, and only gently meowing came from the darkened prison cell. And the beast’s paw had reverted back into the cute, tiny paw from before and was once again swiping at the shadows on the floor. Mea wrinkled her nose up in disbelief and gave a screwed-face look to Blackwell. “What the hell was that?”
“A thing. Down here, in the dark… things aren’t always what they seem.” Blackwell smiled, and they continued their journey.
Their footsteps echoed loudly and announced their approach as the flickering light of Blackwell’s torch did so as well.
“Again? So soon?” Azazel growled as the green flames of his eyes flickered. “I’m honored.”
As he saw Mea, he added, “Oh… it’s you,” then huffed. “Come to mock me, have you?”
“No, just to talk.”
Blackwell glared at Azazel before squeezing Mea’s shoulder. “I’ll give you two a moment.”
Mea watched Blackwell as he walked away. As the flames of his torch flickered and danced behind him, he faded into the shadows like a quickened sunset.
Turning back towards Azazel, Mea noticed that his wings had returned. Fuller and plumper than they were at Blackwell’s last visit, they were still not quite fully healed. The black feathers shimmered like tarnished onyx. “You look better.”
“Yes,” said Azazel. “All things considered, I’m good. You know, aside from being imprisoned. Where’s your little bird, the reaper? You need to watch that one. He might stab you in the back—or through the back, as in my case.”
“Him? He’s…” Her sympathy was interrupted by her memories. “You were trying to kill me. What did you think he would do?”
“Kill you?” Azazel laughed. “Kill you? Kill your flesh suit, maybe. Maybe toy with you some, but kill you? You’re a god. We’re immortal.”
“Are we? How do we stop it? How do we stop them?”
Again Azazel laughed. “Stop them? Stop Lilith, maybe… this time. The Wolf? Difficult but possible… But the others? It can’t be done. It’s impossible.”
“There has to be a way. Billions will die.”
“Yes, billions and billions. Then it will happen again, and billions more will die. And twenty thousand, thirty thousand years from now—a million years, it will happen again. It doesn’t matter when it will happen, but it will happen. Then it will happen again, and again.”
“Dammit, Azazel.” Mea slammed her armored fist into one of the iron bars of his cell, and the vibrations rang out like church bells. “You would just stand by and watch. Do something. Help us… Please.”
Her words stoked his anger, and his anger stoked the fire in his eyes which were now ablaze like wildfire tinted forest-green. “Help us? Help them? I tried. Once, I tried. And what was my reward? I was cut. My wings were ripped from my shoulders and I was thrown out of my home, our home.”
A stream of memories flooded Mea, slamming into her like an epiphany. The Guf, the Tree of Life. Azazel’s rebellion in heaven, to overthrow, to rule the world. Their fight. Tearing out his wings. Casting him out.
They were all lies, false memories. “You weren’t trying to take over… You were trying to destroy it, the Tree of Life, the creation of souls, all of it.”
“Yeah, destroy it—all of it,” Azazel said, mocking her. Then he huffed sarcastically and thought, she still doesn’t get it.
He moved further back into his cell and settled in the far corner of it. Bathed in the darkness, Azazel was invisible. That is, everything except his flaming green eyes. And although the fire in his eyes had settled some, the flames were still anything but calm. “Yes, destroy it. As I said so long ago, the tree is corrupted, rotten. And I would bury it—the tree, life, and everything else before I…” His next words were hard. “Before I would see you weep for humanity, again. Your compassion for them, how you embrace their pain as your own, they are unworthy. They curse the gods and curse each other. They only know greed and hunger and give no thanks for the gifts and the time they are given. They are no more than entitled children, ignorant and expecting everything without sacrifice… unworthy.
“So, yes. I would… destroy the Tree of Life and everything with it, all living creatures… to start over, to do it right. To spare you the pain of trying to save an unworthy species of a fate of their own making.”
Mea gripped the iron bars, and with a softness in her voice that matched the softness of her face she said, “No, Azazel. You are the child. People can be bad and do horrible things but… they can also be good and generous and caring and charitable. The world is cold. No one questions that. But humans, mortals, they will persevere. For their families, for their friends, they will fight for them and care for them and forgive them for as long as they can. And if—and when—they have to do horrible and evil things to protect the ones they love… they will do just that. And then they will also bear that pain and regret of it… Just as you and I do now.
The Long Night of the Gods: Lilith Awakens (Forgotten Ones Book 2) Page 22