Chapter 489
Lilith yawned.
Not because she was tired—she had never truly experienced exhaustion in the way ordinary living beings understood it.
She yawned because she was bored, because boredom was the only guest that had never left this space, and yawning was the only way to acknowledge it without having to speak.
The eye that had originally been open was now closed, and the eye that had originally been closed was now open—as though it were a change that altered nothing at all, like two sides of the same coin that never once fell to the ground.
She floated silently, her pitch-black hair drifting slowly as though pulled by unseen ocean currents, and for several moments she simply stared upward.
Toward a sky that did not exist there.
Toward something that could not be reflected by the shattered pieces of glass surrounding her.
"Monotonous," she finally whispered, her voice emerging like a sigh that had been held back for far too long.
"This life. My life. Our lives."
She slowly moved her hand, sweeping through the empty air before her as though brushing away invisible dust.
"I've tried everything, you know?" she continued, speaking to the glass fragments, to the shattered pieces that never answered.
"Hydroponic farming in a vacuum. Vertical agriculture with reversed gravity. Mushroom fields growing from the cracks of reality. I even planted rice at the bottom of the ocean in an alternate version of Earth that had no moon."
She smiled faintly, a smile that never reached that single eye of hers.
"None of it worked. Not the plants—the plants grew perfectly well, strangely enough. But that sense of boredom… it never left."
She closed her eye once again, then opened it again.
The eye now open was the exact same eye as before—nothing had changed, nothing ever changed.
"And Earth," she said, and this time her tone shifted.
There was something resembling disgust within it, though never strong enough to truly be called hatred.
"They always say, 'Why don't you just stay on Earth? Earth is beautiful. Earth is comfortable. Earth is…' blah blah blah."
She raised her left hand, mimicking someone speaking with exaggerated gestures.
"I hate Earth. Not because Earth itself is ugly. Earth is… sufficient. Sufficient for little creatures who know nothing about emptiness. But for me? For us?"
She gestured around the room in a circular motion, pointing toward the scratched glass, the cracks that never healed, the fragments floating aimlessly without direction.
"This is my home. A space that has never been whole. A space cracked apart like my consciousness after existing for far too long."
She floated several centimeters higher, as though stretching a body that had never truly been tense.
"At least here, no one forces me to smile. No one asks 'How are you?' with a face that never truly cares about the answer."
She stopped, that single eye staring straight ahead, piercing through the glass fragments, through walls that did not exist, through something far away that no one else could possibly see.
"Because my answer is always the same. Monotonous. And no one truly wants to hear that word."
She fell silent for a long time.
So long that the glass fragments around her began rotating more slowly, as though the space itself had grown bored waiting for her to speak again.
Then, with a slow and deliberate motion, Lilith closed her open eye.
And when she opened it again—that same eye, the one that never changed—her gaze had shifted.
She was no longer looking around the room.
She was looking inward.
Toward the place where memories she had never asked for were stored.
"We were born from the nature of the Nothingness," she said, her voice suddenly feeling heavier, deeper, like a voice emerging not from a throat but from the depths of something older than herself.
"Me and my thirteen sisters. Not sisters of the same womb. Not sisters of the same blood. But sisters of the same emptiness. Sisters born from the scattered remnants released when the Nothingness cast us into the world—into the Multiverse Pathways, into the little boxes called universes."
She exhaled softly, and for the first time, that breath felt heavy.
"We never spoke much to one another. Each of us was too busy with our own boredom, with our own methods of not going insane amidst an existence we never asked for."
She began reciting names one by one, like someone reading an inventory list of what remained after a fire.
"Asherah. Mammon. Ashmedai. Baal-Zevul. Chemosh. Apollyon. Rahab. Apophis. Bes. Enlil. Lamashtu. Ahura Mazda. Mictlantecuhtli."
She paused briefly, and that single eye blinked slowly.
"And me. Lilith HaRish'a. Disturbers Number Two. Because Number One… Number One was never one of us."
"Huuuuh!"
"We agreed to separate ourselves," she continued, her voice returning to that nearly emotionless flat tone.
"Not because we hated one another. Not because we didn't care. But because… we were too alike. Too identical. And when too much emptiness gathers in one place, it does not become full. It becomes emptier."
Slowly, she closed that single eye again.
"And we—me and my thirteen sisters—we will gather again. Not because we miss each other. Not because we want to. But because that instruction… that instruction written since the very beginning, since before we were born from the nature of the Nothingness, an instruction whose time of arrival was never known."
That single eye no longer merely pierced through space.
Now it pierced through time itself.
Lilith HaRish'a fell silent amidst the slowly rotating shards of glass, and within that silence, old visions began surfacing like bubbles rising from an ocean too deep for light to ever reach.
She remembered those times—the time when the first news of the sealing of the Nothingness reached the ears of the fourteen residuals scattered throughout the Multiverse Pathways.
"They sealed it," she whispered, her voice suddenly hoarse, like someone swallowing shards of glass.
"The Gods. The direct descendants of Xavier XVII and Myra Astrielle. They thought it would be enough to seal the power and memories of the Nothingness inside that infant's body—inside Ilux's body."
She clenched her fist, her long nails pressing against her palm with pressure not strong enough to wound, yet strong enough to leave marks.
"But they didn't stop there. Once the seal hardened, they moved. Not as guardians. As hunters."
She remembered how news of deaths began arriving before any of them had even reached a certain age.
Not through letters, not through messengers, but through vibrations deep within their consciousnesses, all connected by the same nature, like strings being severed one by one by an unseen blade.
"Bes," she said, speaking the name in a flat tone that somehow felt more painful than crying.
"Enlil. Lamashtu. Ahura Mazda. Mictlantecuhtli."
She exhaled, and that breath felt like blowing away ashes.
"They died not because they lost. They died because they were alone. Because the hunt happened so quickly, so brutally, so… inhumanly. And the Gods never called it murder. They called it purification."
"Hooooh!!"
"We who remained—me, Asherah, Mammon, Ashmedai, Baal-Zevul, Chemosh, Apollyon, Rahab, Apophis—nine out of fourteen," she continued, her voice trembling at the edge of rage she had buried beneath layers of thick boredom for so long.
"We learned to hide. Not because we were afraid. But because if we died, then no one would remain to remember. No one would remain to demand answers."
To be continued….