Page 92 of Which Witch is Willing?
And as a woman, as theCeannDorcha, The Dark One, Lillith had witnessed them all. All their sins. All the things they wished to hide from the goodness of the Goddess, and the mortals twisted her from the light.
Turned her away from Adam.
And so, he’d turned to another. Eve.
That had been the beginning of the end. The balance they’d struck in their love had been disrupted, and she’d known no good would come of it. She’d lowered herself to beg him for his favor.
But Adam had been a man, and he’d insisted that he’dknownbetter. He’d wanted something other than a scheming woman. He wanted sweetness and softness and amenable self-sacrifice in a mate. He’d wanted a woman on her knees to accept him. To accept the role she’d been given. To not reach above or beyond her station or her question her destiny.
Because the light could be corrupted, too. The light was often just as damaging as darkness.
If only he’d listened… if only he’d joined her. Chosen her. The balance never would have been distorted. The hurt within her wouldn’t have turned to anger, would never have spread the darkness. That darkness wouldn’t have obsessed her every moment, overwhelmed her until she gathered enough of it to smother the light.
Only because she could not bear to watch Adam and Eve be happy together.
When Lilith fell from the Goddess’s favor, she knew she had to bring Eve down with her, for only then could she banish the light from the world.
It had been almost too easy, coiling as a serpent, leaking poison into Eve’s ear. She knew Adam’s weaknesses and his wants, she knew the parts of his heart he kept hidden, and the little pinpricks of darkness seeded within him.
She knew how to drag them down with her.
Nowshe was no longer a morning star. She was again that helical serpent. Or a spider. Gathering her resources, her power, sucking it from whatever source she could find and storing it away to expend later. Tantalizing her prey with her shiny web and all the abundance caught within it.
She’d snatched up everything that was supposed to belong to the Goddess. Starting with the Horsemen. They’d been blessed, too. A higher race of immortals tasked with power and the prescience of prophecy to fight for the divinity of the Goddess’s creation.
She’d corrupted them over millennia. Corrupted their powers of protection against the mortals they’d been birthed to defend. Turned the divine blessing that was their celestial bodies into her own depraved playground.
And sometimes, they’d begged her to do it.
As the years slid by, she’d shrouded the truth as was her way until they’d forgotten their place. They’d forgotten their Goddess, or had become certain their Goddess had forgotten them. They’d forgotten that Adam and Eve had borne children. Not two boys, as the story had been changed for the official records.
But girls. Four of them.
And those children, that divine lineage, had been their responsibility to guard.
To love.
De Moray. It meantthe leaders.The Lords.Because language back then didn’t have any gender, and as a parting gift the Goddess left her priestesses with one last blessing.
A way to end it all.
For there was never any doubt that this would end, it was now only a question of how.
Lucy scanned the world through eyes that were not her own. Gwen, the poor, deluded soul, battered on the place in her mind that Lucy had banished her to.
They had so much to thank her for, these mortals. Their towers of glass and steel. Their wealth and weapons. Their millennia of progression in both science and skill, entertainment and now, the inevitable entropy.
It was over, their ridiculous, meaningless rule. She’d given them plenty of time to fuel her powers. To feed her stores and to break this world down in a way she’d always known was possible. Dismantling the gift of the Goddess until it begged for change.
For the apocalypse.
Once the final seal was broken… she’d give it what it wanted, wiping the last seed of Adam from the planet as she should have done eons ago.
She’d reclaim the horsemen as her consorts, chaining them to her throne of thunder as she burned the entire world to the ground
And rule over the ashes.
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