Lilith is closer, now. She has drifted from the pillar in barbed flight, her job of guarding the Cathedral abandoned ( was it ever a purpose at all ? ). Approached Zelda in that ghostly manner she so often travels by; a manner that makes Lilith a creature both lost and lethal.
Settles in. Power. Beautiful. Powerful. It’s a statement raw and blunt and ominous to anyone else, but Zelda fears no such thing. She wants all for Sabrina that she could not achieve. Zelda, thus, does not answer this. The weight of her response lies more familiar within the throat and it will rest there. Power or NOT. Martyr, messiah, child of the one they once called Lucifer. She is still my niece. Instead, her lips tighten; her exhale is louder. She doesn’t have a smoke; she wishes it were so, and that it might veil her eyes, suddenly. Instead, she glances, as if for the first time, at the stained glass window. Her eyes fall upon the serpent, the tree, the dark, cherrywood bark. From her peripheral she notices the hand of God, but only there.
There is something so small, yet so deep, in Lilith’s question. It surprises Zelda; she finds herself momentarily lost in the depth of its implication. Does she know? Does Lilith know what I know? Eyes soft, brow hardened, Zelda folds her arms in front of her chest, fingers gripping each opposing elbow gently. Such a vulnerable moment they have shared, and she is shaken by how much and how suddenly – does Lilith know – the vulnerability that runs here, let so violently, like blood from an old, forgotten wound ? Zelda is overcome with a desire to spare her; and thus she does not look her in the eye as she wishes to do. Instead, she tilts her own head, looking more thoroughly at the scene BELLOWING to be HEARD, SEEN, BELIEVED, before the both of them. She is trying to anchor herself, suddenly impregnated with the inescapable epiphany that this Mother of Demons beside her was once, simply, a being of the cosmos. A celestial creation of God, a woman, of no one’s rib but the dust, who lived in the Garden of Eden.
❛ What I’ve always found to be particularly … troubling … is the depiction of the snake, ❜ Zelda says at last, referring to the obviously sinister nature of the creature stained on the panel. ❛ It simply could not have been so obvious. Not nearly as impeding as you see here … as one might have imagined. Lucifer was clever – surely he wouldn’t have appeared to Eve like that ? As dark and deadly, smothering that forbidden tree, fangs protruding in wait ? ❜ How could the girl have been so foolish, so as to fall prey to that ?
Zelda suddenly is overcome with sorrow; she swallows, instead, and composes herself.
She finally meets Lilith’s eyes, and strangely, she is not afraid, for she finds nothing but lingering sadness there. Her question seems accusatory but the contact they share sings a different song; what were you like – what have you lost?
❛ The Catholics have such … ghastly imaginations. ❜
This is her final, offered judgment. She hopes it will suffice.
There’s a quiet chasm that echoes between them. Lilith’s words fall down them. Her clacking, precise heels sound, to her pricked ears, like the echoes of the words crumbling on the rocks at the bottom. She’s not very good with silence, for all her experience of it. Probably because of her experience with it.
Zelda stands there, cutting a figures shadow in the room’s light, dust glittering as it slowly drifted in the air about them. She stands there, in her porcelain exhaustion, in her delicate steadfastness. She turns wordlessly, that chasm roaring between them. Lilith exhales a small breath, tension and facade and quietness mingling. The events of the night feel aeons away; as far away as the laughable parade of sound and fury splayed all over the stained glass.
Not for the first time, Lilith’s pale eyes wolfishly devour the woman before her. There is a sort of dense gravity around her; the din of power and a dignity that will constrict her own neck and correct her posture. How funny, in its own sick little way, that this Nexus point has them both collared to it. How much funnier still it is that her neck gets hot and tight around Zelda, how it feels like she has been pulled back to this woman and to this place for no threat, for no obligation. It is not in the nature of herself to comprehend what it is to be drawn to another without it being a clever performance, to serve with her mouth and to plot behind her eyes.
THE CATHOLICS HAVE SUCH GHASTLY IMAGINATIONS.
She deigns to give Zelda’s condescension to the False God’s sheep a stoic, croaking little laugh. Zelda is a curiously clever creature. Arrogant and proud and submissive and frightened all at once. Rather than point this out, Lilith instead engages. She’ll bite. ❛ Ghastly imagination is all it is, I assure you. ❜ And - do you like it when I assure you? No one has ever seemed to pay it much mind before. Flashes of mentoring Sabrina when she was younger, less scorched internally by the sunlight and gold of GLORY. Back then she had dispensed wisdom and suggestions like precious contraband. She had adored it. It is something she can never admit, and it adds to a million other soft inklings in her labyrinth heart, but she had relished the opportunity to have IMPACT. Lilith loved it with a viciousness.
❛ The Woman was already unhappy. ❜ She doesn’t talk about this usually. It is overplayed and hits a part of her heart that once hurt until she tore the muscle apart with vengeance so it would grow back stony. She only ever calls Eve ‘the woman’. The name sounds in her mouth like admission of vulnerability. Every part of her has been used against her at least once, so she, like a bruised dog, has learned to hide in plain sight. Pack herself away in a box in her own mind, and wear her basest functions like claws. ❛ Her sin and her salvation - her undoing and her creation - was her pessimism. She was created to be docile, to be the perfect upstanding woman of her Garden. And she did better than some at that purpose, I’ll grant her that. ❜ Her sardonic little joke is for Zelda’s benefit, a courtesy because she knows that her eyes keep drifting upward to the snake in the tree, to the wincing face of Eve and the disgusted face of Adam. There are copious reasons she does not dwell, but after today old habits call out to her. The same rage that forged her, made her a hardy survivalist with a bitter longing to live and belong has rendered her quiet and pensive now.
❛ Through it all she couldn’t shake the notion that something was not right. Adam, the Angels, and God gave her an answer as to what life and creation was. To what she ought be. ❜ Lilith’s eyes drag down from that worn out fairytale, and settle on the nape of Zelda’s back, where her pale gold hair ends in swirling strands and her breathing is soft and slow. ❛ The snake offered her an alternative; the opportunity to take that answer and, in her ready maw, bite it in half. ❜
For good measure, Lilith sighs and rolls her eyes. ❛ Yes, the Dark Lord usually appeared very charming at first. A serpent isn’t his style - nor is liberation. ❜ And Eve, that day, had been set free of someone else’s perfection. Was that not a kindness, in its own way?
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