She’s gotten used to this world. In many ways, it is less hostile than the Boiling Isles, barring a few temporary incidents. What she hasn’t gotten used to is the suspense. The not knowing... and the knowing, that at any moment her everyday life could be interrupted as she’s plunged back into the chaos which had been made of her home.
Eclipses are a regular occurrence here: so frequent, and so without warning, as to be astronomically impossible. And still, with each one Lilith feels a stab of profound terror. As if this time, it really could be the end.
And then she shrugs it off and carries on with her business.
She is no stranger to terror, after all.
It follows her wherever she goes. A dark, haunting presence—repulsive, but welcoming in its familiarity. Even when she’s alone, she can’t shake the feeling of being watched. Of being judged. Isn’t that what she asked for? And isn’t it what she deserves?
She thinks it might be her imagination: a hallucination brought on by a lack of sleep. Her half-curse acting up, not for the first time, straining against her connection to reality.
But then he turns around.
The false prophet, red-handed. The most important man in the world. She has thrown his name around so freely in the past, but now under his freezing gaze she cannot even think to utter it.
For the longest time, she kept asking herself: what if he was telling the truth? What if she’s the one who’s wrong, like she always was? What if it was not only him, but the Titan who would punish her betrayal? The fear sits, rotting in her stomach. It’s been there longer than she’s been aware of it.
But there is also an anger. Her lip curls in a snarl, as she holds her staff out in front of her. It may only be good as a blunt weapon, but he should know well enough to recognize that as a threat.
“You.” She has one advantage, in the form of the gaping pit at the Emperor’s back. The void is hungry. She advances, a bold step forward, looks him in the eyes and prays to whoever’s listening that she doesn’t lose her nerve.
She seems, for a moment, as appalled to see him as he is her, and this gives him a sort of buoyancy against the apprehension of her simply being here.
“Lilith,” he says in turn, a frozen smile forming around her name.
She is a traitor by the abysmal nature of her birth and by the rules of fate; yet not so many days ago, a smile like this would have brought the witch to her knees in eager subservience.
Here and now, she advances on him, staff held forward like a physical threat. He brings his own staff into view; the wood under his hands is not yet familiar to him, an assigned toy rather than an object crafted by his own standards, but he knows well that in the end these things don’t come down to the material of the tool. They come down to the hand that wields.
And while Lilith’s hand is capable enough ( he sees the work of it in every one of his true reflections ), his is the hand of that which hunts her.
Belos keeps his eyes on the witch as he begins to take a few steady steps sideways rather than forward, as if to edge himself out from between her and the seemingly bottomless hole behind him. He hopes in some small way she gets closer still and he can send her plummeting, before she can do the same to him.
“Are you sure you want to do this? Things can be different here, you know. The Titan is not beyond granting second chances.”
