by S. M. Reine
She could hear Adam’s heart beating toward an end.
Soon, she would be alone again.
“Never leave me,” she said.
“Never,” Adam agreed, the tenor of His voice drawing her from her memories.
She laced her fingers with His. There was such relief in His touch, as much as the aging frightened her.
Side-by-side, they traveled through the gloom of the jungle. She could hear a distant river. He had promised that they would swim together. She had long been tempted by the water, but feared getting her wings wet.
That tugging sensation was growing stronger.
You’re getting close. Find them.
She ignored the voice.
She pushed branches out of her path, and a thorn stung her finger.
The pain cleared her mind. For a moment, she had almost forgotten she wasn’t Eve again.
Elise reflexively put her finger in her mouth and sucked on it. She was shocked when her mouth didn’t flood with the iron taste of blood. It was warm, sticky, and a little sweet.
She pulled her hand out to look at it. The wound was still oozing, but what she had expected to be blood was the glossy orange-gold of amber. Confused, she tried to wipe the sap off on leaves. It stung to rub the cut, and more amber fluid oozed from her.
Elise was bleeding sap.
When she had stepped through Adam’s door, she must have allowed the trunk to finally devour her body, sucking her in deep where Adam’s mortal form rested. She had finally integrated into the garden fully, as Metaraon had always wanted her to do. The blood of the Tree was flowing through her veins.
If the Tree was bleeding into her, then did that mean Elise was bleeding into the Tree, too?
Her mind swam with the possibilities. Her blood was meant to render gods mortal.
What would that do to the Tree?
Find them, said the feminine voice again.
Adam realized that she wasn’t following. He stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Elise asked, dropping her hand to her side. The sap was already beginning to harden over the wound.
Adam plunged into the water first. He moved through the waves like Eve moved through the air. “Join me,” Adam said.
Eve slipped into the water with him, much more hesitantly.
Her initial struggles were pathetic. Wings were not made for swimming, and her six limbs felt ungainly, unorganized.
Adam didn’t allow her to drown. His arms wrapped around her, legs tangling, and Adam propelled both of them downstream. Eve would remember that moment forever—it was the first time that she had become aroused, thinking of the many ways that their bodies could function as a unit.
He kissed her there for the first time, too.
Lips brushed over hers.
It shot electricity through Elise’s belly, mingling with the surprise of waking from the memory to find herself in the river.
Mnemosyne was not so violent back then. She wasn’t in danger of drowning.
But the distance between Eve and Elise was shrinking, and it wasn’t Elise who kissed Adam back, but His wife.
His hands cupped her back. His fingers found her spine and drew feather-light patterns between her shoulder blades, sending chills rippling down her body. Adam pressed her against the rocks, standing between her legs. Her wings bent uncomfortably behind her. She didn’t care.
Eve remembered the taste of Adam’s mortality on her tongue. He didn’t taste mortal anymore, and kissing Him was as intoxicating as pouring wine down her throat.
Find them, said the voice.
Eve pulled away from Him.
Rocks framed the opposite bank of the river. Metal glimmered beyond.
You’re not the only thing trapped here.
He caught her chin and kissed her again. It was more insistent this time, like He was trying to force her to pay attention to Him, jealous that anything else could catch her attention.
Eve was tempted to linger.
Elise was not.
She freed herself of Him and climbed onto the banks. Her sodden wings were heavy. She struggled to stand, shaking the feathers dry.
That wasn’t what had happened in reality, and disturbing the status quo disturbed the entire garden. The jungle shuddered. Birds erupted from the trees, soaring into the night sky. A metallic tang lingered on her tongue.
Adam climbed out of the river behind her.
“Where are you going?” He asked.
Elise walked through the jungle. In three steps, she found herself standing at the place that Mnemosyne flowed between the roots of the Tree. It was not the First Tree as a sapling when Eve had first discovered it—this was an adult Tree, watching over the glorious city of Eden.
The world was burning. The jungle that she had just been walking in smoldered, scorching her skin. Ash drifted through the air.
They’re here, said the voice. Find them.
Elise pressed her hands to her temples.
This was where Eve had died so many years ago—this place where river met Tree within Eden.
Elise remembered it perfectly. She could easily form the mental image of Adam striding toward her, weighed down with a flaming sword in each hand. There had been murderous jealousy in His eyes. When Elise looked down at her navel, she half-expected to see a blade driven hilt-deep into her gut.
How dare you, Adam had said, as if Eve had forced His hand.
He would do it again.
“What is this place?” Adam asked, joining her in the dry riverbed. “What are all of these structures?” He was still innocent, still mortal, confused by the changing garden.
Metal caught Elise’s eye.
She turned to find a pair of swords jutting out of the root of the Tree.
One of them had a hilt wrapped in leather, and a blade of steel. The metal was marked with delicate carvings: pentagrams, crosses, ankhs, a Star of David, and many other religious symbols. The second sword was almost its twin, but it was obsidian from tip to tip, and it oozed ichor into the place that touched the Tree. The blades, two feet long each, were driven halfway into the root.
Metaraon had said that those falchions had been thrown into the lake underneath the Tree, where everything was recycled into new life.
But her swords hadn’t been destroyed. They had only been drawn into the Tree to wait.
“Let’s go back,” Adam said. “I don’t think I like it here.”
Elise settled her hand around the hilt of the obsidian sword first, and then its match. They felt right underneath her fingers. As if she had been born to wield such things.
She pulled them free.
Adam seemed so confused by the sight of Eve holding weapons that He didn’t react when she walked toward Him, almost mechanically.
Do it, whispered the voice. He’s killed so many.
“But He doesn’t know that,” she said. It was Eve speaking, not Elise. “He’s innocent.”
“Eve?” Adam asked.
She kissed Him again, and this time, it was of her own free will. She savored the immortality on His breath. She tasted the blood of billions of lives that had been destroyed at His orders—not just the angels growing in Eve’s nursery, but the humans He had drowned, burned, and violated. She tasted all of Lilith’s demons that He had slaughtered.
Without Metaraon, and without the Treaty of Dis, the garden wouldn’t be able to hold Him anymore. He could kill again, just as He had killed Eve.
The entire world would suffer at His feet.
Do it, urged the voice. Eve and Elise steeled their grip.
Adam smiled against her lips. “I love—”
Elise plunged a falchion into His heart.
Adam caught her wrist, breath caught in His throat. “I’m sorry,” Eve said, eyes welling up with tears. “There was no other way.”
His power drained away.
The Tree behind her groaned, and the mighty sound throbbed through the ground beneath her feet. Its roots peeled away fr
om the earth.
The trunk began to topple, as if shoved by a giant hand. It tumbled through the smoke. Burning buildings collapsed into dust. The forest faded.
Stars swirled above them, and Mnemosyne withdrew.
Adam fell.
Elise released the swords. Her hands were covered with sap, making the fingers stick together. Amber blood caked hair to the side of Adam’s face. His eyes were blank by the time He landed at her feet.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, tracing her trembling fingers over the bridge of His nose, His lips, His chin.
How could she have done this?
The city, Eden, and the growing garden were gone within moments, leaving nothing but patchy jungle and a tiny sapling where the Tree had stood moments above. Elise stood in the center of a grassy plane with a blank sky above, ringed by trees and vines that shriveled as she watched.
It was the beginning again—a beginning without Adam.
All light faded.
Elise heard a rustling in the trees. She tensed, hands clenched on the falchions.
A woman’s hand pushed through the branches, parting them in front of her. She had strong, muscled fingers with a pronounced thumb pad and knuckles, as if she had spent her entire life working hard. The hand was followed by a strong wrist, muscled forearm, elegant shoulder, and a naked torso.
The face that was revealed at last took Elise’s breath away. It wasn’t that the woman was beautiful—although she was, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful creatures that Elise had ever seen—but rather that the woman looked very, very much like Elise. She had been remade in Yatam’s likeness, but Yatam had been remade in the likeness of a god that had once loved him: Nügua, who sculpted humanity from clay with her hands.
This woman had a heart-shaped face, full lips the color of blood, and heavy-lidded eyes that turned up at the corners. An eternal smile lingered on her lips.
Nügua was the serpent in the garden, the feminine voice that had been chasing Elise.
Lilith.
XV
Inside the Tree, at the beginning of everything, the garden was still.
“It’s you,” Elise said.
Nügua smiled. “Thank you.” Her lips didn’t move when she spoke. Instead, the words whispered through Elise’s mind in a familiar voice—a voice that she had been hearing ever since she entered the garden.
“For what?”
“You have done honor to Eve’s memory, liberated my most cherished children from the curse of immortality, and saved Adam from Himself,” Nügua said. “Thanks mean nothing in comparison to all you’ve done, but I’ve nothing left to give. I have already bequeathed the best of myself upon you.”
Elise stood, pulling the swords free of Adam’s chest. In front of this god-demon that had created her, she felt oddly self-conscious about her hair, her skin, her eyes. “You were inside the statue.”
“And, fortunately for us all, you freed me,” Nügua said. “I had hidden from the world long enough. Now I must ask you for one more favor.”
She slithered to Elise’s side, tail whispering through the grass. The stars were frozen in the sky. Nügua’s scales sparkled with the light of galaxies.
Nügua slipped around Elise’s back, rubbing her silken, scaly flesh against hers. “End it,” she whispered, lips tickling Elise’s ears. “All of it. Kill me so that I might be with Eve and Adam, and let this era pass. It’s time for a new dawn—a new world that can heal all of our mistakes.”
Grief flooded Elise. Her hands trembled on the swords.
“But…I can’t…”
Nügua wrapped around Elise’s lower body. The muscles of her tail constricted around Elise’s calves, hugging her tightly. She pressed her upper body to Elise’s.
“It’s much to ask,” Nügua said, tongue flicking from between her lips to tickle Elise’s throat. “I know. You have already been through so much pain. Much more than any mortal should be expected to bear.”
“What will happen once all three of you are gone?” Elise asked.
Nügua’s smile spread.
“Catharsis,” she said in her silent way.
She kissed Elise, lips to lips. Her breath tasted like heavy rain, distant sands, the churning metals deep within the fires of Hell. Nügua’s kiss was eternity.
Elise gazed over her shoulder to Adam’s body. Eve had been jealous that He had seemed to prefer Lilith—Nügua—but Eve had never hated her for it. She would want both Adam and Nügua to be happy, whatever that meant.
And Nügua had been alive for so long—even longer than Yatam had been when he had begun to go insane.
Catharsis. It would be a relief for her to die.
Elise took a deep, shuddering breath, then nodded.
Nügua’s eyes softened with relief. “Thank you.”
Then Elise swung the swords, removing Nügua’s head in a single, swift stroke.
Eternity shattered.
James staggered between the roots of the Tree as the garden dissolved around him. The bushes that had been tainted with ichor were turning to ash. Mnemosyne’s roar rocked through his skull, bouncing off of his eardrums, making his teeth ache.
Elise was embedded in the garden. Her blood flowed through the Tree, which meant that the most dire blood of a Godslayer turned demon was flooding the entire garden.
He had no idea what was going to happen, but he was certain it couldn’t be good.
Even as he stumbled through the cavern underneath the Tree, he couldn’t shake the image of the last look that Elise had given him before stepping through that door. Her glare had been so cold. There was so much hate in the way she looked at him.
It must have been Eve.
The ferns along the shore of the lake shook and swayed as if blasted by a wind that James couldn’t feel. He pushed through them to stand on the brink of the amber lake. Its dark depths bubbled below, churning in a vortex.
Plunging inside would lead James directly to the heart of the Tree.
It would be a kind of death, but what other option did he have? Elise had stepped through the door, quite possibly insane from her time in the garden, and he had no other way of saving her.
“You don’t have to do that.”
Nathaniel stood behind him, untouched by the chaos that wracked the garden. Naked except for the sap marking his body, he was a leggy, gawky child whose pale eyes spiked straight through James’s mind.
His eyes should have been brown.
“Dear Lord,” James said. “Are you all right?”
It was a foolish question. Nathaniel wasn’t all right. The presence of this new body, soft-skinned and blue-eyed, could only mean that he had died. Metaraon had saved Nathaniel by sacrificing him, just as James had. Now Nathaniel was bound to the garden, his fate entwined permanently with that damn Tree.
“It wouldn’t make a difference if you jumped in anyway,” Nathaniel said. “She knows.” He touched two fingers to the healing wound on his left pectoral, near the shoulder. “She saw my sacrifice, and she found your old body. It’s not hard to connect the dots. So even if you jumped in to save her, all you’d end up doing is killing yourself—Elise isn’t going to forgive you for what you did to her.”
The shock of it was so powerful that James didn’t feel anything at first. His fingertips were numb. His head swam with half-formed thoughts that quickly dissolved before he could actually process them. The guilt, the self-hatred, the fear—that would all come later.
“I searched so long for her,” he whispered.
There wasn’t even a hint of sympathy in Nathaniel’s face. “You should leave. This Tree is too dangerous. I have to hide it.”
The Tree shuddered dangerously above them. Dirt showered from the roots at the top of the cavern, and James lifted an arm to shield his head.
If Elise was gone, then what was the point? Everything he had done since he became an adult had been in service to his coven, their God, and later, to hide Elise from them. Without Elise, without Hanna
h, he didn’t have a future.
But he did have his son.
“Fine. Let’s get going,” he said.
“I’m not going back to Earth,” Nathaniel said. “To hide the Tree I’ll have to move the whole dimension, just like I did with the Haven. I have to be inside to do it.”
“You can’t stay here,” James said. “Everything is going to fall apart.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Do you see that?” He pointed at the lake. “That’s Elise’s blood. She’s turning this place mortal. The orchards, the river, the Tree—and there’s no way of knowing what the repercussions will be. We need to escape.”
“I’m not going to run,” Nathaniel said.
Frustration built within James until he couldn’t hold it back anymore. “I can’t leave you here. I have to do something.”
Nathaniel gave a half-smile. “You can save yourself. That’s what you can do.” He turned away from James. There were two gaping wounds on his back, like vertical slits that bared bone underneath, and James’s shoulder blades ached in memory of similar wounds. “Everything’s changing. The world’s going to need you to get back to the beginning.”
Wings unfurled from Nathaniel’s back. They were brilliant white, glowing with their own internal light, so much brighter than anything else in the cavern. James could only watch, stunned, as his flapped once and lifted himself into the air.
He carried himself above the lake of amber and spread his arms wide.
It was with a sigh, more than an explosion, that the Tree split own the center.
The cavern above the amber lake broke in half. Rock showered over James, crushing the ferns and splashing into the pool of sap. James dived, covering his head with his arms as debris pelted him.
The sigh grew into a groan. The air thickened, throbbed, pulsed like a heart struggling to beat.
The Tree severed.
A path tunneled straight through it, splitting the branches into two separate pieces that tumbled away. The fog poured down into the hole that was left behind, and gray beams of light pierced through, highlighting Nathaniel’s hair and the tips of his wings.
