Lilith Versus The Seven Demon Gods [ONC 2024]

Prologue: No Paradise

A pit in her stomach formed as she moved nearer to him, and the first thing he did to her was to slap her in the face. Lilith held on to that injury—this was no Adam.

"Submit!" he said in a dead voice, the motionless timbre that did not belong to the only friend she knew.

As he came closer, she stepped back from him.

"Submit!" He repeated with his finger now pointed on the ground, and there she saw it—the thick veil of ignorance shading his iris.

Flaring her nostrils, Lilith stood back up on her feet, tall against this usurper. "No!"

"Submit!" Adam insisted again as he hit her even harder in the face.

Lilith wiped the blood from her nose and rose back up again. "No." She shook her head as a laugh erupted out of her mouth. "You're not Adam!" At her statement, the clouds turned grey, and the sky raged in thunder. "You're Yaldabaoth!"

At the name of her maker, Lilith's body twitched in pain, with her knees buckling down to the ground against her will. She grunted like a feral animal, convulsing in rabies, before huge red wings burst out of her back.

They were four long finger-like bones with even a thumb, each connected to the next by a thin layer of skin. Lilith breathed out in relief at the release of her wings, but they weren't hers. They flapped on their own, and they took her higher and higher into the sky.

***

With no recollection of where the wings took her, Lilith woke up laying on a cold grey floor. It tasted like the blood in her mouth, and while she sat up with her hand holding on to her face, her vision cleared into the eight shadows sitting before her.

They were men in shape like Adam but without face or flesh, shrouded in black from head to toe, lacking the brightness of Lilith. She crawled back from them, as she knew from that sight only that they were those who absorbed light without reflecting it.

"Submit!" they bellowed altogether, speaking in one loud voice.

Lilith wrapped her hand around her head as it pulsed with pain at their conundrum, her eyes focusing out again until she spotted Adam. He was lying on a huge white leaf, inert, with his eyes shut. A sudden coldness hit her at the heart when she saw the large bleeding cut on his ribcage.

"What did you do to him?"

Her question blew an icy breeze of quietness into the obscure room. They ignored her. Their voices continued to chant louder for her submission. Impulse of a pulse in a series of uniformly spaced heartbeats, setting their motion while scaffolding the rhythm of her torment.

She covered her ears and shouted against their madness, but they would not concede. Lilith's head darted around, afraid, cold, and alone, but as she didn't answer, their limbs grew long and shone with sharpness. One hit on the floor cracked it into pieces.

Lilith's chin quivered in panic, and she only stood up to walk back from them. She was able to entertain this dance as long as there was enough ground for her to still step on it, but she was getting closer to the void. Seeing no way out of their stubbornness and madness, she gave them one last look of despair before jumping down from their abode and back into Eden.

The air was free—a warm embrace on her body helped her descend, yet she fell straight on her right shoulder. And even on her belly and eating dust, they were still behind her, forcing her to crawl for her own life.

Lilith moved as far as she could from them until a gentle voice came to her mind.

"Use your thought; use your epinoia."

Darting her widened eyes around, she could see no one apart from a tree with red apples on its leaves, and yet she nodded at that invisible ally. Lilith closed her eyes and gripped the grass, thinking about her enemies' weapons. It was just a long, black, one-sided, curved stick with no use to her, but they broke the ground with it, stirring fear into her.

Power.

The same one appeared on her hand, like her body healed from all its aches. Lilith got back up again with no more terror but an ugly twist on her lips. Her epinoia made the object in her possession swing against the wind in a precise replica of their movements.

The first one jumped on her with his weapon raised above his head, and Lilith thought about his unforeseen end—one large cut on his chest, the same as they did on Adam. Her opponent collapsed on the ground in this instant, bleeding out like her wounded friend.

"Aim for the head," the voice said. Lilith sliced the neck of the shadow kneeling next to her, for it became a speck of dirt swept away into the emptiness.

At his death, her smile grew wider in confidence, and she ran into them fearlessly. Lilith chopped limbs and crushed skulls. She barely hurt them with the same technique while they still outnumbered her, and they knew it.

The seven left of them circled her, roaming around as if they were ready to attack her at once. Beads of sweat grew on her forehead as she looked back at the tree.

"Give them your body; if that is what they want, then join me and become like I."

It was an unexpected answer, a mad solution, but Lilith threw her sword at them and ran to the tree with her arms all stretched out. Then she saw the three bleeding slashes on its bark—three, like the number of times it spoke to her.

The seven entities then seized Lilith's feet and dragged her to them, while another tree grew on the opposite bank of the first one. It was a living insult, a shape that deprived itself of any semblance to that of a human, and it rose tall on this dead embodiment, drying up every sap of energy. With the powers they deemed a shame, Lilith now inhabited this new tree, her soul remaining to witness as their lust consumed her former body.

She cried invisible tears and screamed in silenced sorrow as her branches entangled with her nearby evergreen friend. And they called her "the tree of life."

Lilith became the tree that Adam once called her to be.