The taste of a tongue, the feeling of hands. The expectation of blood. Lilith embraced her wife for the last time, her eyes closed, her senses running faster than the colors around them. She felt so alive in a world that was so, so very dead. Soon she would be too.
Eve’s hands twisted through Lilith’s hair, desperate, grasping, trying to memorize each strand before it was too late. She used to have such gorgeous black hair, but now it was a sad, empty white. She moved her hands down, feeling her wife’s neck, her wife’s back. Both were sticky with sweat and sex. Lilith copied the movements. The spell wouldn’t work unless they were both ready, both willing. Humans had it wrong: It took two sacrifices to save the world.
They stood naked in their bedroom, Titan and Vampire, the walls once spring green now dripping into grey and fading into a floor that had turned to stone. Their bed swirled with unpleasant shades of red and brown, a large scab ready to be picked clean and thrown away. They cast no shadows.
Eve’s kiss became a bite, a quick touch of fang to tongue. Lilith accepted the pain and the taste of blood—the first drop must always be spilled for love. Magic flashed around their heads, a gold without shine, and outside, the yellow sun faded to beige. Tomorrow it would go out for good.
Lilith made herself relax as her wife’s hands moved to her shoulders, finding that blank spot that floated between her shoulder blades and spine. She shuddered, and her body broke into cold sweat. Everything was so cold now, so slow and without hope.
“Look at me,” Eve said. Her eyes were flush with green. All color had faded from her face and hair, except her eyes. Life still remained.
“Do it.”
Eve’s fingernails became claws, jagged points of grey and white. She reached into Lilith’s back, spilling blood that had the courtesy to run red. Death still remained too.
Lilith grimaced, and when she threatened to cry for the pain, Eve kissed her again. They kissed, and they suffered, and Eve dug. When she found her wife’s stolen spark of magic, she pulled. Blood erupted from Lilith’s back. Wings followed suit.
The feathers glistened wet, but underneath the crimson and pain, they were black.
*
Outside, the universe distorted with a hazy lilt that spoke of not just decay but confusion. It wasn’t time to for it to end. But God had done the unthinkable, had dug down to the very first building block of existence and yanked. Now the Four Spires of All and Nothing were falling. The Earth was a wasteland of salted dirt and cracked concrete, and space itself ebbed and flowed like an ocean. There were no stars anymore, just drops of pretty water.
Lilith watched them glitter like diamonds, knowing they would soon turn to ash.
“We were supposed to have more time,” she said. “A trillion more years together and more.”
The Titan and the Vampire stood side-by-side in the empty space between their front door and oblivion, fog on their breath and the past in their hearts. They had kept this garden together, a catalogue of every strange plant known to mankind—and many that had yet to be discovered. Acres of fruit trees with a rainbow harvest, bugs of every type and temperament, enough birds to sing even the Sirens deaf, a zoo of animals and fungi. All gone. In a six-day blink, their Eden had turned into a lifeless desert, windswept with dust and the occasional falling star.
Now heading for a drain. And at the bottom of the drain was a dragon.
Eve reached for her wife’s hand. Sometime between their bedroom and their front door, it had turned grey, but it was still warm, so she squeezed and put on a brave smile. “Time stood still for us. Would that everyone were so lucky.”
“Everyone is dead, love.”
“I know.” Eve leaned into her wife, savoring the warmth of her, feeling the tickle of a stray feather. Lilith’s wings were the last bit of black in the entire universe, the last of foundation. Without dark, there could be no light. Without light, there could be no life.
The fate of the universe would come down to a single feather.
“I know,” Eve repeated. “If I close my eyes, I can see the bodies. They stack like grains of sand in a desert.”
“I’m sorry.” Lilith sighed with her whole body, rolling her shoulders and her wings. She hadn’t flown in eons and was both excited and terrified of it.
“I will catalogue them all, if you succeed.” Eve let Lilith’s hand fall away. “I hope to use black ink.”
Now it was Lilith’s turn to smile. The universe was ending, and all she could think of was how embarrassing it would be if she tried to fly and fell. She would go kill God, and the only person that mattered in her life would think her a klutz.
“You could come with me,” Lilith tried. “Watch it all, and catalogue it. One more body for your book.”
“Two,” Eve said. Her voice broke. Lilith looked at her and saw that Eve had been crying this entire time. “There will be two. There has to be two, or it will not work.”
“Nope,” Lilith said. She bent to kiss her wife on the cheek. The salt burned the hole in her tongue. “That’s where you’re wrong, love. I won’t die. I’ll just transform. That’s all.”
“But—”
“Check your shadow tomorrow, when it’s back.” Lilith laughed. “You’ll see. I’ll find us our trillions of years. I promised, remember?”
Eve wiped at her eyes. Ash streaked down her face, around her mouth and down to her chin where it dripped, dripped, disappeared. “I will rebuild the garden.”
“You should leave it,” Lilith said. “Start fresh, somewhere with a better view.”
Eve shook her head. “I can’t.”
“He’ll be dead when I’m done with him. You’ll be able to leave.”
“I cannot break the rules, Lil’. I am not blessed.”
Lilith flexed her wings. Already the tips were beginning to grey, to turn to ash like everything else. She yearned to stay and talk, to hold her wife until the universe ended and let time itself burn to the ground, but she couldn’t. If Eve couldn’t break any rules, then Lilith couldn’t obey them. Titan and Vampire, Vampire and Titan. Lilith watched their garden sprawl as patches of dull rock and calcified bark. A bone here, a tooth there. Colors swirling into beige-brown because they didn’t know what else to do. All the green in the world remained in Eve’s eyes, and all the black in Lilith’s wings.
But God’s blood would run crimson.
“Go,” Eve said. “Before you cannot.”
“See you soon.”
“I lo—”
Lilith jumped, stretched her wings, and let the scattered winds take hold. She soared into the dead-galaxy sky. One flap, two, three, and then she was above the destruction, surveying it like a crow looking for something shiny. Their garden had gone flat over the last six days, everything crumbling into its base form. Dust stung her eyes. What few trees were left jutted from the ground like stalagmites. She had seen her fair share of death over the last ten thousand years and always thought it must be peaceful or dark, not flat and bland.
But maybe that wasn’t so surprising. This was God’s universe, after all.
As Lilith flew, chunks of the universe loosened from their foundation, floating as globes of dark blue and faded stars until they popped like bubbles. They left stains of nothing behind. Lilith passed through one and watched the black of her wings return it to normal. The feeling was warm, the smell cinnamon. It was wrong in its own way, because Eve was the one who gave life. Lilith just took it away. She liked the sensation though. It was a shame she had spent so much of her life destroying and fighting. It was a shame God had gotten it all so wrong.
Lilith checked her wings. Already bright spots of ash speckled her feathers. Time was short, maybe a day if she was lucky. A few hours if she was not.
The further Lilith flew from Eden, the more pockets of unreality she found. First the voids were bubbles, then they became ponds, until finally they were great lakes of pure emptiness. She worked her wings, the muscle memory thankfully never leaving her, and flew up, up, up until she was above one unmade lake and viewing the Earth not like a hawk but a cloud. Lilith floated on a pocket of warm air. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt truly tired.
“Just one of those last days, I guess,” she said to the wind. The breeze grabbed the words and took them, to whatever might still be left alive to listen. Lilith wasn’t hopeful.
With the sky an absolute mess, and with the sun trapped in an awkward state of setting and dying at the same time, Lilith had to use intuition to find due south. She had a day to make it to all Four Spires of All and Nothing. Thankfully each Spire had a portal. Finding one meant finding them all, and the southern was closest. Or Lilith was pretty sure it was. It had been a good five thousand years since she had paid Sebastian a visit.
She’d be happy to see him though! If he was still alive.
He would try to kill her, but one step at a time.
Lilith flew. It was easier to look on the dead planet when everything was so small it might as well not be real. More pockets of unreality opened up around her, and she plowed through the smaller ones, converting them back into real space for fractions of a second. The life she gave was quick to die. She looked at her wings, now a few feathers smaller than when she started, and hoped for Eve’s sake she could do better.
She had promised trillions of years, not trillions of fractions.
*
“Damn,” Lilith said. She rolled her shoulders which did not ache, but winced at the new muscles right below them. Flying hurt.
The state of the tower hurt more.
Once a proud pillar of creation, the southern tower of All and Nothing lay in ruin, an explosion of stone and glass that spread almost two miles in every direction. It looked like a black hole had gone off and then burned itself out before all the evidence could be sucked away. Each rock, each brick, was as smooth as glass but dull as beige-brown—eroded to the point of decay. Nothing cast a shadow. Lilith marched towards the center of the wreckage while dust roved around her feet, the closest thing to life she had seen since she left Eden.
“Sebastian!” she called. “Hey, Sebastian! I’m back!”
She didn’t expect an answer but was still disappointed when the Living Creature didn’t roar in threat.
“I still have your wings!”
The wind kicked more dust around her legs. A pocket of unreality formed, floated, popped. She titled a black feather into it and watched it repair. This time she smelled nutmeg.
When she tilted away, the unreality returned. It smelled like nothing.
“Fine,” Lilith said, the taunt more at herself than the dead guardian. “Guess I’ll just….” She sighed. She was too tired to think of something clever.
It took a few more steps to find the center of the destruction, marked not with an X but a broken statue of a thinking monster. Sebastian had died like he lived, with a frown on his face and some kind of puzzle in his paws. His four remaining wings twisted around him like a blanket.
“Damn,” Lilith said. She surveyed what had once been the top floor of the tower. “Damn, damn, damn.”
The portal in the Southern Spire was destroyed. Her hope of reaching all four before the universe ended was gone. Even at her fastest, she couldn’t cover so many miles. Lilith checked her wings, which had once belonged to the dead thing in front of her, and hissed. In the span of landing and searching, they had shrunk by almost half. Instead of twenty four hours, she had maybe six. But leave it to God to not follow his own schedule. Too lazy to build for seven straight days, he did six and left the remainder to chance.
Lilith spat at the broken portal. Her saliva turned to ash before it hit the ground. “Dying sucks,” she said.
She wandered back to Sebastian, feeling some mix of sympathy and nostalgia for the Living Creature. They had met on a Sunday, but instead of resting, Lilith had wanted to gamble. Magic for magic; information for information. Lilith had lost. She had then stolen his wings because she was a sore loser.
“You were still faster than me, even without them,” she said to the broken statue. “But you had rules to follow, and I did not.” Lilith ran her hand down Sebastian’s lion-like face. “I’m sorry.”
She reached for the creature’s paws. Up close, the puzzle had tints of gold and aquamarine. Lilith hadn’t seen anything pretty since she left Eden, and she hadn’t stolen anything since she met Eve’s heart. With a shrug, she grabbed the object and pulled. Sebastian’s paws shattered. Lilith rubbed at the object until it was clean, or as clean as it could be on the last day of the universe.
“Oh!” Lilith smiled. “I guess you knew I was coming.”
It wasn’t a puzzle but a piece of a key. Or scepter. Or whatever the thing was that Lilith needed to kill God. She supposed it was truly a lance, because in his base form, God was a dragon and the best thing for killing dragons was a lance. Each of the four Living Creatures held a part. Sebastian carried the pommel. It was about as long as her forearm, made of twisted gold with a large, round sea-shell lump at the top. A swirl in the lump flashed blue, perhaps the only true blue left in the universe, and spines protected the swirl in awkward fits and starts. In a way, it was like a mace—though with less craft.
Lilith saw her reflection in the gold. Saw how pale and hallow she looked. The red in her eyes was gone, replaced with a grey that would soon become white. Her hair was white. Her dress was beige, even though yesterday it had been green. Eve liked green. She twitched her wings and watched a handful of feathers fall off. They turned to ash before they hit the ground.
“I look like shit,” Lilith said. She gave the mace a swing. “But so does God.” She chuckled. “It’ll be a fair fight.”
With a jump and a hefty push of her wings, Lilith resumed her quest, heading north and a little east, towards the drain. And the dragon. She struggled for every bit of height she could find, and with her wings more grey than black, she made sure to avoid all the pockets of unreality. She didn’t think she had it in her to create anymore.
The mace slowed her down. It was heavy and awkward because killing was heavy and awkward.
Lilith flew for about an hour, skimming above the ground like a hawk on the hunt. Her wings shed feathers, and the new muscles next to her shoulder blades screamed in pain. Sometimes the wind pushed her on, but mostly it blew in the opposite direction. Even the wind was smart enough to know to run away.
When something crimson caught Lilith’s eye, she took the excuse for a break. She landed in an awkward stumble, shedding feathers and tearing her dress. Her lungs burned. Her legs threatened to buckle. She approached the spot of red at a lilt, just happy to keep herself from falling over, the mace dangling from her right hand. She expected to find blood or worse. The spot was the size of her fist, maybe a little bigger, and the color of rubies at night. Confused, she bent over. She picked up a wine glass.
“Hello,” she said to the glass. She held it by the stem and rolled it in a shallow circle with her fingers. The wine sloshed but didn’t fall out. It smelled like strawberries. “You look familiar.”
It couldn’t look familiar though, because she had never seen a wine glass so thin or boring—like the fundamental idea of a wine glass. Thought without substance. She gave it a poke and chipped her fingernail. Inside the glass was a piece of red string, maybe four inches long.
“I know you,” Lilith said.
“Hello, Lilith,” the piece of string said. Its voice had a feminine, gravel sound to it. “It’s been awhile.”
“Lucifer?” Lilith held the glass close. The string didn’t look like Lucifer, but it did have a certain devilish quality to it. It could sew fire together. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in there?” Lilith gave the glass another swirl. “And why are you string?”
Lucifer chuckled, and Lilith heard the sound of someone sipping.
“Dear, I am dying, just like everyone else. I’m just doing it in style.”
Lilith smirked. “That so?”
“It is so.”
“Can I have a sip?”
The string swirled into a knot. “No.”
“Okay.” Lilith put the glass to her lips and took a drink. The taste was blood and fruit, with just a little heat. She liked it, but if she had to pick a taste to drown in, it wouldn’t be this one. “I like dry wines.”
Lucifer uncoiled. “I told you—”
“What are you going to do?” Lilith laughed. “Kill me?” She gestured to the landscape around them, flat and dead. “Get in line, hun.”
Lucifer sipped, and when the pause in the conversation grew too long, Lilith took another herself. The wine burned at the hole in her tongue, the one Eve gave her that morning.
“Why are you a piece of string?”
“To slow my death.” Lucifer swirled about until the tip of his string was poking out of the glass. It reminded Lilith of talking to a mermaid half submerged. “I was a mile in length two days ago. Now I am a few inches, but I’ll be the last thing alive before the universe ends.”
Lilith hefted her mace. “Not if I can help it. Where’s God?”
“Gone.”
Lilith blinked. “Beg pardon?”
God left a lifetime ago, Lilith, right after he made you and Eve. He took with him a few angels, and he took Adam, and he left.” Lucifer dunked back into his glass. He drank. “I don’t know where they went. I’m not sure they do, either.”
A pocket of unreality bloomed in front of Lilith, big enough to drive a chariot into. She thought of tossing Lucifer in but instead stepped away. She did, however, take another sip of wine.
“So what happened?”
Lucifer sighed in the way he always did when he had to give bad news that he did not cause. “It was a human,” he said. “A doctor, or a philosopher. Maybe both.”
“A human?”
“Yes.”
“But how could a human steal a color?”
Lucifer bent in half, the string equivalent to a shrug. “How do humans do anything? I tried to stop him, but I can only tempt in the two directions. He didn’t seem to care.”
Lilith brought the wine glass close. She exhaled deep, though instead of heat and fog, the glass chilled. Lucifer wiggled in his string form.
“What can I do to a human?” she asked, almost begged. “I don’t have any human weapons. I don’t—”
Now it was Lucifer’s turn to laugh. “Dear,” he said. “The great thing about humans is anything can be a weapon if you hit them hard enough.”
*
Lilith flew until she couldn’t. Then she ran. The drain was ahead, marked by a new tower, a misshapen, bent smokestack that blocked out the sky. Not that the sky was much to look at anymore. The sun was now a beige spot with no light or heat, and unreality drowned the rest. No more stars, no more colors, just nothing. The universe was turning into a flat, blank page that could not be written on.
The smokestack was white as bone but had started its life as a dark shade of brushed steel. Lilith approached the door, also made of steel, and jiggled the handle. It was locked, but she had never met a door she couldn’t open. She used her shoulder.
Inside, she saw shadows.
“Hello,” she called. She gripped her God-killing mace and stepped inside.
The gold of her weapon drank at the fear and strangeness of the place, turning it from bizarre to boring. It was a science lab of some kind. Instruments too big for practicality covered walls and open floor space, and jars of stuff threatened to fall off shelves. There were notepads, computers, pens, and a half-eaten apple that was as beige as the sun outside. Lilith saw blood too, some human, some less than. There was a mop in one corner, but it looked like it had never been touched. The whole place stank of electricity and strange chemicals.
“Hello!” Lilith’s voice boomed. She flexed what was left of her wings, just a few feathers but each one as black as midnight. “Human, you home?”
“Yes, yes,” a voice called from somewhere deeper in the lab. It sounded husky yet energetic. “If you’re here to tempt me again, you might as well just go away.”
“I’m here to kill you.”
“Oh.” Something crashed to the floor and exploded in a shower of metal-on-metal. “Well, then you best come in and do it quickly. We only have about an hour left.” Another something fell, this one a dull thunk. “Or a few minutes.”
Lilith followed the sounds, through the lab and its library of scribbles and toys. The next room was smaller than the first, reeking of blood and brimstone. There was a portal on one wall, sucking and snuffling because it was a drain, and a man in front of it. He turned to give Lilith a nod. She judged him to be in his 30s but with the stooped back of a 60 year old and the wrinkles of someone even older. Black smudges rimmed his eyes. He wore a white lab coat and held some kind of wand or metal stick. Lilith couldn’t tell if it was a weapon.
“You’re prettier than the last angel,” he said.
“I’m not an angel.”
“Oh.” He used his stick to point at a dissection table, where a circular creature lay pinned down and ripped open. Half its hundred eyes were missing. “That’s good. Not much to them on the inside, you know?”
“I do.”
“So what are you?”
Lilith eyed up the human. He didn’t seem all that dangerous, but then, they never did. “A vampire.”
The human’s eyes went wide. “Indeed? Well, splendid. The end of the universe brings out all types.”
Lilith approached. “Who are you?”
The man frowned. “Forgive me,” and he looked truly distraught. “My name is Doctor D. I forget what the D stands for though. Used to know, but some things aren’t what they used to be.”
“Nope.”
“Are you here to stop me, Miss? To kill an old man and end his life’s work?”
Lilith scowled. “You aren’t as old as you pretend to be.”
Doctor D waved his stick. Now that Lilith was closer, she saw that it wasn’t a wand but a simple piece of metal. Good for pointing and poking. “I feel old. Felt old all my life. Docs call it a rare disease. One of those ‘born with’ types. I’ll live another year, maybe two if I’m lucky.”
“You won’t live through the hour,” Lilith said. “The universe is almost gone.”
Now Doctor D smiled. “This one is almost gone, but not the next. Or the next.”
The doctor turned his back on Lilith to reach behind some cabinet or cart. He yanked out a little cage, a fitting home for a rat. Inside was a blob of amorphous sable, jiggling and cold. Doctor D passed his hand over it, and the blob turned into a series of pointed spikes. It was blacker than the deepest reaches of space.
“You know what this is?” he asked.
“Black.”
“Yes, but it’s also my way out of here. It’ll become a tunnel.” He poked at his empty portal with his stick. “With this, I’ll travel to the next universe. And then the one after that.”
Lilith stepped closer. She gripped her mace so tight her knuckles where white, though they had been that color all morning. “And then what?” she hissed. “You’ll destroy another universe, and then what?”
Doctor D blinked. His smile turned into a puzzled frown. “Why, I’ll find God of course. He walks in a straight line.”
“What?”
The doctor tripped over to a white board covered in more punctuation marks than numbers or letters. He had no color, but he had a smell and a spark. Ambition, knowledge, fear. He wasn’t the Seven Deadly Sins, but he was related to them. Their cousin, perhaps. Because he was a human, and that meant he was free of rules and bound to make every foolish mistake possible before he died.
“We are in his footprint,” Doctor D said. “God walks, and each step is a universe. A bit of water in a bit of mud, but no drop is ever just a bit of water.” Doctor D turned back to Lilith. His expression was a sad shrug. “Do you ever feel small?”
Lilith twitched the last few feathers of her wings. She eyed the human. Her brain told her to lie, but her tongue burned with truth: “I used to feel small. Then I met someone who made me feel normal.”
“Ah.” Doctor D nodded. “Yes. Yes. Love. Very nice. I used to have a dog….” He shook his head. “Can’t follow a dog though. I can follow God.”
Lilith cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Honestly.”
“The biggest things move the slowest,” Doctor D said. He tapped at a specific part of his equations. “Like how it’s so hard to catch a dragonfly. We lumber. So does God. He’s only four or five universes away. It takes him a few billion years to make one step.”
“Lucifer said he was gone,” Lilith said. She eyed the doctor’s math, and then she eyed the doctor. “Guess I never thought to look.”
“Too many rules,” Doctor D agreed. “But I’ll find him. And you can come with, if you’d like.”
Lilith shook her head. “Why do you want to find him?”
“Because,” Doctor D’s face contorted into a mix of fury and sorrow. The wrinkles in him deepened into thick crevices of black. “Because I’m supposed to have a choice, but I do not. I want to know why. I want to know why he can break the rules and I cannot.”
“You have—”
“I do not!” Doctor D roared. “I was born so sick I should be dead. A once-in-ten-thousand years disease! That’s not a choice! That’s not how the rules go!” His shoulders slumped, and for an instant, he looked three times his age, a skeleton with thin skin and a ghost that didn’t know how to leave. “I should never have outlived my dog.”
Lilith stepped closer. She felt her wings shriveling, felt the cold weight of the mace in her hand. A trillion years promised, thrown away because bad things happened for no good reason. And because humans did what humans always do.
“You still had a choice,” she said. “No one else could do this but you.”
Doctor D smiled. Lucifer would have blushed at the pride. “No. No choice. I was supposed to have a choice, because that’s in the rules. Humans have choice. It’s what separates us from the Celestial.” He shrugged. “It’s why you cannot kill me, even with that club of yours. Rules. Order. Non—”
“I can kill you,” Lilith interrupted. “I am not Celestial.”
Doctor D’s eyes went wide. His mouth fell open. “Oh.”
“I’m a vampire. I haven’t been Celestial since the sixth day.”
“Then….”
Lilith approached, lifted her mace, and swung. Doctor D collapsed in a pool of his own blood. Like the rest of him, it ran beige.
*
Eve gasped, and the breath was warm. It had color. She opened her eyes to a brilliance of it, a swarming, teeming, disorder of all things life. Her eyes shined with green.
She burst into tears, because that meant her wife was dead.
Beneath her, her shadow waved.
Nonsense 