Chapter Text
Chapter 2: Kayne
Lilith learns of her father's—Kayne's—true plans. It's worse than she ever expected.
How stupid of her. She should've never expected anything different.
~o0o~
Nyarlathotep summons her and comes obediently like a whipped dog, a beaten wife, teeth gritted and kept humiliatingly blunt the whole way there. But it is not Nyarlathotep—not her father—who greets her.
It is a man—the shape of a man, a chaotic sprawling infinity so tightly bound it fits inside the the finite edges of a man so neatly that it made her father seem like a toddler who couldn't colour inside the lines—with a face like her father had taken to wearing, only more complete somehow, more… coherent. He comes into view as her surroundings shift into laquered wood and crushed velvet, the air hazy with smoke and soft yellow lights. Immediately she is on edge at the effortlessness of her displacement. She had never been her father's equal, but she took pride in never being easy for him to force into anything.
The being who is not her father, and Lilith cannot say how she knows this only that she does, meets her eyes and they fill with some kind of unspeakable raw emotion whose intensity she knew from the moment of her creation would never be directed at her. Then he clears his throat and straightens the collar of his holy-white suite and opens his mouth to give her a taste of what cosmic horror must be like for a mortal.
He tells her what is forbidden, what takes Azathoth's power to know, and he tells her a story about how she—how another version of her—was so loved she was willing to die.
And she must've been loved, truly and openly loved in a way she could not bear imagining, in a way so foreign to her that its alieness can explain the inexplicability of this version of herself's action; loved and known she was loved in all the ways that in a brief burst of maddening clarity she envied, because there was no other way any version of her would've stupidly died for her father.
It is horrifying. It is incomprehensible. And also all that stuff about Azathoth and the multiverse is upsetting too.
And then—this man-shaped being who is not her father, who is revealed as wholey different to the offshoot that spawned her by the honest grief in his eyes—he tells her that her own self-interest is no longer the only stake in her plan.
Lilith's scheme just became about far more than her freedom and she's only a little bitter about it.
~o0o~
Nyarlathotep– a Nyarlathotep summons her. Nots hers. Not anymore. He says his name is Kayne now, his face now finally settled into one just like the man-shape who tries so hard to not be Nyarlathotep or Kayne, and he drips red red red with the blood of himself murdered an exponential times over (and her blood, at least once, as well). His black suit ripples with a black hole's density made to (poorly) resemble mortal fabrics, and his laugh is unrestrained and mad and for all he tries to be different, just like she remembers it.
"Heya kiddo!" he says, he screams, and without warning he lunges with an unhinged cackle.
Lilith fights. Lilith barely has time to raise up her arms in defence. Lilith rips free of her humanoid guise moments before he's upon her and still, still, with him indulging in his pathetic two-arms two-legs finite form and hers unleashed, unfolding and stretching out into the cosmos, unfurling wing after wing after wing in layering kaleidoscopic infinity, she cannot beat him. He tears her feathers and peels her scales and he beats her into crust of Mars, creating new indents on the planet's surface with her body.
He keeps going after she yields. He keeps going until she goes limp and still, until she stops trying to even soften the blow, and even then he rips in one last chunk of feathers to reinforce the point. He does it with his two human hands, somehow, impossibly even for a god, and his limiting human costume and he isn't made vulnerable and weak despite taking on the shape of it. And Lilith can do nothing but take it.
For a moment, for far more than a moment, as he doesn't stop, Lilith is terrified he is going to kill her.
Lilith survives. She lives. But– she knows, she knows it is because Kayne let her. It is a mercy. It is now a mercy.
"This is just a little warning," Kayne says casually as Lilith twists in the crater. Her ichor drips, clumping black in her nostrils as she chokes weakly on her body's damage. It is not pain, she doesn't feel pain unless she's in that pathetic mortal guise, but her shattered form distresses her in its helplessness. That is, of course, the point. "Going forwards I'll be having none of your tricks and none of your… your schemes. You're my kid so I'm going easy, but I can't have you messing around. It's time to be a big girl now and let the adults do what they need to do."
There is a threat in his voice, and not an idle one.
So that's what he wants. For her to let him end all of reality, including herself. To lie down and let him kill her and everything she– Or, if not that, let his mind and his dreams and his desires be the shape of the world she exists like Azathoth's do now; let him control her more than he already does.
(At least until Lilith found a way to follow in his footsteps and kill him in turn)
Lilith wants to spit at him. All she manages is a low moan.
He is not her father. Not anymore. This man was not her father. Yes, her father had beaten her into submission before—such was the way of gods—but not so unprovoked, and not for so long after she had stopped fighting back.
Not to the point she realized letting her live was a choice he was making, rather than something she could expect. The lines she knew not to cross, the lines that kept her safe in her avoidance of them, were suddenly closing in, already underfoot.
Lilith is running out of time. She didn't realize she had so little of it left.
Lilith drags herself back with broken wings across the mortal plane, back to Earth, back to England trailing feathers and shedding nightmares, and she plots and schemes and wants to see her fa—Kayne—dead.
He is not her father anymore. She is the daughter of Nyarlathotep and Nyarlathotep is gone. She must remember that.
She will be free.
~o0o~
Muriel and Joseph appeal to her and it is about their son.
Which is unusual. They asked for dreams and knowledge respectively to the point of predictability, and it has been a while—months. Years, maybe? Time is hard for Lilith, currently noted as Arthur getting bigger and Kayne's movements—since they brought up their son to her directly. In whatever time had passed, the silver on Joseph's robes now curled up to his knee while the silver border on Muriel's robes had grown at least three tiers thicker, but still less than her husband.
For a brief moment Lilith wonders why now. Why, when ever since Lilith so casually dismissed Arthur's importance it seemed they and the rest of the cult had written Arthur off as at most of passing whim of hers, or more likely something that failed to keep her interest? The child wasn't even standing with his parents, instead sitting quiet and stone-faced in the audience, eyes burning holes into the bench in front of him. The cult's disappointment in the boy's failure to appeal to her was ill-concealed at best, including from his parents who also mixed that disappointment with a sense of shame, so for what purpose did they speak of their son to her now?
Arthur's robes were getting a little too small for him and still only had two lines of silver along the edge of the hood like he was barely above those the cult assumed were the least favoured. Lilith felt no annoyance about that at all.
"Please," Muriel requests, not quite begging but certainly with a hint of desperation. "Please, honoured Lady Lilith. For our son, we ask for both mercy and guidance."
And Joseph… Joseph bows his head as well. "We request your aid," he says softly, stiffly, the words forced out of him like he barely wants to say it but still without any hesitation. It takes her off guard. They have nothing to offer her at the moment, except for what they have already given her. This is no deal, but a request.
A plea.
The cult watches. Except for Arthur, who simply glares down.
"We are worried that he is being influenced," Muriel continues, carefully, cautiously watching Lilith's face as she speaks. "He is but a vulnerable child and we suspect… Joseph and I suspect, that despite the great faith he is growing into, he is too young to ignore the whispers of false idols."
And Joseph nods gravely, his face lined with what Lilith may dare to call concern.
Lilith is then presented drawings of owls and what must be a child's view of her true form, filling pages of scrap paper Arthur must have been given to draw on. A texture that might be meant to represent feathers, large silvery eyes, and a body that is inaccurately shape except in its largeness. And also several monstrous caricatures of what must be the pale black-eyed beauty she took on for the cult, rendered as a tall, twisted presence with a cruel grin. A few of them she had even watched him scribble and then hastily shove under his mattress.
Lilith is almost surprised Joseph and Muriel cared enough to bring it to her, let alone ask for help with nothing to offer her in turn. She doesn't know if it is a pleasant surprise or not.
Regardless, Lilith wants to laugh in their faces. Lilith wants to scream. She wants to kill them both, feel them break and scream beneath her hand and she thinks ah, this is what human insanity feels like. The irony of it is maddening, these parents so concerned about a few scribbles when there was so much worse the be scared of. Knowing so much that they do not know, that they can never understand, and left alone with it– well, it is infuriating, which is just another word for madness.
They don't know what is coming for them and their sad, pathetic attempt at a family. They don't know the incomprehensible suffering that awaits their child. The fact that Muriel and Joseph were so worried about mere drawings only reinforces that. And they come to Lilith, the one who marked them for it, for help.
Muriel and Joseph worship the god who will bring that evil down upon them. Arthur has no choice in the matter, and correctly fears Lilith, but has no escape and even his darkest fears do not capture the true horror that is to come.
Arthur kicks the back of the bench in front of them. The entire cult goes still. Every breath his held. Muriel freezes, pleasant smile carved into her face like marble. Joseph's head snaps back to stare at his son, both terror and the promise of furious retribution in his eyes.
Lilith lip curves, all she can allow with the eyes of her cult upon her. Always watching, so hungry for ever scrap she did not hide. She smiles (mysteriously) and reassures them (demurely); "My form comes in many kinds," she promises. "As he grows he will come to appreciate my beauty and wisdom rather than fear my power. And owls are far from concerning omens to me and mine."
The collective breath that only Arthur did not hold is released. Arthur, instead, perhaps realizing what giving into impulse would lead to once he was home, was hunched over in his seat, eyes wet and chin trembling.
There is relief on Muriel's face. There is a tension that leeches out of Joseph. Muriel and Joseph accept Lilith's reassurances. Of course they do. They haven't even noticed the windows of Arthur's room are so warped they barely fit the window frames, or if they do they ascribe it to their status, even though the glass in their bedroom is barely rippled.
~o0o~
"Aww, isn't this just precious," a voice comes from behind her—behind the shadow she was inhabiting, behind the very curve of reality that even Great Old Ones could see—and Lilith goes very still.
The room is quiet except for Arthur's soft breathing and the muffled but familiar sound of drunken men loudly talking down the hall. The room is suffocating and Lilith can barely breath. A sudden draft tickles her feathers. Kayne steps into existence and the very life of the room seems to die.
He looks right through her concealing shadow and whistles. "Wow sweetheart, you sure are aiming to terrorize and disgust this one!"
Lilith recoils like his words hurts have the power to hurt her and she folds up herself into something more pleasing, skin milky white and soft. Her feathers vanish, her scales melt away, her body shortens and straightens into an ill-designed spine, teeth and nails turned blunt and useless and face so disgustingly, involuntarily expressive. She steps out into the faint warped moonlight that struggles through the window, draped in a glittering gown made of night and absence that shimmers when the mortal eye tries to make sense of it.
"What's this!" Kayne exclaims, the words of a question but a tone of utter delight.
Lilith glances at the door. Everyone is asleep, will remain asleep so long as she wills it, but Kayne could try to be a little more quiet. As if in response, Arthur's shifts in his sleep, his nightmare twisting from empty halls to a darkened maze with a grinning, sharp-limbed creature climbing the walls.
Kayne drips his way over to the bed and stares down at the sleeping boy. "So this is your favourite, huh? I thought I told you that you are a god. I thought I raised you to know better, baby. A being so far above these protozoa having a favourite germ, why," he barked a short, manic laugh that makes something within her both cringe and burn. "That's insanity, sweetheart."
Her chest is unnaturally tight as Kayne casually looms over the sleeping child, a position she has taken many nights before, only he does so in the shape of a blood-soaked man. She is still, so very still, because there is nothing she can do but try not to provoke anything more than what he is already going to do. He peers down at Arthur and Lilith braces for the inevitable like she has done dozens, hundreds of times before.
His unsettling grin turns to her. "I heard someone has been breaking the rules," he trills in an obnoxious, foul sing-song. Lilith had been wrong. She had thought she'd be given time, that Kayne would want to draw this out, that Arthur would have a chance– a chance to capture his attention.
Kayne's eyes glitter in an unseen light from dimensions and angles even she cannot fathom. He clicks his tongue. "What am I to do with you?"
Then Kayne is gone.
Lilith staggers in his absence, unsteadied by the horror that never came, braced for a flinch that never happened. Everything is suddenly happening so fast ever since her not-father showed up it. Arthur slumbers on, specks of red staining the edges of his sheets the only sign of how close he came to obliteration.
She is tempted, not for the first time, to kill the boy herself. Instead she sinks back into the darkness and traps Arthur in his nightmares of running and hiding long past the point he would've, should've, woken in fear.
~o0o~
Nyarla– Kayne summons her to the middle of the Sahara where the sun beats down on her, making her already vulnerable form—beautiful, soft, too close to mortal—feel heavier than a black hole and weaker than a human newborn. It is intentional, she has no doubt; not just in how the sun strips her of her strength, but the exact pile of sand Kayne had chosen to stand on.
Beneath them, buried in endless layers of shifting sand, is the ruins of a temple. Centuries ago she had walked those halls alongside her father as the mortals bowed and grovelled when they passed, Lilith a step behind, but… only a step.
It was this temple where Lilith's father taught her many lessons. Lessons such as how mortals screamed, and how as a god she was not to care when they did. There were names she had purposefully forgotten spoken in those halls with ill-advised warmth, names she had also screamed until she learned not too because she wasn't supposed to, not unless she wanted to see them bleed out on altars and floors and thrones alike. Her father had been creative in how he reminded her she was his to own and how she was to conduct herself.
Lilith had been going through a rebellious phase then, her father claimed.
Kayne's still form stands out against the endless dunes. The heat-distortion itself seems to bend around him, making him looks like the one thing to solid and real in a dream. There's something in his hand, half behind his back as he walks barefoot across the burning earth towards her.
Lilith's eyes lock onto the limp form he was half-dragging, leaving a furrow in the sand. Her expression locks in place.
It's a body, small and delicate with fragile bones she could remember feeling under her hand. Kayne grins in pure delight at whatever he sees in her face, however hard she tries not to emote at all.
Kayne holds the body up by the neck, jostling it while speaking in a high-pitched falsetto like a man with a puppet. "Hi miss Lilith! It's me, Arthur! I love you soooo much! You're such a nice good person!"
And it is Arthur. For a brief moment, Lilith fears– fears that it is all over, that her gambit hadn't paid off and Kayne snapped up her bait too soon; that he chose upsetting her over his own deadly curiosity. He was not above torturing children, but he found them ever so dull and she was banking on him waiting until Arthur was a little older–
But… her Arthur had longer hair, occasionally matted. This boy's hair was short, a mess but neatly cut. Kayne could've cut it… but across his nose was a scar. A small scar, but an old one, and Lilith knew her Arthur didn't have–
It's a sickening relief when she puts the pieces together. And there's a part of her that resents that it's not over.
Kayne then laughs, the pitched shriek of someone confronted with something truly absurd. He throws the body to the ground like it was nothing. Trash to be discarded. If there was once an instinct in Lilith that would have her reach for the body, she is glad it was killed long ago.
Lilith stares down at the tiny, limp corpse, small limbs splayed out in ways a human's should not go without intense pain. Its face is slack and unseeing. She keeps the expression on her face stiff and strained, like she was trying to hold back intense emotion—Nyarla– Kayne knew that face well, had routinely mocked her for it—even though it was nothing but a lie. A trick. She feels nothing but the satisfaction of fooling Kayne so well he was dragging little boys from their beds and across the multiverse just to upset her. She knew better. It was a trick.
Kayne giggles and pinches her cheek. "What's with the sour face, sweetheart? Upset cause I squashed the ant?"
She inhales.
"Don't worry, I'll get around to yours," Kayne assures, swallowing her hook whole. "But you've given me a brilliant idea. There's just so many of them across the multiverse. It'd be like a scavenger hunt! A itsy bitsy grub hunt? I'll be honest, I can't really remember his name but I think it'll be best if I saved your favourite-favourite till last–"
The grin on his face, the cunning, calculated gleam in his eye– he knows what he is doing. And he is relishing it. The loathing bubbles up within her, twisting foul and thick with relief–
She hates him. She hates him. She hates him she hates she hates hates hateshateshates–
~o0o~
She threads her fingers through Arthur's hair and the silken strands of his dreams, absently tangling his mind into knots beneath her hand as she picks apart the mattes and snarls. Muriel had forgotten to brush his hair, again. Muriel forgot a lot of things. She forgot Arthur, her her husband, and if she could manage it she would forget the world.
Lilith notices, then, what she is doing and recoils as if burned. The room is suffocating. The room keeps becoming suffocating.
Thousands years ago she watched a human mother untangle her child's hair with gentle hands and was filled with nothing but revulsion for the sickening ritual. She scoffed at the birds that preened each other, the lions licking their cubs, and all the other lesser animals cleaning and comforting each other as they picked insects off their filthy skin while rolling in the dirt. As a god, Lilith didn't need such degrading care or any care at all. She was greater than the flea-ridden masses since the moment she was born. The very concept of it made her skin itch.
She grabs the pillow and smothers the boy until he wakes and begins to flail, then vanishes into the ether to find something she can kill.
It's almost time.
~o0o~
Arthur loves his mother. He loves his father. Despite everything, he loves them. He aches for their attention, for their love, for their comfort. His deprivation only seemed to make him hunger for it more, to cling harder. He would do anything for them if they only were to look his way. He barely a boy, he hardly knows better, and he turns to them like they're his sun. His world. Lilith aches. Lilith pities. Lilith seethes.
It's all happening so fast. The last leg of her plan is here. It is time.
She knows what she has to do.
~o0o~
A year passes. She puts it off. She doesn't have to yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
She can spare him a while longer.
(She doesn't care.)
A while longer.
~o0o~
She is summoned by her– by Kayne. She doesn't know why. He can't have sniffed her out yet, she had been so careful and his "grub hunt" had continued, the occasional body left in her path for her to find even though she doesn't care, she doesn't care, and he hasn't summoned her since that day he called her to meet on the burning sand above the buried remains of their history, but… there is no more time. She can't risk him finding her out. She can't risk not coming back before everything is set up. She needs to prime her trap and set her bait. She needs to curtail the cruelty Kayne may inflict on him so for all he can pleasingly suffer there is nothing left that can break him. Her followers, desperate Muriel and voracious Joseph, do not deserve what Kayne would inflict.
Arthur does not either, but there is nothing she can do to spare him. If there was, she would've kindly killed him as an infant.
Muriel has been waiting for this dream all her life, has prayed for it in her darkest moments in a life of shadow. She accepts it with open arms, welcomes it even. Joseph, however, fights it. He protests even in his dream and resists and recites some pointless lines from a poem on his wall—and Lilith stops asking nicely.
Muriel rises and walks in a placid slumber. Joe staggers, stiff-limbed and eyes rapidly flickering beneath his closed lids with a voiceless terror as he tries to force himself awake. Neither of them in either their acceptance or resistance think of their son as they make their way to the kitchen and shut the door behind them.
It does not take long. Lilith ignores the wetness trickling out of Muriel's closed eyes or Joseph's shaking hands. She doesn't care. She does not care at all.
Lilith slinks down the hall to a familiar bedroom. The door swings open on moaning hinges but the still form in the bed does not stir. Even if he was not used to ignoring the creaks and groans of a haunted home, she would not allow him to wake. Not tonight. She would grant him that last gift.
She sheds her beauty as she enters the room, growing long and sinuous with pitch black feathers and papery white scales. Her taloned feet scrape upon the well-scratched floorboards and the window glass, already warped by her long lingering presence, strain within the frames.
She bends over the small boy in the bed, a looming nightmare stretched out over him like the night sky.
A hand reaches out, then pulls back. She remembers how he fit in her palm and her head tilts. He no longer did. She had watched him grow and still– and still– somehow she lingers on how small he still is. Fragile, flickering, and destined to be so terribly brief. Mortals… how valuable could such a short existence be? This flickering flame, snuffed out as easily as flicking closed a lighter?
She has known him since we was born. He was made for her and her purposes, shaped by her and her hands to be her tool. Her weapon. Her barbed lure. He is hers, and she thinks this was a stubborn, vicious defiance. She had him first.
She stares down at him with her inhuman gaze. Anticipation rests heavy in her chest. Despite herself, a loathsome burn traces the edges of her eyes and she hates it. There is only one thing left.
"My favourite," she whispers, resolute. The Lester she is not able to spare. Her favourite, which she could do anything to but save.
But since when had that not been the case?
And she leaves him behind to face her own trial.