Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Nyarlathotep
Lilith holds him before even his mother.
It is a home birth. Home, of course, not being the well-used townhouse in London where the newlywed Lesters lived, but the basement of the gentleman’s club the cult normally met in. It is cold, and dank, and water drips off the exposed piping. The screams of pain echo in the cramped room, coming from the woman lying on a glossy black slab.
The woman howls like a dog, like she is being murdered, her hands tight on the fine obsidian edges even as it makes her palms bleed. The candlelight glints off her sweaty skin, the air thick with the haze of scented tallow and suffocating smoke of incense. She is not alone in her pain, or rather her pain is not private.
A small congregation observes, silent, sat shoulder-to-shoulder on benches crammed in to the too-small space, dressed in black robes with varying amounts of silver embroidery. At the woman's feet stands a balding man, his robes with more silver than the rest, who stares down upon her with a gilded dagger in his grip. A high priest, though he cannot sense Lilith's presence and Lilith does not bother to remember his name.
He has no training or even much experience in childbirth. It is his position, not his expertise, which grants him this honour.
Finally, after far too long in Lilith's opinion—the human body was designed so poorly, the unfortunate creatures—an infant is born.
Not crying. The priest makes a noise of alarm and Lilith peers down upon it from the unseen shadows, an invisible, ghastly spectre looming over the scene like death, and the small little face is still and ashen and– ah, the umbilical cord is wrapped around its neck. For a moment, Lilith feels something like relief, though it must be disappointment; the child is born mercifully dead.
Then the priest takes the dagger and cuts the newborn free. Faster than Lilith expects and against all odds in this dank cold basement, the infant takes a breath. Even swifter, does it begin to scream.
Muriel—the mother, favoured of Lilith, born into the cult like her own mother and her mother's mother and many mothers before that—does not reach for her infant, Lilith notices. Instead her eyes flutter close with a prayer, letting go of the waking world like she had been waiting, begging, to be released from its cruel chains through the whole ordeal of birth, and perhaps more generally the ordeal of life.
The priest takes the infant, still coated in afterbirth, and places it upon the hewn-stone altar engraved with silver. The pipes continue to drip as the congregation breaks into uneasy whispers. They rise on stiff legs and file out, the priest departing last, the mother left to her exhausted slumber and the infant to his futile cries.
The infant wails. His mother does not stir, training and medicine and true exhaustion keeping her sleep heavy and absolute. Lilith waits for a time, tracking the condensation trickling down the walls. He needs to learn that no one will come when he screams. It is only when his cries fade to whimpers does she appear.
Lilith forms from the night and absently brushes a taloned hand across her worshipper’s sweaty brow. It is not grace she offers, but a simple obligation; an honouring of the contract between god and a favoured servant.
Nightmares and premonition; pain, but meaningful pain, the pain that teaches. Every fear revealed to the new mother, made clear in the subconscious truth that the waking mind flinched from. Lilith finds Muriel's nightmares are more of failure than the possibility of her child’s pain and misery.
Lilith glides across the damp stone to the altar where the infant whimpers, eyes sealed shut and no longer with the energy to scream. The scent is rich and animal, his skin left tacky and unclean.
Loneliness. No one to hold or care for him even on the momentous day, slipping right out of the womb on to the cold offering plate rather than into warm arms. His mother, perhaps, could be excused—though, Lilith knows she would’ve slept willingly rather than hold her infant. The rest simply listened to their higher power. The rest would just as easily place him in her open maw.
Their obedience pleases Lilith, their willingness to leave their newborn child at just her word, but some part nonetheless felt a strange resentment. The father and mother hadn’t even asked to stay or what their god intended. It serves her interests, it is part of why they are two of her favoured, and yet… it grates. So easily they leave him alone on the altar. So carelessly do they place this feeble life in her lethal hand. So unquestioning of her plans for him, or perhaps so uncaring.
There is no real reason for this. She just demanded it and had it done. There is no reason for why she had the infant left to her upon the altar, no need for her plans or herself. It was but a whim. Maybe just to see if they would, as they always did.
The infant whimpers and whines, a little fleshbag of organs and blood and not much else. It is grotesque in proportion, skin loose and wrinkled and middle bulging like its innards just a bit too big. It is strange to think it will grow from such a small creature of instinct to something just a little bit more.
Not much more. But more.
Lilith’s hand is less human than a paw and a talon, a broad, scaley palm with soft black pads and strong, sharp fingers that curled inwards, delicately sliding under the newborn with pragmatic gentleness. He is so small he fits neatly within a single hand, and his flesh is cold from the stone and air. She trails a sharp claw down the middle of his red-streaked chest and round stomach, quietly contemplating how this little spark of life—brief, flickering, small, like a candle's flame—could be the thing to end her torment.
The infant sobs, wriggling in her palm, and she draws him close. It is pragmatism, nothing more, that sees him warmed by her feathers. With a single breath from her he falls asleep hungry, as he will many times, and the chill indifference of reality leaves him even as his nightmares begin. She already knows him and his mind from the womb, formless fears of sudden noise from somewhere outside the warm dark, but now with less than an hour in the world there is more to spin his fear from.
In her arms he is safe for the moment, but this makes no difference to what must happen, or what fate awaits him. In his mind he fears the cool emptiness, the hard stone, and the aching absence of the one who carried him. That is what he will remember from this experience, as she intended.
(His mind will not remember, but his fragile body will know the feeling of the warm feathers as well, and the irregular beat of her heart)
Lilith holds him before his mother.
~o0o~
They name the child Arthur after his grandfather, some insignificant nobody Lilith had never met but haunted Joseph's nightmares as a large, lumbering presence always stomping around and smelling of the same alcohol Joseph now drank every night. Arthur Lester, a painfully dull name for the potential key to her freedom.
"You don't want to be called Arthur, do you kid?" Lilith drawls, her massive monstrous form draped terrifyingly over the crib's edge. "It's so boring. How about I give you a better one. It'll be our secret."
The infant squirms in his crib, blurry child-blue eyes staring up and right past her horrifying visage, the swaddling cloth he had been wrapped in long since escaped. She giggles (quite cruelly) and lets an inhuman hand dangle above him. He wiggles in infantile curiosity, arms he does not know how to use flailing uselessly as he tries to grab at her.
"What about Enki? How's that sound, kid?"
His tiny face screws up in frustration as her still hand continues to elude his clumsy reach. She knows that expression well enough to predict screaming in the next five seconds. Taking mercy on his torment, Lilith lowers her hands to one of his and gently wriggles a knuckle into his closed fist.
"What about Baldur? Or Imho?"
She grins, flat, owlish face baring a lion's fangs. "Or Grah'n?"
Arthur tries to pull her very sharp, taloned finger into his toothless maw. His face twists in dismay, then turns distraught when she doesn't let him impale himself on her claws. A promising sign, that he is so eager to throw himself on the blade.
"Not till you're older," Lilith chides. Arthur opens his mouth and starts wailing at the injustice.
He is left alone, much of the time. He is rarely touched or held. This will not change even as he grew older and can leave the house—Lilith chose a British cult for a reason, so touch-adverse as a culture relative to many others. It is half a chance either of his parents will investigate his cries. The windows in the nursery are warped to the point the afternoon sunlight casts shattered bits of rainbow across the small room.
Outside the room, Lilith hears movement. Muffled shouting. Someone bangs on the door as they pass. No one comes in.
"Aw kid, don't be like that," Lilith sighs as Arthur continues to scream. She doesn't mean it. This is exactly how he's supposed to be.
She supposes Arthur will have to do.
~o0o~
She does not talk to her father often; hardly at all, now, as his interest in her faded eons ago. But she knows at any time he could be watching her; he didn't care to interact with her, or even tolerate her presence most of the time, but she still is his and so she is something to control. Such is the nature of Outer Gods.
Her plan exists in her head alone. To speak it was too great a risk. Even too revealing an action could tip her hand and bring it all crashing down, bring him down upon her. And he could be watching her. He would be watching her.
Not so long ago, barely a moment for one as ancient as her and likely even less so to a being like Nyarlathotep, he called on her. He was being polite, letting her arrive under her own power, or perhaps it was a test, but she had no illusion that it was a choice.
Her father in a form not unlike that of a human man—but, incomplete somehow, like he was trying to fit all the parts together and still figuring out how—stood in the center of a mass grave. Lilith dressed herself to match in the form her cults found most appealing, the one that her father declared was "enough," beautiful and human and so terribly vulnerable.
The carrion squelched beneath her feet and how she wished she could rend it with her non-existent talons. Rend him with her talons, teach him that she was more than what he restricted her to. Every breath came tight within the limitations of her form, made small and finite when she was so much more. Lilith gritted her teeth hard enough she could taste the warp of her gums, aching to shift into something more threatening.
Nyarlathotep rambled. He spoke of Azathoth and godhood and freedom. He preached madness, as was his nature, but a madness Lilith had never heard from him before except on the edges of his darkest resentment. More than that, she didn't believe him. Freedom?
He may not be interested in her but she was, and forever would be, his daughter. He would never let her forget that. He would never let her be free and if Azathoth were their jailer, she would just be trading one warden for a far more personal one. Whatever he was offering, madness or genius, promised no liberation for her.
She refused, emphatically, and he let her go. But his words still leave her uneasy even now, and she knows his eyes followed her as she left. She lingers in Lesters' nursery, watching the crib from the darkest corner of the room, and considers how important her plan may truly be. Her stomach aches as Arthur stirs wretchedly in his sleep.
~o0o~
Still so new, Arthur's fears were similarly infantile. Loud noises, bright lights, pain, and of course being alone. This one, loneliness, Lilith drew to the surface quite often and very rarely had to enhance. An intense enough fear of loneliness would eventually become a fear of unfamiliar, easily-lost intimacy, validated by parents who vacillated between adoration and indifference.
Arthur's mother holds him, and rocks him, and feeds him as she should, a frown marring her face as she stares down at her spawn. Most of the time she cannot even bring herself to do that, preferring to stay in bed and pray for her god's blessings and, when Lilith is not feeling generous, imbibe until sleep comes for her regardless. Her sympathy for her child waxes and wanes like the ebb of the tides but it rarely goes beyond a distant pity for the strange creature whose cries now haunt her nightmares and home.
Arthur's father has brief but intense periods of affection for him, but it rapidly cools and becomes distant once more when whatever in his child caught his interest has grown dull. The day-to-day existence of his son seems unable to hold his attention for long when there were new truths to uncover and intellectual exchanges to be had with his "brothers" in the gentlemen's club.
This is why she chose the Lesters out of all her cultists dedicated enough to dedicate a their own flesh and blood to her. Depressed and distracted, young Arthur was so often left alone with only his nightmare as company.
She keeps a close eye on Arthur and who is, admittedly, not that exciting. He mostly exists and does what biology demands he do to keep existing. But he is her ticket to freedom, to her father's defeat; something which she is beginning to get an inkling of being more important than first assumed. From her night and the dreams of shifting infinities there are scattered whispers she is beginning to put together into some much larger and more terrifying than planned, and his offer to her not so long ago squirms uncomfortably in her mind. She cannot banish the case he made to her atop a mound of cooling corpses, each one bearing Azathoth's favour in their flesh and bone.
It cannot be anything more than the usual plots and machinations, some horror he would inflict upon her to spite her weakness. It is nothing but the usual spiteful words of a madman lashing out at a creator he cannot reach.
Still, it digs into her mind, a nail of niggling madness driven into her skull and she wishes nothing more than to wretch it out.
Arthur screams, long and terrified when night falls. His parents leave him to cry it out, bags growing under their eyes as the screeching of their child nonetheless keeps them up. Lilith hums an old song, one from when humanity was still in its cradle, when she was already older than the mountains but still somehow new, as she watches him howl himself to exhaustion. She makes his slumber just as lonely as his waking hours. She terrorizes him with visions of empty rooms and loud voices and a tall, pale woman of unimaginable beauty who regards him with icy indifference. When winter comes and the heating goes out, she holds his small form close so he doesn't freeze to death.
~o0o~
Joseph and Muriel's interest grows in Arthur as he gets a little older, a little less a helpless grub squirming in place. He rolls over at first and then Lilith watches as he begins to crawl, begins to even stand with both hands gripping something to steady him. When Lilith looms over his crib—a nightmare of teeth and claw and inhuman monstrosity—he reaches up and makes a sound that he only makes when he sees her, or at particularly interesting shadows.
"Ilyth'ya," she croons like spiders skittering across warped glass. "It is Ilyth'ya." He should know the name of his god, the older name, even if he will not remember her.
"Ee-wa!" Arthur squawks instead, meaningless gibberish he keeps repeating over and over with no reason, and reaches, still so new he has not learned to cringe in horror at her true form. He was talkative, even if his constant noise meant nothing.
He will not remember this so Lilith does not shy away from the chubby hands that grab her feathers. They loosen easily—she is a god, they can be pulled without pain if she so allows— and Arthur is left with a fistful of divinity that he lets fall to the crib bottom, watching in rapt fascination. The kind of token great nations have fought wars over rests on the threadbare cushion of the crib like bits of fluffy void—until Muriel notices and, unknowing of their origin, throws out the feathers of her deity with an ignorance that makes Lilith shriek with laughter.
Looking in his eyes, dark and soft in his chubby face, Lilith for a moment is struck by the belief that somehow even in his infancy, Arthur knows far more of the world and his place in it than he is letting on. Then she dismisses it—what is she doing, searching for the ocean in the depths of a puddle?
~o0o~
Time passes. Indifference melts from his mother, still often frowning or sad; some days she can barely get out from bed, praying day and night for Lilith to bring her the nightmares she found more tolerable than her existence. But she holds her son and some dreams bleed fear for what is intended for her child, so small and trusting, and Lilith is honest enough to let those fears remain.
Joseph is intrigued by his child. He regards Arthur with the fascinated interest of a man seeing an exotic animal at the zoo and his attention lingers longer as Arthur does more and more, but rarely does this extend to true interaction. Muriel, who can barely stand the waking world, is left to assume that responsibility. Lilith scoffs at the sheer irrational society of it all but… this is why she picked their child. This is what she wanted.
Regardless, Arthur seems to enjoy it, soaking up the attention like a flower in the insufferable sun. His babbling even begins to resemble some kind of English. Lilith, meanwhile, tries to teach him the occasional word in R'lyeh (not that he understands what she has him say). He'll forget it before he's grown but it's amusing to hear his tongue struggle with the alien phonics, and know that she'll likely get to see him call one of her priests—the ones that knew a little of the communing tongue—several creative insults, if by accident.
Arthur is left out of the crib most days now, but still frequently unsupervised. Except for Lilith of course; it would do no good if her bait fell down the stairs and cracked his head open. Lilith does not know why but he had taken to throwing himself bodily into the darkest shadow he could find and she was getting rather sick of catching him.
~o0o~
There is an altar in Joseph's study.
Arthur is not supposed to go in there. He is also too young to truly grasp that. Mostly he knew to avoid the study when Joseph was inside, if only to avoid being yelled at by the man. But when Joseph was not there, Lilith could see the study fascinated him. It was by far the most furnished room in the house.
Arthur is not old enough to read the poetry on the wall that would soon enrapture him or even speak beyond a few fragmented phrases. He is not old enough to admire the leather-bound books lining the bookshelves. But he is old enough to gawk at several interesting artefacts and trinkets hanging from the walls, at the strange symbols scrawled on paper hanging from a board in a dizzying display, and at the high table framed in dark curtains and silver.
He is old enough to crawl and even walk short distances—sometimes lurching at shadows with a shriek, reaching out as if he expects something to be there, and sometimes there is, catching him in deadly hands—and he is old enough to climb when he drags over a chair to the altar and clambers on.
Lilith observes absently from where she lingers in the slanted shadow as Arthur goes from the chair to the top of the table, sitting on the edge among the snuffed candles and silver offering bowls. Some part of it feels bitterly right, her sacrifice willingly climbing to sit upon her altar just like he was gifted to her so few years ago.
Arthur yelps, suddenly, and Lilith jerks out of her idle musings. He had opened the curtains and course of it is a painting of her—beautiful, resplendent, pale-skinned and dark-eyed, the woman who haunts his nightmares—and Arthur had recoiled in shock, falling back off the table. Lilith, with inhuman reflexes, lunges and catches him in her talons moments before he hits the floor head-first.
For a brief moment, he stares up at her with frightened, teary eyes. His skull is so fragile cradled in her palm, his small ribcage expanding with each breath against her. For a brief moment she feels the absurd urge to close her fist, to crush his head and feel the bone and brain ooze out from between her fingers, to end this absolute farce once and for all in a single moment and spare them both–
"Ithya!" Arthur sniffles, then bursts into tears, and she drops him like he was fire and such things could burn her.
~o0o~
Arthur sleeps. Lilith spitefully regards his peaceful face and thinks how he will die, she thinks how he will scream, and is too revolted by him to even twist his dreams into something cathartically cruel. She rattles the windows until he wakes up crying and before he can notice her presence, shoves him off the bed with an inhuman shriek that will leave his ears bleeding. Thin red lines on the skin of his arm ooze beads of crimson where he scrapped them on the floor, or perhaps where her nails grazed his skin.
Arthur screams, terrified, laying stunned on the ground but Lilith is gone before he can properly see her. He wails loudly, then breaks into sobs. The whole house should've heard him. The whole house had. But no one comes, the same way they haven't come before.
She stops appearing to him except in his nightmares as the same pale human woman who so frightened him on that altar. It was time anyway. He was getting older and she couldn't have him remember her as anything but a bad dream.
He calls for "Ithya" in the night, and will until he finally learns it's as much a waste of breath as calling for his mother and father.
~o0o~
Arthur learns his prayers, his mother dutifully coaching him through them with the same patience she had been taught. They come easy to him. His mouth is already familiar with the strange phonics of R'lyehian (or the equivalent humans could pronounce), not that he knows what he's saying. He comes to cult meetings on his mothers hip, eyes wide and watching as cloaked figures perform the less secretive rituals and later, as the men discard the trappings of occultism to smoke and drink on the main floor. He participates in what capacity he can, clumsy tongue following in the chants and prayers. He is the only child in a room full of adults, left to either follow along blindly or ignored as the adults talk around him.
There are no other children in the cult and whatever interest his presence brings the adults is lost quick. They don't know Lilith's plans for him; they don't even know that she lingers around him, these proud devoted experts on all they claim she is. All they know is she had demanded him upon his birth, something which most now agreed was more a test upon his parents than anything innate to such an unremarkable child.
His black child-sized robes—adorable, some part of her thinks, a mocking amusement only for herself—have the least and plainest silver embroidery in the cult, barely a single line along the hood's brim. More than anything any other child of a cultist has since Arthur is an official member, but still less than even the lowest-ranking adult.
Something about that grates on Lilith. Her little sacrifice, his tiny life born straight into the palm of her monstrous hand, somehow marked as less hers than nameless worshippers who grovel at the feet of a suffocating unthreatening costume.
It merely grates, though. She doesn't care enough to demand it be made reality. What god truly cares which colours a toy is adorn with? That is something only lowly humans obsess over and even these black-silver robes denoting seniority and authority were a creation of her worshippers alone.
When Arthur learns to open his mouth more freely, or perhaps when silence becomes too difficult for an impatient child who is always fidgeting, he spends much of his time in the gentlemen's club suffering various forms of discipline. He's curious, and stubborn, and he keeps asking questions and– well, Lilith cannot claim she didn't encourage some of it. His dreams of robed men are easy to turn sour and dark and all the more honest for it, and it is even easier to allow with some bemusement nightmares where Arthur can steal even some kind of spiteful victory from them. Her followers, so certain every punishment is bringing him further into line, do not understand they are only driving him further away, left on the outside of even their warped community.
It makes her giggle, to see the humans gasp and stutter when one of their larvae calls the priest a pile of disgusting shed skin in a god's tongue. His parents are less amused, horrified and embarrassed when informed and he is thoroughly disciplined with a belt and salt water on the open welts. Arthur does not take this quietly—and Lilith is pleased he does not, the stubborn little fleshmite—trying vainly to argue his innocence.
But he cannot say who taught him such words without him knowing the meaning. The resentment of it festers in Arthur and his nightmares even as he begs at his father's feet for attention, clings at his mother's skirt for love. He is too young to put a name for it, but it pulses hot and familiar to Lilith.
~o0o~
Arthur plays on the floor, some make-believe story about a fox and a dog and Lilith had stopped paying attention a while ago. In fact, Lilith is bored. Lilith is deeply bored and yet here she remains because… well, she doesn't even know why. Which is only more frustrating, why she found herself here, again, watching Arthur like he was a fish swimming circles in a pond.
Arthur babbles, narrating a grand chase that ends with a fox eluding a dog through basic trickery. A strange narrative choice to have the prey escape the hunter. The way of the world, and the satisfaction of a proper end, was prey caught and killed.
Lilith shoves a lamp off the side table and it shatters, so sudden and loud Arthur freezes before bursting into messy tears. He immediately runs for the bed and hides under it, fist shoved in his mouth to stifle his crying.
Joseph comes in and upon seeing the lamp, his face twists. It does not take him long to find his son, the muffled noise of terror giving Arthur away. He grabs Arthur by the arm and pulls him out, then yanks the boy up by the limb until he's trembling his tip-toes. Arthur doesn't plead his innocence anymore—he has learned not to—and instead apologizes blindly, panicked.
Joseph shakes him until he cries harder. Joseph smells like gin and ritual candles and Lilith makes no move to stop it—she knew the man Joseph could be when she chose his child for her purpose—and when he strikes his son across the face for lying, she is not surprised.
~o0o~
Lilith breaks Arthur's things quite regularly. She can't quite say why, though surely it would help damage him in some way beneficial to being the kind of mortal her father so obsessed over. But there was also a part of it that felt… satisfying. She was a cruel capricious being after all, a malevolent god who cared not for the pathetic mortal worms except as entertainment; it only made sense breaking a child's few possessions would soothe some kind of ache within her.
Arthur does not have many toys. He does not have much at all. His parents believe in an ascetic life, at least for their son, and they were hardly wealthy enough to spoil a child. Even what Lilith gave them in return for their service did not translate to money. Arthur has clothes and food but not much more, which could be fine—Lilith has seen families raise thriving children on less—but also sparse is his parents' attention.
Lilith shreds his good shirt and the frantic, panicked boy could not convince his parents of his innocence. Nevermind that he had no access to knives or scissors or razor-sharp claws. Six swats against his palms leaves him snivelling but it is more regimented that Lilith expected.
Arthur had a stuffed bear, purchased during one of Joseph's bouts of interest. Lilith tore off its head and Arthur was inconsolable until Muriel resigned herself to sewing it back on. Arthur lit up when handed back his friend and hugged his mother and for a brief moment a smile lit up Muriel's sullen expression.
The bear disappears and Arthur never sees it again.
~o0o~
One day, Arthur is brought before her in the dank, crowded basement. At least in an official capacity. It is Lilith as she was meant to be seen by her cult, tall and beautiful and almost human except in her perfection. It's his first time having an official audience with her and Muriel presents him like a gift, like that infant left alone on the altar some years back.
It is a big deal among the cult who discussed and speculated like she couldn't hear them even when she wasn't visible to them. She had shown so much interest when he was born and then suddenly none, while the immediate fascination had faded the possibility she might do something upon seeing him was renewing it.
As if she needed to wait until he was brought before her by these mortals.
He stares at her, wide-eyed and terrified to see the woman from his dreams—his nightmares. He tries to recoil into his mother's side but she shoves him away, left to stand alone in new black robes, made slightly too large so he can grow into them. Funny, how Lilith frightened him now when tooth and claw never scared the infant.
"Who is this?" she asked with an elegant raised eyebrow. There is a second line of silver along the edge of his hood. If he possibly was something important to her, like some still wondered, how did anyone think that was enough?
"Our son," Joseph says, oddly proud for a man who spent most of what little time he had with his son in anger. It annoys her. Almost expectant, he looks at her like he was waiting for something. "You requested him upon his birth and we gave him to you."
This clearly is news to Arthur whose eyes widen. He looks up at his mother who doesn't even glance at him, busy drinking in the sight of her goddess.
"Hmm," Lilith says, tapping her mouth with one delicate finger like she was trying to remember something insignificant. Then, like she has just remembered, she says "Ah, I recall. Come forward, child."
Arthur does not.
Muriel scolds Arthur for his disobedience. Joseph hisses like a snake. The audience begins to whisper and a tension builds. Arthur merely looks away, tiny fists clenched and something unnaturally unreadable and tight on his chubby face. Once he grew into it, Lilith's father would adore this expression, she thinks.
But Lilith merely smiles, mysterious and alluring, and the cult relaxes.
"He'll come to see his place someday," she assures Muriel who smiles, wane and weary and deeply relieved, and neither parent not know enough to fear as they should.
"So he's worth nothing?" Joseph asks instead, disrespectfully unable to keep a little incredulity out of his tone. Always a man of desire more than faith.
The cult titters. Arthur's expression grows more… whatever it is, tears gathering in his eyes.
"He is no more significant than any of you," Lilith says haughtily, a clear dismissal.
Muriel picks up her child and as she turns away back to the benches, Arthur watches Lilith over his mother's shoulder. Joseph puffs up, then sighs, frustration draining from so easily when not behind closed doors.
They were still two of her favourites, these mortals; Muriel's dreary nightmares she found more merciful than living and Joseph's passion for knowledge and art. How they treat their son was exactly to her plan. But their son was no doubt feeling that small hard ball of resentment in his chest like a tangle of thorny vines.
~o0o~
She can stop.
She hasn't crossed the point of no return yet. She has not made Arthur anymore a target than other followers she had expressed interest in in the past. Nyarlathotep would take the intentional expression of favouritism as not just weakness but defiance, of a rejection of his lessons.
She could kill him now even. A merciful, quick end; he wouldn't even need to wake. Like many other children who passed silently and suddenly in the night, and out of her re– of her father's reach.
But. She needs– she will be free.
It is night. The white light of the moon breaks when it hits the warped windows, casting shattering fragments of light across the room. The kindness catches in her throat and claw. What comes out instead is the boy’s damnation, Lilith’s greatest curse since the very first day she existed. “My favourite,” she whispers, and she loathes how it isn't–
"My favourite," she tries to lie.
“My favourite,” she says, and it sounds almost like “I’m sorry.”
She has no apologies though. This is no mistake. She would do it again, and again, and again.
She strokes his hair, knotted with casual neglect. "My favourite," she croons more steadily as the child slumbers in his bed uneasily.
"My favourite."
It still tastes like metal in her mouth.