Lilith

An avid, cheerful explorer of new terrain and ancient ruins, Lilith dotes on her loyal familiar, a curiously intelligent ruby webwing, and the two can often be seen poking around flea markets and dusty back-alley shops in search of some artefact or another.

The cave opening beneath the dragon’s feet might have been terrifying to most wyverns, but for Lilith, it was just another call to adventure. One of many that she’s accepted in the months since her hatchlings left the nest, spreading their clumsy wings and floating off into the night.

She drags a glowing claw against the ground, carving an intricate pattern to remind her of the way out. She’s gotten lost one too many times in caves like this, curiously pulling over rocks until the sun starts to set and the stars remain as her only guide out.

“Ready to go in?” She asks Redfeather, who chirps and flits in the air, wings snapping and sending a subtle breeze to ruffle her feathers. “Alright, alright! So pushy,” she teases, and Redfeather nests into her shoulder fur, staring into the darkness ahead.

The further she walks, the darker the cave becomes, until the only light is emitting from her claws, only enough to signal the danger of stepping into a sudden drop. It’s rather empty, actually; suspiciously empty. After an hour of shuffling through the cave, the only thing she’s found is a dead rat, which appears to have been killed by a sharp bite to the spine. Nothing she hasn’t seen before.

“How boring,” she comments, carefully flipping over the rat. No paper slips out, no gems start to glow; only the slippery guts of the animal slide out onto the rock. “For somewhere that hasn’t been seen in so long, you’d think there would be something interesting.”

Redfeather cheeps in what may be agreement, or what may just be complaining about her complaining. “Better keep going anyway. You never know, right?” She carves another symbol into the ground with significant effort to pierce the rock before moving forward towards what could be an opening, or could just be another rock to run into.

It’s not long before she notices something else. Something different.

Her claws aren’t glowing anymore. They’re just as dark as the rest of the room.

“That’s… odd,” Lilith points out, raising one of them and clicking it against a rock on the wall. “I’ve never heard of something like this running out.” But the light doesn’t come back once she’s pointed out the logical fallacy in it disappearing. “It’s like it’s been… sucked out?”

Ahead of her, there’s no light at all. It’s a deep void, and the shadows sneaking along the wall are barely visible when everything else is gloomy as well. She keeps walking.

Lilith stops when the creeping feeling of fear starts to rise in her stomach. Redfeather is burying his beak into her fur, not daring to peer out into the night. Is it night? In this room, it doesn’t seem like time passes anymore. Does anything really matter, while she’s in this room, where she can’t see her own paws? Her head fills with mush and she reaches a paw out to grope, surprised when instead of a wall, she finds a podium.

There’s something on it.

On the podium is something rivaling the power of an eclipse, something that she can’t look at for too long despite not seeing anything. There’s nothing on the podium, but there’s everything there, all at once. She reaches out to touch it in what may be a foolish decision, and when she feels it, there’s nothing like it.

Voices scream in her ears, and invisible claws grip at her feathers, like they’re trying to stop her from flying away, trying to keep her stuck to this ground forever. Her paws don’t move anymore, and she can’t feel anything but her paw is stuck in something, a memory.

She only snaps out of it when Redfeather digs his beak, hard, into her shoulder, and she starts to run, sprinting away from the podium as her wings spread and try to lift her off the ground.

There’s a brief, odd pressure as she leaves the cave, and it feels like no time has passed at all since she touched the strange material. Time warps around her, the cave disappears and stretches until she reaches the opening. On the way out, she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t turn back. She can never go back to that place, never, not until the day she dies.

If Lilith had turned back for a final glance at the cave, she might have noticed something leaving, a mass of corruption, a profound lack of light slipping through the cracks and eclipsing the rest of the night.









Redfeather, Lilith's companion: