Chapter 50: Her Unbecoming
Liliana stumbled out of the Temple of Hades. Her own blood had dried to her chin, leaving a metallic taste behind. Something she couldn't accept.
The golden chains set by her master were broken, and she was left with the feeling of something deeper being broken too.
"I am not even useful as a pawn. How will he ever see me as equal?"
She didn't feel it at first, but a crack had appeared deep within her power, similar to a hairline crack in glass.
The violet threads that used to spring up so easily at her command would now slowly begin to rise and then again falter, as if they too had tasted the oldest, darkest part of the Underworld.
She did not look back at the three corpses.
She did not need to.
Behind her, bone scraped against stone in wet, deliberate motion. Still following her. The three demigods who had murdered her parents twenty-one years prior.
Their eyes, once a brilliant blue, were now a flat, lightless black, just as Amon's had been when he walked through the black gate of the underworld, Hades' final gift to her.
Their eyes, however, were now transformed because of her. She didn't know how or why. They had changed to the same pale, expressionless color as hers.
But Liliana didn't care. She just kept walking as her insides churned from pain, burning with sheer agony.
Her wrists ached. The places where Amon had held her with his light were raw, telling her she was weak.
"All that training for nothing. Only to leave me in the end."
It had been days, maybe weeks. Time seemed to have no meaning here. The zombies that were following her, she had been trying to burn them away with her darkness.
"Forget me," those undead told her.
"Remember me," some bellowed.
Her every memory was heightened, from the eleven minutes of that fight to every little aspect of him. The way he didn't even glance at her while he was trying to tear the other demigods apart. The way he stepped through the black wound without even a second glance to walk through the gate of the underworld.
"Control, Liliana. These...these are only dreams. Visions which I fear would happen."
She came to a stop on the temple grounds, ruined as they were.
[Warning! Host's Psyche can't handle it any longer]
Thick, nearly solid violet threads shot up from her wrists, buzzing with an energy that had, until now, obeyed her every command.
Instead, they sprang up to find their own way, tasting the air and sampling the death that had long since faded from the temple grounds.
One of them even reached out to touch the nearest of the demigods' corpses. The instant it did, the body sprang up, a puppet with its strings having been tugged.
Liliana felt something, a slight connection, then a crack inside of her.
It stirred. The gap Amon had left inside her grew until she realized something the Creator had missed had been quietly sleeping beneath twenty-one years of carefully controlled hatred and...maybe...maybe equally measured love.
It stirred. All around.
It liked the taste of the order he had given her.
It liked the taste of being left behind.
A slow smile spread across her face. It was a half-smile and it never reached her eyes. For a moment, she looked like the younger female version of Hades himself.
"No...no, no...I refuse," she whispered.
They waited as three rigid, soulless bodies for three long, silent moments.
Liliana raised her hand, thickened the violet threads of her power into strong, gnarled cords, and forced them into the chests of the three recently reanimated demigods.
There was a rush of power, beastly, unsorted, chaotic power, laced with the monstrous taint of Hades' enslavement. It swelled through her, changed her, as it had the three.
Her sight wavered and for a single moment she saw everything. The temple, an empty path leading deeper into the underworld's border, the faint trail of golden air left by Amon's passage.
The golden trail was already fading.
She could follow the remnants and claw her way out.
Or she could do something far worse.
Liliana chose the second option.
She pressed her wounded wrist against the surface of the cracked altar and let the darkness drink. As the power flowed through her, the gold of her own life force bubbling up in her blood like a fizzing soda, she felt the ancient stones of the temple vibrate around her.
Runes long faded scratched themselves to life, scribbled in a sick, twisting violet that reeked of rotting stars.
The seal which for so long had been fed by Hades' minions began to tremble.
Far, far below in the dusty, forgotten depths of the underworld, a presence far older than all of the monsters and gods of Olympus itself slowly opened one single, gleaming eye.
Liliana felt it notice her.
She did not flinch.
"Left me behind, Master," she said to the empty air around her, her voice steady. "When you come back, if you come back, there will be nothing left for you of the world that you tried to save."
The three corpses stepped closer, waiting for orders.
Liliana quickly wiped her chin of the remaining blood and gave a proper smile.
"Find every soul that still remembers the Golden Immortal," Liliana commanded of her newly found corpses. "Bring them to me. Alive if possible. Broken if necessary."
Liliana watched as the three bodies turned from her and went off in the opposite direction, three hounds that had finally found a master.
Behind her, the sound of stone on stone split the air as the altar split open. A thin, vertical line of absence appeared behind her, very much like a door. It was far smaller than the gate Amon had used to escape to Heaven and seemed to pulse with a cold hunger that seemed to seep from it.
Liliana stepped toward it without hesitation.
The rot inside her uncoiled, pleased.
She did not try to stop it.
She fed it.
The black wound closed behind Amon with the sound of a tomb sealing.
The blackness was so complete that it seemed to have its own weight, and Amon could feel it pressing down upon him.
There was no light, no heat, and for a moment he seemed to be standing at the edge of the universe, so far outside of normal experience that even the System's notifications were forced to lag behind. Then, in a burst of brilliant but unstable gold, they appeared, broken and flickering.
[Warning: User has entered a sealed domain outside standard creation parameters.]
[Divinity integrity compromised.]
[Tier 1 Level Mortal Transcendence: restricted.]
[All stats temporarily capped at 999,999.]
[Error: Higher authority detected.]
Amon ignored the messages. He had expected them.
For hours, or maybe minutes, he followed the path made of silently compacted layers of forgotten wishes, prayers to non-existent gods, the remains of countless souls that hadn't reached an afterlife because of him.
Every step of his sank slowly into the deep, dark ground that seemed to resent the mere presence of life.
Time didn't work well in this domain. Amon wasn't quite sure how long he had walked. Hours perhaps, or even minutes.
Then the pressure changed.
Something vast shifted in the dark ahead.
It was not a voice, but a memory of a voice long past. A voice that had spoken before there was language.
"Second breath."
Amon stopped.
The darkness in front of him slowly started to unfold, and as it did, a massive, misshapen form slowly and laboriously came into view. The general shape of a tall, thin humanoid was apparent, but that was where the comparison to anything living ended.
The dark, void-like limbs twisted outward from the center of the mass, like vines of shadow that had grown for centuries without any real reason to form in a particular way.
The body was a single, unbroken mass of intricate, interlocking seals, each one pulsing with a golden, ethereal light that seemed to contain within them the very first writing of the Creator, the original script from which all others would follow.
And at the very apex of the twisted, nightmarish mass, a single, vertical slit of even deeper, absolute black gazed out, like an open wound that had never once closed.
The thing that Hades had been feeding.
The thing the Creator had sealed and then, apparently, forgotten.
The air seemed to be drinking in the golden light of Amon's presence, like a desert drinking in the rain of a rare shower. The light did not disappear completely, but it lost a lot of its luster and it did not seem to be spreading in a circle around him.
"Second breath," it stated eventually, without actually speaking. Since the realization of its presence instantly rearranged reality to include the understanding of those words within his mind.
"However, I was not summoned, so I shall leave straight away," Amon stated matter-of-factly.