Lilith, Chapter Two

Neetra and Gala had scrabbled upright at the bottom of the cliff to confront each other once more across a stretch of several feet. The latter was facing the rocky slope, while Neetra’s back was to it, such that behind and above our heroine’s head the baby atop the elevation was within Gala’s line of sight.

That one was holding her cutlass in one hand, at right-angles to her body such that the blade was level with the ground. Its white luminescence had suddenly come alive in fantastic whirls and parabola and orbits, which circled and spiralled from hilt to point with steadily mounting vigour. Gala possessed no energy-projection attack that Neetra knew of, but nor had she ever seen her do this before. That was part of the reason our heroine’s heart was pummelling in her bosom, and she knew her nerve-endings could not afford a split-second to relax.

There was more besides. The sweat standing out on Gala’s brow and cheekbones, not to mention the weakened condition she had been in from the start, were indication enough for Neetra just where this battle stood. On a day they had already spoken of once, Gala had shown herself quite willing to sacrifice herself and the team she commanded just as long as it meant doom for her enemies too. This left our heroine in no doubt they had arrived again at such a time. As Neetra looked on the dance of death that even now neared crescendo along Gala’s sword, she was in the unenviable position of knowing it was meant for all three who lived and breathed under its dreadful intensifying starkness.

“You certainly fight like a Scot,” commented Gala, with a low humourless laugh. “Second-best tumble I’ve taken in a while.”

Neetra hadn’t wanted this to turn into a playground brawl. It was true the stinging from her skinned knees was putting her in the mood for one, but in the end it wasn’t that, or even Gala’s latest cruel jibe. It was the dozen or so ladders and runs that the cliffside had inflicted on her sweater, which her friend Flashshadow had found for her when she’d needed something warm to wear. Funny how sometimes it was the little things that did it. But maybe the sweater-damage was just too much of a reminder of something else precious to Neetra which Gala had likewise ruined for her.

“While you’re standing there making jokes about it, do you even stop to think what it meant to me?” our heroine demanded, tears pricking hotly at her eyes. “I bet you don’t. To someone like you it doesn’t mean anything. So go ahead, laugh about it again, say something else horrid about me tidying my top drawer – ” she had started to sob “ – but just so you know, the reason some people wait is because they want it to be special. They wait because they could only be happy sharing it with someone they love. I wanted that. It wasn’t much to ask. But you took it away from me, and now whatever else happens, I’ll never have what I waited for.”

Neetra drew in breath harshly through gritted teeth.

“I know The Four Heroes are meant to forgive worse things than that,” she choked out. “But you’ve changed me, Gala. I didn’t think I could hate anyone like I hate you for what you did.”

When the response came back, it was not the superior sneer that might have followed on the schoolyard Neetra had been picturing. Gala’s words, however, bore not the slightest trace of pity.

“Eve could live with it, and so can you,” she declared. “When Joe and I first set foot in this place I felt a little like her, what with everything that had happened. But no. You and he still get to be the general ancestors of The Four Heroes’ illustrious lineage, but you don’t get to be his first. Which I guess answers the question of who I really was in this all along.”

Neetra, amid the last of her tears, dragged a hand across her wet face.

“If you’re Lilith, Gala, then you’re a Lilith of your own making,” was all she could reply. “And I wish you’d chosen some other way to prove it.”

“Mythology remembers her as a monster,” Gala went on. “Don’t bother telling me I became one too on the day I killed the Burghermeister. Because what were all those years of you and Joe skipping around Nottingham, having adventures and delightful romantic mishaps, if it wasn’t Eden? Remember what happened there. Do you think afterwards there never came a day when Adam, toiling away by the sweat of his brow, didn’t stop to consider he might have been better off with his first choice? She’d have led him to power. She’d have made him truly great. Let that be the closing thought you keep forever with you.”

And on no more verbal warning than this, but merely a last dauntless look from the deathly-white face to the tearstained girl with skinned knees before her, Gala cut loose.

In a single mighty bowling swing the cutlass came down and around and up, its lowermost swoop ploughing a furrow through stone from which spilled luminescent streamers and scythes to carve the remainder into chunks and chips. Gaining the zenith of this monumental thrust the blade hurled its burden of turbulent white at the clifftop, then shattered under the strain. Shards of steel hung suspended as if in slow-motion, each a once-searing sliver fading back to dull grey, while sheer-sided boulders began to rise from the disintegrating desert beneath the females’ feet.

Neetra’s darting eyes tracked the light, a vicious circumambulatory bolt all dagger-tips and murderous points riding out the diagonal distance between its consignor and the baby. Our heroine boasted no power that might divert or dissipate it. So there was just one thing left to do.

She teleported vertically to the cliff’s edge and threw herself in the projectile’s path.

The cutlass itself, piercing Neetra at the breastbone to crack its way through her ribcage and burst out again bloodied and dripping between her shoulders, could not have hurt more than that impact. She was light-years beyond a scream, though every last vestige of breath was crushed in noiseless throes from her lungs. The parts of her that smacked the cliff’s gravelly surface in swift succession – a cheek, a thigh, the small of her back – felt like severed pieces with no motive force to unite them. But even then, even as Neetra lay prone and yearned for blessed unconsciousness which pain of this magnitude denied her, there was a glimmer of comfort in knowing the intended victim could never have survived.

Nor did the attack’s residual energies spare the inflictor. Even as these whips of light chopped up the last of the land down below, they gouged and scored Gala’s once-proud figure in turn. Cut down thus she thudded to the rock. The whole of that expanse at the foot of the cliff was now so many irregular monoliths, slowly parting and drifting in different directions to the oxygen-bereft environs beyond The Back Garden, Gala outstretched as if lifeless on the summit of one. Neetra, witnessing this through eyes that would barely stay open, struggled to lift a weak hand amid delirious hopes of teleporting to the other’s aid, or telekinetically snaring the asteroid before it was too late. But such notions were futile dreams. There was not strength enough for Neetra to so much as raise her head. It was all she could do to reach out one aching arm and encircle the baby, drawing him safe to her, and lie wracked but in the knowledge he and she were still alive.

Gala, supine on a strange sailing-ship with the broken remnants of her weapon strewn about her, was navigating her last sea. The Back Garden atmosphere was gently dispersing, and she knew she was not far from shore.

She wished she had a cigar with which to while away these final moments.

Unexpected, that it should feel this way. Gala had always assumed she would be like the tempests she knew so well, going out with all the relentless ferocity she had displayed in life. Yet knowing for certain the ravages inflicted on her over these last few hours were not to be fought back from carried a tranquillity she could never have imagined.

A weight inside Gala’s coat shifted softly and ceased to pull. She moved her eyes to look. The Prophecy of the Flame, ancient leathern-bound delineation of Nottingham’s past, present and future, was climbing sedately into the universe as gravity dwindled away. There before a backdrop of stars made large and luminous by Gala’s blurry vision ascended the tome, dry parchment pages fanning one after the other as if in farewell. Between each inclining plane of black shadow Gala took her final glimpses of the illuminations she loved, picked out obliquely where the celestial shafts fell.

That book had been responsible for everything in Gala’s life. Joe, The Chancellor, the Next Four, the Collective, the conflict with The Four Heroes, and so much else that could never be listed, least of all now. Gala knew for certain this must be the end, if the Prophecy was leaving her.

So she smiled, and let her old friend go. The Prophecy of the Flame was at last bound for a trail which Gala would follow no longer.

Somewhere beyond the edge of the deck, the great golden cusp of a sun was swelling. From the moment its beams touched her face, Gala knew what it was. It was the place where the anger and the hating stopped. She had been searching for it, without always realising this was so, since long before she ever laid eyes on the Prophecy.

It had something to do with the warm weight of a ginger kitten in her lap. But above all else, it was a pair of kindly smiling eyes.

“Mother,” whispered Gala.

Then there was nothing more.

On Planet Earth, many Solidity soldiers had laid down their armaments and surrendered after Neetra’s Toothfire hordes annihilated the living lynchpin of their campaign. For others, escape had become the new objective, and these battled on against human troops solely to gain an evacuating ship and join their orbital armada for the full-scale retreat they assumed must by now be underway. Of that whole invasion-force it was only the foul servants of Empress Ungus herself, part toadstool and part demon, whose savagery with tentacle and fang continued unabated.

Their monstrous mistress lay outspread on the floor of her own mothership, high above the City Centre. The roots at the base of her body that had bound her to the conglomerations below were reduced to crumbly brown dust, and towards her unmoving mass her numerous sons crept as an inquisitive mob, meekly for creatures of evil but with a power-hungriness that perfectly suited.

When however Ungus’s long stringy neck and budlike head thrust erect again without warning, and the brothers glimpsed the expression that blazed from the tiny face of their matriarch, meekness was hardly the word. Of a mutual accord they fled to man the lifeboats.

Rising slowly, serried and stripped, vivisected by a thousand goo-oozing lacerations the Lords of Toothfire had dealt to her by proxy, but still photosynthesizing through some or other of the occult administrations enacted on her own person over her millennia of wicked life, Empress Ungus surveyed the state of things. In a voice as despoiled and derelict as her form, gargling on plant-bile that bubbled from her lipless mouth, she threw forth:

“Not…over yet. Can’t do it as we agreed, then…always another way.”

Silently the circular hugeness of the Back Garden flagship began to ascend, even as the hollow gourds that were its escape-pods hastily scattered from their sacs and bore Ungus’s dastardly dynasty to terran soil. Every other eye in Nottingham watched as the saucer in its smooth elevation summarily made of itself a small dark disc in the afternoon sky, then a dot, and finally a nothing. Only when the colossal craft had achieved an altitude that set it alongside the Solidity fleet did it stop, a huge fleshy fungus lying incongruously among sleek intergalactic dreadnoughts, stars glittering in the cosmos above, the blue-green orb of the Earth below.

Aboard her bridge, Empress Ungus threw both wasted arms wide.

This time it was not a matter of tendrils growing from the mothership’s shape. Rather the entirety of that flat mushroom-cap, its circumference akin to a national park’s, contracted in some gigantic pucker. Then, after the interval of a single throbbing pulsation, the crumpled bundled bag of organic tissue burst forth from its self-imposed collapse and was tendrils itself, a ball of grey-green outward-stabbing fingers like some hideous star or monster spiny blowfish. With pinpoint accuracy each of these myriad tentacle-points rammed through the armoured hull of a Solidity warship in the immediate vicinity.

On board those luckless vessels, colour and time and heartbeats ended and every living crew-member died at a stroke.

Their life-force, together with the potency that had been simmering in the ships’ battery reservoirs ready for deployment, was leeched from those hulks in an intermingled tide of supercharged photons and accursed souls which rushed along the tentacles’ lengths to course into the being of Empress Ungus. Sucking down thirstily on this influx she flooded her every cell with newfound teeming strength, and an instant later the monochrome wrecks that had been her first prey each vented a score of tendrils themselves, to punch through the same number of bulkheads in turn and repeat the perfidious process. With terrifying swiftness the whole armada became a web, and throughout its lattice was not one creature living but the bloated queen who feasted at the core.

A mile or two ahead, colours lurid and unclean were warping in a luminous vortex even as the stratospheric vaults began to echo with a noise that might have been the screams of lost lives coruscating into the whirlpool. Now every violated presence that came upon Empress Ungus through her vampiric vines, everything from technological ergs to fragments of sentience, she was pushing outward as fuel for a last resort which only she could have concocted. It was a dark starbirth. There would be no need to crack the planet’s mantle in advance, as the conventional weaponry of the original plan had required. This abomination, purchased at the cost of a populace that had pictured outliving the war, would wipe Earth clean from the face of the universe all on its own.

“Whatever it takes!” roared Empress Ungus above the rising infernal din. “No matter how many must be sacrificed! There will be no Planet Earth. The Foretold One’s reign will not come to pass!”

END OF CHAPTER TWO