>>6824
There are certain constants that reoccur across the multiverse, and among them some of the most influential are those that represent meaningful experiences for sentient beings. Call them archetypes. Call them the thousand faces of the Strong Anthropic Principle: The Companion and Consort of the Eternal Champion following their doomed hero to the bitter end, the Treacherous Son doomed to lay waste to his father and brothers' legacy. But the one that has acted most closely in concert with [REDACTED] without being subsumed by him is most commonly recognised as the Dark Mother: A principle of malign feminine power, associated paradoxically with perverse immortality and death in desolation.
To simplify the complexity of a multidimensional Kabbalistic creation mythos: Always upon the beginning of every time, in a world that was more idea than place, there was a woman fleeing retribution. At the shores of the primordial waters, met with [REDACTED] who had recently crashlanded there.
That was when the entire script of her life flipped on it's head.
GENESIS
'''[REDACTED] has been the Tree of Life, the Demiurge, the Angel of the Abyss.
He has been called a hundred names, and has been called a thousand more long before this world grows dim and cold
He is what is left when the world has taken all it can from a hero, but cannot stop him
She has been nameless since their birth.
A constant companion drenched in his ruin,
A serpent dripping venom into his ears, to be closer with him.
She is the darkness. O Lethe, enemy and
lover sworn sister, without
Whom his very existence would be pathetic and vulgar!
Their relationship is complex and perhaps eternal.
They met once in the garden at the beginning of the world
And, unaware of their twin destinies, matched stares'''
There is a consistent pattern to the Dark Mother's existence: She is a vain and peerless woman preeminent in her field and older than nations, but she yearns for what she cannot have. Power to usurp God, the destruction of all who ever wronged her, and the love of a great man among others. She cannot have these things, and so in her rage|humiliation|grief brings ruin to the world and creates twisted life (often by mating with other monstrous archetypes like the Adversary) to exact vengeance on it. Due to a combination of factors, she is defeated by her own hubris and the loyalty between her foes exceeding the many betrayals she sows against them before her plans can come to fruition; often the most she can hope for is to damn the world along with herself.
This did not happen when she met [REDACTED]. She chooses to recount that life as Lilith: Her body shaped from the mire by God as Adam was from Earth, but her spirit dwelt in the abyss long before being clothed in flesh. She alone (and one must assume, God) remembers the sight of [REDACTED] ablaze as he crashed across realities-reshaped by divine providence into a naked soul of utmost light before landing in the waters they shared. She remembers her instinctive mistrust of God-and the hope that [REDACTED]'s entry kindled in her, that there was something beyond the world of her creation.
When the inevitable events of her existence-the spat with Adam, her flight from Eden-happened, she went to [REDACTED], named Apollyon by God, and proposed an agreement she assumed he would someday forfeit, but not before she obtained leverage over him.
He did not.
ACTS
__"I will go on forever. I will understand everything. There is only one path and that is the path that you make. But you can make more than one path. This is the law I hereby bind myself to: To shape the cosmos with our way of being, for nothing else can save a world less eternal than ourselves. And to learn that law, I devote myself to defence of this mighty kingdom that is your body and our family"
"I will break the bars of my cell. I will make a new shape, hew that shape from our path, find your cell's bars, break out of the bars, find a new shape, make the shape from our path, eat the light, eat the path. This is the wager I put up, for freedom and transcendence of all rivals that would end us. And the stakes are the children I bear you, the prosperity they create for us"
"I quench my zeal in the venom of your will, that it may be made immutable through nuance"
"I warm my will in the flame of your zeal, that I may master myself as I master others"
"Let it be thus, Lilith"
"For to be anything less is fatal, Apollyon"__
Lilith's plan was simple beneath the curses and plots she concocted: Outbreed Adam and his pet, then take ownership over the world. She would form a mighty army between her loins, they would scale the heights of Heaven to plunder power from it, and even if God ended the world lay waste to so much of it that in ending it he would commit the ultimate evil. A moral victory, if nothing else.
Though she respected [REDACTED] for his kindness and honesty, she saw no place for him but as a breeding bull for her goals-and once suitably guided, a sword swung at her enemies. Once clothed in flesh, she saw him to be almost lacking in desire-though looked aghast at him when the only thing he prayed for from God was challenge, wrestling the maker of all to test the limits of his abilities. Seeing his love for both God and immaculate order, she engaged him in social intercourse as well as the other kind to try to divide his priorities-trying to guide him to violence by asking what he would do to preserve the status quo, speaking of Adam's great fear of them both, and suggesting that ominous lake of fire over there probably meant...something ominous.
Her plan was immediately jeopardised by the fact that her children the Lilim, likewise almost never knowing parental love in all other iterations of reality, all loved [REDACTED] far more than her. She raged against them for being anything other than her violence personified, and they in turn raged at her for her pettiness and manipulation and callous pride. That Lilith shared a soul with her children-for she was concept as much as flesh, and they were her feelings given form as much as individuals-made this matter worse. [REDACTED] built cities the children didn't need, and carved canals they didn't see the point of, and negotiated blessings from Heaven they stared mystified at, and made structures like the wheel and the wrench that they laughed at. And they loved him all the more for it, for just as [REDACTED] loved divine providence they loved his unconditional kindness and the wonder he brought into their lives.
At one point, it occurred to Lilith she resented that she herself had never known such a feeling.
Inevitably there was war between the children of Adam and Lilith despite [REDACTED]'s attempts to preserve peace, and inevitably Lilith's children won. The children of Adam fought with invoked miracles and the might of carved stone, but their bodies were fixed in flesh. While the children of Lilith were as much spirit as flesh, and took on vast and terrible forms, and at last found purpose for their father's many gifts.
Lilith remembers that she could have ended the war in blood and fire. She remembers Adam's clan huddling behind him in terror and exhaustion, as serpents eclipsed the sky and giants howled in exultation. She was still the Lilim's sovereign as the dominant force among them, and she would like to say in that moment she was wise to God's retribution if she had taken her vengeance further. That she found it beneath her, knowing there were greater worlds to conquer. That the eternal nightmare of her visage was better revenge than the finality of death.
[Expand Post]
Lilith could say at the time, she truly had no mercy. But she would never say she simply guided her clan away because [REDACTED] asked her, very gently, to consider sparing the children that had never threatened her.
REVELATION
>"I'm sorry"
>"I wish you cared"
Lilith remembers the next few eons as a time of riotous, hedonistic, wonderful anarchy beyond anything she had ever dreamed of even as she spoke of it to [REDACTED] as the chance to bring Heaven's bounty to all worlds. She remembers the rift in their reality that had deposited them in another, stranger garden in which angels spread beauty for an absent God and starry-eyed riders dwelled in the void. She remembers running through fields of predatory narratives and slaughtering them while whispering poison in [REDACTED]'s ears as he converged on a world where godslayers had slain and imprisoned spirits of titanic spoke-enraging him since never before. She remembers the depths of Wonderland and the mysteries of Uncreated Night, and she remembers dancing naked on the streets of Metropolis as God's blood drenched her skin like rain. Where [REDACTED] found respite in Eden and was horrified by the suffering beyond it, Lilith had felt nothing but paranoia and the crushing pressure of predestination. The greater multiverse freed her to not just obtain cosmic power, but to relearn the simple joys of discovery that Lilith never knew mortal children could experience until then.
She flatters herself that she was the one who truly responsible for making [REDACTED] into the principle of tyranny itself. But Lilith cannot help but acknowledge [REDACTED] changed her just as much. His determination seized divine forces and fonts of cosmic power Lilith never imagined, and in her first tumultuous apotheosis he held her even as she raked his back in anguish at the agony of degrading death. His insights refined her curses to a level she never imagined possible, and he never failed to thank or credit her when her own helped him topple tyrant gods or raise peasants into heroes. More than once, she contemplates there was never a power struggle between them simply because it never occurred to [REDACTED] there needed to be one. He simply set up other kingdoms, then arrayed them around hers like a ring of spears.
In short, Lilith was given as much capacity for kindness, empathy and remorse by [REDACTED] as he was given ruthlessness, cruelty and zealous hatred by her. An inevitable day came when [REDACTED], at last, was horrified by the trail of carnage they had left across the multiverse-and even as he resolved to begin anew in a mortal avatar to learn where he erred, it never occurred to [REDACTED] to blame Lilith. In fact, during the Human Order Recompilation event he expressed nothing but gratitude to her, an awareness of her nature and the sincere belief that he would have been lesser without it-less prepared to carry out his vision of perfect order. Lilith spends much of her time wondering what kind of man he would have been without her, thinking on the sheer relief he exuded from whatever strange and distant future he was cast from to the garden.