shapes and incarnations, and they all flinched a little under that thoughtful gaze, even if they didn’t remember why. She made them feel nervous, unworthy, on some deep and primal level. As though she knew something they had tried very hard to forget, or, if never known, had somehow always suspected.
“I am Lilith,” she said finally. “First wife to Adam, thrown out of Eden for refusing to acknowledge any authority but mine own. I descended into Hell and lay down with demons, and gave birth to monsters. All my marvellous children—the first to be invited to dwell in my Nightside. You are all my children, or descendants of my children. You are not gods, and never were. It takes more than worship to make you divine. I made you to be splendid and free, but you have grown small and limited down the many years, seduced by worship and acclaim, allowed yourselves to be shaped and enslaved by the imaginations of humanity. Well, playtime is over now, children. I am back, in the place I made for us, and it’s time to go to work. I’ve been away too long, and there is much to be put right.
“I have been here for some time, watching and learning. I walked among you, and you knew me not. You’ve been playing at being gods for so long you’ve forgotten you were ever anything else. But you owe your existence and loyalty to me. Your lives are mine, to do with as I please.”
The Beings and Forces and Powers looked at each other, stirring uneasily. It was all happening so fast. One minute they were being worshipped as divine, and the next… Some of them were beginning to remember. Some shook their heads in hopeless denial, even as tears ran down their faces. Some didn’t take at all kindly to being reminded of their true origins and obligations, and shouted defiance. And quite a large number were distinctly resentful at finding out they weren’t gods at all and never had been. The watching worshippers retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance, and let the gods argue it out amongst themselves. The argument was getting quite noisy, if not actually raucous, when Lilith silenced them all with a single sharp gesture.
“You,” she said, pointing to a single figure at the front of the pack. “I don’t know you. You’re not one of mine. What are you?”
The Engineer stared calmly back at her, while everyone else edged away from him. He was squat and broad and only vaguely humanoid, with blue steel shapes piercing blue flesh, and long strips of bare muscle tissue held together with bolts and springs. Steam hissed from his naked joints, his eyes glowed like coals, and if you got close enough you could hear his heart ticking. He was surrounded and protected by a group of gangling metal constructions, of intricate design and baroque sensibilities, though whether they were the engineer’s worshippers or his creations was unclear.
“I am a Transient Being,” said the Engineer, in a voice like metal scraping against metal. “A physical incarnation of an abstract idea. I am immortal because I am a concept, not because I have your unnatural blood in my ancestry. The world has become so much more complex since your time, Lilith. All of this… is none of my business. So I’ll leave you to get on with it.”
He turned and walked sideways from the world, disappearing down a direction most of those present couldn’t even comprehend, let alone identify, and in a moment he was gone. The steel-and-brass constructions he left behind collapsed emptily, so much scrap metal littering the ground. Lilith stood silent for a moment, nonplussed. That hadn’t been in the script. Emboldened by the Engineer’s defiance, some of the Beings stepped forward to confront Lilith.
“We heard you were banished,” drawled the Splendid, leaving a shimmering trail behind him as he moved. “Forced out of the world you made, by those you trusted and empowered.”
“Thrust into Limbo,” said La Belle Dame du Rocher, in her watery voice. “Until some damned fool let you out, let you back into the Nightside to trouble us again with bad dreams of our beginnings.”
“Some say you’ve been here for years,” said Molly Widdershins, showing her stained and blocky teeth in something that was only nominally a smile. “So where have you been hiding, all this time?”
“Not hiding,” said Lilith, and the chill in her voice made them all fall back a pace. “I’ve been… preparing. So much to do, and so many to do it to. And then, of course, I had to produce a new child, and see to his education. He is mine, body and soul, even if he doesn’t realise it yet. My dearest darling John Taylor.”
The name rumbled through the crowd, from worshippers and worshipped alike, and not in a good way. Many shifted uneasily, and aspects flickered on and off in the crowd like heat lightning. The Splendid opened his perfect mouth to protest further, and Lilith reached out and touched him lightly on the forehead. He cried out in shock and horror as his life energy was ripped right out of him, to feed Lilith’s endless hunger. She sucked him dry in a moment, watching calmly as he crumpled and shrivelled up before her, all his power nothing more to her than a drop in her ocean. The Splendid blinked out and was gone, as though he had never been. Lilith smiled about her.
“Just a little illustration of my mood, so everyone knows where they stand. I may be your mother, but I won’t abide over-familiarity. Now, where are those who banded together to betray me, so very long ago? To banish me from my own creation? Step forward, that I might look upon your faces once again.”
There was a long, uncomfortable pause, then the Devil’s Bride stepped forward reluctantly, the conjoined twin in the hump on her back peering over her shoulder. “They’re all gone, mistress,” said the little twin, in a sweet seductive voice. “Long and long ago. They killed each other, or were brought down, or grew irrelevant to the modern world and just faded away. There’s only one left that we know of. Its original name is lost to us. We call it the Carrion in Tears, and it is quite insane.”
She darted back into the safety of the crowd, while others pushed forward the Carrion in Tears, a huge body of rotting flesh, red and black and purple, with jagged ends of bones protruding from suppurating flesh. Forever decaying, never dying, quite mad. It snapped at the world with broken teeth, dull grey in muddy scarlet flesh, and its cloudy eyes were fixed and staring.
“It incorporates dead things into itself,” volunteered Molly Widdershins. “They keep it going. Make it strong.”
“And this… has followers?” said Lilith.
“Of a kind,” said Molly.
“Proof, if proof were needed, that some people will worship absolutely anything,” said Lilith. “As long as it has the stink of immortality about it.”
Some of the Carrion in Tears’ worshippers were thrust forward through the crowd, to face Lilith. They dressed in soiled rags and torn plastic, with grime artfully smeared across their faces. The oldest among them raised his head proudly and stood defiantly before Lilith.
“We worship it because it shows us the truth. The real world is filth and rot, pollution and corruption. Our god shows us the dirty truth behind the pretty face. When all else is fallen into ruin, our god will remain, and we will be with him.”
“No you won’t,” said Lilith. “You offend me even more than he does.” And she killed them all, with a glance.
The Carrion in Tears didn’t notice. It was too busy digesting a dead angel it had noticed lying by its foot. Inch by inch, the dead angel was sucked into the Being’s corrupt flesh and absorbed. The smell was awful, and even other Beings looked away. The Carrion in Tears straightened up abruptly, as the last lingering traces of the angel’s divine energies surged through it, and shocked the slumbering mind awake. It cried out, a thick choking sound of horrid awareness, and fixed Lilith with its staring eyes.
“You! This is all your fault! See what has become of me! Look at what driving you out did to me!”
“I see it,” Lilith said calmly. “Fair punishment, I’d have said, for a traitor and a fool.”
“It was necessary,” said the Carrion in Tears, but it sounded tired, as though repeating an old, worn-out argument. “And now you’re back, and it was all for nothing. I told them, but they wouldn’t listen… Kill me if you want. I don’t care. I was beautiful once, and adored… I don’t recognise this Nightside. You won’t either. It’s all changed. It’s moved on and left us behind.”
“Killing you would be a mercy, in your current state,” said Lilith. “But what the hell. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”
She absorbed all its living energies in a moment, then made a moue of distaste with her night-dark mouth as the Carrion in Tears vanished into her. “Nasty,” she said to the silent crowd. “But I promised myself that I’d kill all of my old enemies who survived, and I always keep my word. Now, step forward, my children. The original productions of my young and lusty flesh.”
She called for them by their original names, and again there was a long pause. Finally, a mere handful of Beings made their way to the front of the crowd to face their long-forgotten mother. First was the Harlequin, who
