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For the Love of Death
- For the Love of Death -
Based upon a series of otherworldly events from my present life...
As a child, I was always quite often misunderstood. People did not comprehend me I think, and I oft did not truly comprehend them. I was ever an outsider, and as such it was difficult for me to be the kind of person that others expected me to be. When I was sixteen years old, I had already endured the harsh knowledge that I was a disappointment to my family. Yet, in truth they were disappointments to me far more! I was so very young at the time, yet incomprehensibly ancient in soul and spirit. I was not at all like other children my age, and everyone around me knew it. My mother always told me that I had in me alien genetics, and she was not jesting when she said so. She had been a believer in otherworldly things, yet should never have fathomed the things that even at that age I had borne witness to. Things like Lilith. She whom some fear and call by a very far more common name. Her common name. Death!
You may ask how it came to be that way, how I came to know her so intimately and well. One night when my mother and one of my cousins and I were all out for a walk in town... we spotted flying over the pond at the center of town about five pale white flying saucers. They were not searchlight discs, for they had not the cones you see on searchlights. Rather, they flitted here and there unnaturally and at one point formed the pattern of an inverted star in the sky, with each flying saucer at a point of the pentacle. I was no stranger to the occult! Since I was fourteen years old, I had become immersed in it, and I had met before the woman whom I would meet again on this occasion. It was the last month of the summer season, well into the end of August, and that mean it was the dawn of the ancient Samhain season. The dark season, the season of the dead! As we walked along, the flying discs descended closer and we had been able to make out windows in the crafts through which we could noticed several people. Only the people we saw all had pure white skin and ebony black hair, with black eyes to match. They were, in short, extraterrestrials or at least so they seemed to be in appearance. We ran further on into town, very afraid of these bizarre happenings, and hoping to get away from those alien vehicles. Once in the main street in the middle of town, the saucers were lost to our view and seemed to be gone. That... was far from the end of this strangest of ordeals, however! I was about to come nearly face to face with... her.
Upon the sidewalk of the main street, we spotted a highly strange woman walking towards us. Like those in the flying saucers, she had skin so purely white that it was like the color of bleached bone. Her hair was jet black and it was long and very flowing, with a single white streak down the side of it. She had a shapely hourglass figure and wore a sparkling black jumpsuit with wide legs and short puffy-type sleeves, an outfit that was draped exquisitely over her splendid body. She was about my age, I noticed, and wore a pair of black sandals on her feet. Her face was elegant, rounded, and she had a cheerful kind of smile that made me feel good when I glanced in her direction. She wore black lipstick, but her eyes I could not see due to the fact that she was wearing a pair of black sunglasses of the type that had those rather big lenses and rims, which completely covered her eyes in such a way that nothing could be seen of them at all. She seemed hauntingly familiar to me! But this was not what my mother or my cousin had seen. Each of them saw a different looking woman, one particular to their lives and who had some special meaning regarding their futures. My cousin, who was one year younger than myself, saw this one particular blonde girl whom she would later meet as an adult many years later when she attempted to steal the girl's... the woman's... boyfriend or husband away from her, along with their children. The woman would end up beating my cousin very badly, and the whole situation would end in misery. My mother saw a girl with short black hair wearing a tee shirt with a very specific date upon it. The date on which my little brother would years later be born on. My mother was very afraid of the girl she beheld!
Her fear was a premonition, because only a decade after giving birth to my brother, my mother would die from a serious and deadly case of diabetes that she inherited from her father, my grandfather. But all I saw, was that hauntingly familiar, beautiful girl wearing the sparkling black jumpsuit. I mention this, and we all compared what we had seen and learned that something very unusual was going on. Just as we had compared notes about the unusual girl, the girl ran into a nearby alley and deliberately dropped her sunglasses on the sidewalk. When we looked down the alley, the girl had vanished entirely! And my mother picked up the sunglasses and put them on her face. She told us that while wearing them all that she around her appeared differently, like looking to another version of reality. She looked at me while wearing them and screamed. Then, she took the sunglasses off and threw them into a nearby car's open window. “That's it!” she yelled in an angry tone, “We're going home right now!” and we turned around and began to walk home. “What is it, what did you see?” asked my cousin, but my mother would not ell us what she had witnessed that frightened her so much. “Too much, too much! And none of it good.” she kept complaining as walked... no, ran... back towards the pond. I was not comprehending what was going on, although I suspected that my mother had seen my true self. What was hidden under my skin, in the very core of the real me. The alien me. It had confirmed what she long suspected about me, and she was not at all happy about this. I would learn all of that later, years later, when she confided in me all of what she had seen while wearing those strange, alien sunglasses. But on that night... we ran fast!
Upon reaching the pond, the flying saucers were back and descended upon us quickly. No other cars or people were out and about that evening, and so there were no witnesses to any of these odd events. All of a sudden, my mother and my cousin both felt a strange desire to go the park past the cemetery that loomed just up one street from the pond. In the far distance, the park was dark and there was an odd stillness in the air that seemed to cling to everything. “They are trying to get us to go the park!” my mother realized before long, before we had gotten to the cemetery itself. “We aren't going to do it! Run, just run until we reach the house! Then, we'll talk about everything.” she concluded decisively. We did just that, and as soon as we reached home the flying saucers had gone off upon their way. We talked a bit about this with my grandparents, and my grandmother was visibly irritated. She seemed jealous that we had this whole experience, saying: “If there really are aliens out there, why don't they just come on down and talk to me!” and then my grandmother ran out unto the side porch that overlooked our main driveway and the back yard, and she screamed this at the top of her lungs: “If you are really out there, come on down and talk to me! Stop stalking my family!” and then she came back inside and said: “You all see now? There's nothing there! Now let's just get on with the night. Okay?” So that was that. My mother and cousin went into the living room to watch some MTV on television while my grandparents retreated to their room, leaving me to go to my own room in order to read some books for a little while.
I had settled in to read one of my favorite fantasy novels, and some long hours passed. I could hear the loud music coming from the living room, and shook my head, musing: “You would think that my mother was the teenager, and that I was the one raising her!” and I simply could not get past how very foolish she often acted. I had a childlike side to me that at that age, which I was keeping hidden because it was not “cool” to be that way... but I never made the kinds of foolish choices that my mother all too often did. She hated me half the time because I was not like my “cooler” cousins, but my grandmother always encouraged me simply to be myself. When she wasn't verbally abusing me and my mother both. It was not a perfect family life for me, growing up... and I longed to be far away from all the drama, the fighting, and the fears that I felt every day growing inside of me. That was when I heard a knocking on my bedroom window. I thought that it was probably either just the tree branches hitting it outside, or perhaps some wild animal that was smacking into it. I ignored the sound and went back to my reading.
Three rapid knocks resounded in my room once again, only this time much louder. I started up to my feet, ran to the window on the far end of the room and cast open the curtains. Outside, was a very large bat banging against the glass and trying to get in. I banged on the window to make it go away and then turned out to head back to my chair. Suddenly, three more tremendous knocks echoed forth... and, as I spun around expecting to see the bat again... I instead saw the alien girl in the sparkling black jumpsuit, the girl from town. I had seen her before, I remembered. Ever since I was fourteen, she would at times appear in my room near by closet. Sometimes, she even hid in my closet! And she would come out as I laid down to sleep, and as she approached me I always felt a strange electric-like paralysis overcome my body. She would kiss me, and whisper things to me in another language I had never heard before. Then... she would change into a large black wolf and run into the shadows of my room, disappearing. I had convinced myself those were just dreams, but now I knew that this girl was real. And she was here in the flesh and trying to get into my room! I walked over to the window... she called inside to me: “Let me in, let me in please... I need to talk to you quickly!” and I felt that she did, and so I did as she bid me and unlocked the window, pushing it up and open. She clambered into the room and sat down on the bed that was up against the side wall of my room. She sighed, brushed herself off with her hands, and said to me: “It has been a very long time, hasn't it?” and I had no idea what she was talking about. “I have to help you to remember who you are... and who I am.” she explained to me. She spoke English in a very peculiar accent that sounded quite foreign but like nothing on Earth. Yet, I could understand each and every word perfectly! She was so strange and yet so beautiful and magnificent to my eyes. “Teach me then!” I said to her. “I want to learn.” I was highly introverted in those years of my life, and I rarely spoke to anyone outside of my immediate family. But there was something in this girl that brought me clear out of my shell, making me feel free and easy when talking with her. “I want to learn everything!”
Death... how do you describe such a woman? She is the very embodiment of the cessation of life, the endings of all things in existence. Yet... through death one may be reborn, reincarnated, and so live life anew. These are truths that even at that age I understood perfectly. She did not judge the dead, nor did she decide where the dead should go when their end was at hand... she was simply a guide, a friend, a companion and a mercy to those in need of such. Yet also, she was dreaded, feared, and even hated by so many! All because they equate her with endings rather than beginnings. She was a manifestation of a greater concept, a vaster truth, a force of nature and a necessity of existence. Without her, many that do languish in pain would never receive their release from torment. The seasons would not change, and so the leaves upon the trees would no longer perish in the autumn, and the snow would not descend in the wintertime. Spring would never arrive, and summer would not be so cherished... because it would not have winter to contrast it's vibrancy. She was needed, and on that night she was needed most... by me.
She wore no glasses, and I saw that her eyes were just totally black. You know how normal human beings have whites in their eyes? She had none at all. Looking into her eyes was like looking into the void of space but bereft of the stars or the moon to illuminate everything. I felt fear at first when I did gaze into them, but then the fear gave way to a profound sense of love. She was the most beautiful of all the girls I had ever seen in my life up that point... she was magnificent, and she was choosing now to speak with me. To be with me! Now, when I was at the loneliest point in my entire life. Earlier in that year, I had lost my first love Andrea. A girl who was murdered by her own father, who previously had killed her little sister. I had lost my will to go on living after that, but I kept going on like a machine... I lived, and yet I did not enjoy the act of living, because of my loss and how it had grieved me so deeply. It scarred me, changed me, left me with a seething hatred for and inability to trust humanity as a whole. Men sickened me, women did not understand me, and I felt utterly alone. Just like a scared little child.
I pretended to be cool but I was only a child at heart, and I had lost the only reason I had to even try to grow up. I did not know if that is what called Death to come to me on that night... but come to me she had, and was offering to awaken me to things I had lost sight of over the years. Perhaps even over the course of whole lifetimes! This would be the beginning of my healing, although I though that night she had come for me to bring about my end, which at the time I actually welcomed with grim anticipation. “You are not who you were born as in this life...” she began. “You are far, far more than that!” and she motioned for me to sit down on the bed right next to her. She was a head shorter than I was, and I was not a very tall person being only about five foot nine in height, if that. She made me feel taller than I actually was, and I liked that feeling a lot since it made me feel stronger than I was, as well. She let me put my arm around her and hold her close as she spoke to me quietly. “Although I could simply tell you all that I know...” she continued, “I would prefer just to show you instead! All you need let me do, is to put the palms of my hands upon the temples of your head... like this...” and she demonstrated with her hands what she meant, before stating: “And then, you will not just hear, but you will see!” and I let her do exactly as she pleased. She turned around, reached over to my head, and placed her palms upon the sides of it, squarely over my temples. Then, my entire sense of reality changed forever! I saw all, and I remembered everything, and I knew that this was just the beginning. There would be even more to see, to feel, to know and to learn... this girl was my guide, my teacher, my illumination and the start of my full enlightenment. This moment was the dawn of my full awakening! I was happy to surrender to her.
“Make love with me!” her voice echoed across a billion stars, bringing me back to the room, to the bed on which we both sat. Her hands were folded on her lap, and she was smiled seductively. I began to unzip her jumpsuit... the material was soft like silk or satin... and we proceeded to embrace once we had divested ourselves of our clothes. She was warm, she was hot, and she was not the coldness I had been expecting from Death! I felt ablaze with unbridled passion for her, and holding her was like holding fire equal to my own inner flame. At the height of our intense lovemaking, the pale girl cried out loudly in ecstasy and I could hear that my family heard the sound of it, but they did not seem to care. I heard the television being turned up louder, and was glad that we were being left alone. She was moaning with pleasure, and digging her fingernails into my back like claws, drawing blood. She licked the blood off one of her fingernails, then ran her hands through my hair while we kissed with pleasurable abandon and sheer wantonness. I had such long, long hair back then... a long time indeed before the sad year in which my mother was fated to die. In the year of her death, just following my mother's passing, all of my hair suddenly grew unnaturally thin and burned off of my head, my eyebrows along with it, with a sharp stinging sensation due to some bizarre condition that was never medically identified. My skin was unharmed by that, but ever after I have had to shave my head because what does grow back is not enough to look quite right. My eyebrows I must keep shaved for the same reasons. My blood also in time became more acidic in nature than it used to be... sometimes when I bleed, the blood burns my skin where it touches. It had always been somewhat so, but over time it grew more intense. There are even moments when I have cried tears of blood rather than normal tears! My night with Death was the moment when I was transformed... and when my body started to alter itself, changing me physically to match the spiritual and mental changes taking place. I shall speak no more of the passionate embrace that Death and I shared on that night, for it would not be decent to speak further of it. But once we had finished with our coupling, we dressed once again and sat together in order to talk of things a bit more. “I am going to make you more like me...” she said in a low tone. She took out a small switchblade from one of the pockets of her jumpsuit, and cut the palm of her left hand. She offered me the bleeding palm, and told me to drink of her blood: “I have tasted your blood, and more, and now you must taste of mine in order for us to become fully bonded, for all of time hereafter. As it was of old... so, it must be now!”
“I am not really comfortable with doing something like that.” I admitted to my new lover... to my eternal lover... and she said in a gentle tone of voice: “Death is not about being comfortable, my love! It is about facing uncomfortable truths and grim realities. I know that within the depths of your souls is a small, lost little child who is starving and thirsty for love in life. For someone... for anyone... to love, and who might love you in return. Now wait! I do not mock you by telling you this. I understand you, because in my heart there once existed something much the same. Slake your thirst for love, drink of my blood, and you will know my love for all eternity... and even beyond!” That was what reached me at last, and so I did as she bade me. She wiped my mouth afterwards with a tissue she carried in one of her pockets, and said serenely, in an almost motherly tone: “There, that's better! The changes... will be very gradual, they will not happen overnight. But they will happen, throughout the years to come! I am now going to tell you your true name, and reveal mine to you also. This is just between us, and no one must ever learn these names outside of our company! Do you understand me?” and I confessed that I did. She told me the two true names, and then insisted that I simply call her Lilith. She told me that it was safe for her to likewise openly refer to me by the name Samael, one of my most ancient names... but not my true name. Never that one! That was the understanding we came to next, as my memories flooded back into my mind more and more, increasing in detail and intensity. All the ancient memories that my birth into this life had caused me to forget at first... these same and many more besides rushed forth at last. I was becoming... complete. “I will be departing from this place very soon...” she confided in me. “And so, I must pass on a message to you from a woman named Diana. She wishes to meet you at the local park... you know the place, just up from the old cemetery one street up from here. One year from today, the same time of year! Once there, she will meet with you and finish what I began.” and I agreed to do as Lilith desired, planning to meet with this Diana when the appointed hour had come for me to do so.
I have written elsewhere of that meeting, and what transpired during it... and so it is not necessary to mention it here. When she had finished with all that needed to be said, and done, Lilith climbed back out the window and started to walk down the street in front of our house. All of a sudden I could hear my grandmother opening the front door loudly, like a maniac. She was yelling nastily at the poor girl, and that caused Lilith to run down the street very swiftly to get away from my grandmother's sight. This was the side of my grandmother that I hated, the insane, controlling, verbally abusive side! The noise woke my mother up... it was very late, and she had gone to her room to sleep while my cousin slept on the living room couch, since she was staying the night with us as a guest. My mother came out and said to my grandmother that she should not be yelling so loudly. My grandmother mentioned seeing the girl leave from the side of our house where my window was, and she admitted to my mother that she had chased Lilith off with her screaming. I came out into the living room where all this commotion was, and my grandmother pointed to me and told my mother that she had heard Lilith and I having sex. But rather than be angry with me over it, my mother just said proudly to me: “Good! At least now you've lost your virginity and gotten laid for the first time. Saves me the trouble of having to keep setting you up with girls, if you can get them on your own!” and I did not try to explain who the girl had been, or why this was not a normal average girl of the sort that my family thought it was. My cousin woke up and complained: “I don't know what everyone's yelling so loud about, but would you all mind going back to bed? I'm tired!” I glared at my mother and my grandmother before going back to my room and slamming the door. The next day, my grandmother nailed all of the windows in the house shut and that is how they stayed in all the years I lived there while my grandmother yet lived. She had done that one other time before, the night she tried to keep me from going to try and save Andrea's life, when she had locked me in my own room after nailing my windows shut. Following Andrea's death, I had torn out all the nails, breaking my window in the process. She had it fixed... and until now, had not nailed it again.
There would be other girls, other women, over the long years to come... other loves, sometimes other losses as well, but never quite like what I had once shared with Lilith and she with me. Once, I tried to recreate the events of that night... with a woman who begged me to find a way for Lilith to possess her. She wanted not simply to be like Lilith... she wanted to be Lilith herself. But it did not work, Death did not come to inhabit the woman after all, and in the end things did not even remotely work out between that woman and I, and we had parted ways when everything between us fell through. I had many loves and many lovers... male and female alike. I was born hermaphroditic, but with fully functioning male genitalia, which is exceedingly rare for a hermaphrodite. Despite that, I could be either male or female myself for a person who was interested in being with me. I mostly never brought Lilith up unless I was asked about her directly, in which case I simply told what I knew. Sometimes, I told too much I think... because there was at least one woman who complained to me that she could not allow herself to believe me, because in order to do so she would have to change everything she once believed in and after that start to question everything she had been raised to think was holy and sacred in this world. I realized that some people might, if they knew everything, see me as the Devil... and Lilith as the Devil's harlot. So mostly, I avoided the subject whenever it was prudent to do so. No one ever did learn my true name, and I never spoke it nor ever wrote it down. It was within me, a part of me, along with Lilith's as well. That was enough for it to matter, and it kept me safe from those who would use that knowledge against me. There are always those sorts in the world! I am not like others from my generation... I am not like many other people in general. I am unique, singular, and sometimes very, very lonely because of this.
One time, Lilith came to me in a vision and spoke the following words of encouragement to me while my life was going through a very impossibly dark period: “My beloved, you should not feel so alone... but rather, know that I am never far from your side! Yes, you are very different from all others, but that is not such a terrible thing. All living beings possess a beauty that is unique to them, and yours delights me greatly. You have sought to recreate our love, and through doing so you have shown me so much of what a living being is sometimes capable of when seeking to please one whom they hold dear. Even if you showed me the entire universe in all of its' wonder and diversity, or the brightness of the heavens or the crimson glow of hellfire, I would not be as pleased!” Diana once told me that two years after we had made love, Lilith's physical body died from an unspecified wasting sickness that also caused her body to break out in horrible lesions all over it. She had been sick even back when she came to me, but not like towards the end! On this occasion I asked of her: “Beloved, are you dead?” and she replied to me very frankly and honestly by saying: “Can Death truly die, at all? What is one body! I... have countless shapes, forms, and emanations... some living, some nonliving, some sentient and some without a shred of consciousness as you might understand it. Like the life-force of all that is, I am a part of all that is... and I live forever in your heart. So no, I am not dead... I am eternal. Everything that possesses a soul and a spirit is likewise eternal! Even if they know it not.” And so I came to understand the mind, as well as the heart, of Death in ways that no living being has ever come close to. She opened herself up to me, and I beheld things the like of which there are no words for. It was an experience best felt, best seen, best comprehended on a primal level. Even Diana, was unaware of this hidden level of reality!
There are places in this universe that some people should never go to, not in the physical raiment of the body, nor in the more naked raiment of the spirit... but I allowed myself to venture forth hither, and so I found that there were truths... forbidden truths... that I could never share with anyone. Only Lilith, in her connection to all things, knew where I had been and all that I had seen and done there. Why do I tell of these things? So that others might learn and come to understand the things that make me so very different, that set me apart from so many others... and which sometimes make me feel like an outsider.
In another life, in a time long past... I was standing upon a rough hilltop overlooking a vast stretch of ruins. It was the remains of a once-great city, now just piles of very twisted metal, shattered glass, and vitrified remnants of long dead trees. The foundations of stone, concrete and steel where laid bare, but nothing of the life that had teemed within that place remained. The water was poisoned, the soil was burned, but the reclaimed air was at least breathable once again thanks to science. Blood stained some of the walls of the ruins... ancient blood, long dried into almost unrecognizable forms. The explosion that had done this, was from a weapon that destroyed even itself when it fired. It would never be able to be used again, nor should it have been used even in the first place. Death showed me this vision once, and I will now explain it here fully! It was in a future far removed from the carnage of the Elemental Wars of old, and it was on a planet other than ancient Ra'qia. This planet had been called Olympia, and its' wholesale destruction led to its' population fleeing to its' successor world of Olympia Primus. As far from this dead planet as one could get to comfortably! This was long before the human race decided to make Earth its' home.. and long after the holy planet of Ra'qia, which some called Kolob and Kobol, had been decimated and rendered a post-apocalyptic ruin and a mere shell of its' former glories. It was also long, long after the annihilation of my people's adopted home planet of Rahab. Also known in the ancient tongues as Terra Primus... which was now only a belt of asteroids that lay between Mars and Jupiter in the Sol star system. Terra Minor was our name for Earth. I had come to Olympia seeking a kind of righteous vengeance against those who destroyed Terra Primus, a planet I had been made the absolute god-monarch of prior to its' destruction. I had been very cruelly assassinated along with a girl whom I had come to love and who loved me beyond all else in the universe, and then I was resurrected through cloning... only to be brutally tortured, enslaved for years, then brainwashed to become a killing machine in the service of my enemies. I broke their conditioning, for my will was stronger than their malice... but only after they had used me to slay all that remained of the race I had come to regard as my children. The Titans! The Olympians had no regard for our people, our traditions, or our way of life. I had no regard for their tyranny! And so I rose up in rebellion against them, and along with me were a countless number of others who decided that the time was right for the Titans to rise again. They had not all perished, after all... I spared all the ones whom my “masters” did not know about, or I faked their deaths whenever it was possible to do so. Nor had we Archons perished, we who were the Titans' ancient rulers and predecessors. Nor had perished, so many of the Draconian species of reptilian people of Terra Primus, who had fled and gone into hiding or exile in order to escape genocide at the hands of the self-righteous humans of Olympia and the various other colonies of humanity that had dared to lay my people so low. This was a war of annihilation, and I had no choice but to kill or be killed during its' course. That is how this came to happen on Olympia... this horror that I myself had ordered perpetrated in my name. It would not be last of the colony worlds to be so dealt with, but it was one of the first of them that we struck against. I walked towards the ruins, remembering all of this and musing upon it as I tread... crushing charred skulls and bones into dust under my feet. I felt guilty about this act, because it was not like me! It was more like the cruelties perpetrated by humanity against us. I had lived among them once, sat in their councils, and tried to even see myself as one of them for a time. But no longer!
I had myself become Death in an almost literal way, a literal destroyer of worlds. They had devastated one planet and blasted a second one into rubble and nothingness. But, we would go on to destroy many, in seeking to avenge the two that had been taken from us. Some in nuclear fire, rained down upon the planets from our warships in space... but others, like this Olympia were destroyed on the surface with far more cruel devices and brutal tactics that had not been seen in countless generations. People called me the Devil... and said I would not be content until all humanity was eliminated from their planetary colonies and habitations. But I only wanted to show them how much I was hurting. I wanted it to end!
The war would eventually grow beyond all control, until at last both sides had to sue for peace and seek a new home elsewhere, eventually journeying to Terra Minor. To Earth! That is how the “gods” came to Earth, and how humanity was likewise brought there. But on this occasion, it was in the early days of the Titan campaign of retribution against the Olympians... and we were both equally brutal in our actions against one another. There were no winners in that war, unlike during the time of the old Elemental Wars in which the basic conventions of war were still somewhat followed. Now, there was only one rule, and that rule was Death's to dictate. I knelt in the middle of those ruins, I picked up a single handful of dust and ashes, and I allowed myself to weep for the dead. I did this at least once on every world that my people “conquered”. I was not human, but I understood human feelings. For I had feelings much the same! We were not so different, our rival species, after all. All of a sudden, she was standing at my side. I had not seen her since this terrible war began... back when she was acting as the queen of Olympia itself. My spies informed me that she had fled to the planet of Olympia Primus when this world was scourged. I planned to meet her there and for a time pledge my loyalty to her in a bid for peace. Eventually, it would end in tragedy for the Queen of Ionia, the capital city of the new world. But for a time, for a span of many long years, I served her loyally under the name she assumed during that bygone era. She and I signed an armistice, and it was upheld for so long as she lived! But one day... I was told that she was dying, and that it was my own fault. You see, she had a wasting sickness akin to a kind of cancer, but worse and quicker-acting than many cancers known on Earth. When her body began to break down, I was told to administer to her a series of immunizing curatives and genetic preservative medicines. This was supposed to stop the cancer from spreading and speed its' remission if it was still possible to do so... but it ended up doing exactly the opposite. An enemy spy from a planet where the people wanted to see the ending of the armistice and the return of the old state of war had infiltrated the queen's palace and replaced these healing items' contents with a type of poison known as Hydra Blood. Normally, Hydra Blood was not lethal... but in high enough doses it could kill very fast. As it is, it was believed that the queen had somehow managed to come into contact with the poison previously and that is how she came down with the cancer that now ate away at her from within. I had always suspected the chief physician, since a long time prior he had stated that he was developing a medication that would make the queen immune to any and all poisons that an enemy might wish to slip to her. It was not long after that, when the first signs of her cancer were reported by more reliable doctors in her employ. I had the spy arrested... it was indeed the man I suspected... and I oversaw his execution myself, by means of dissection. But this act of bloody justice was not enough to save my beloved! Once it became apparent that she was dying and could not be saved... a plan was put into place, to create a healthy clone of her body using DNA on record from before she had been poisoned to begin with. The clone was grown and it was enhanced with Titan mechanics... in order to allow it to facilitate the downloading of her soul's energy into it. Before the armistice was dissolved, the resurrected queen made a deal with me and my people that granted her the use of our soul transfer techniques. The principles were simple enough! The spirit is what houses the soul, and it is a form of energy, a spark of the Divine Force that is the source of all that is. We had the means to detect the divine spark in a person and transfer it between bodies if the need to do so should ever arise. Using this method, she wished to be given a different body entirely... one that was made as a backup clone for her should the first clone prove to be defective. This backup clone was in the form of a child version of the queen herself, rather than the adult body she inhabited previously. She liked the child body much better, and the adult clone was made the backup after that. Following her death and resurrection, she was determined to avenge herself upon humanity, and I too longed for renewed retribution against the people who had engineered my beloved's death. In killing the assumed body of Death herself, the people of the remaining colony planets had sealed their ultimate fate. For Death had now returned, and I was at her side and ready to bring her wrath upon each world!
That was all yet to transpire... in the hour in which I knelt in the midst of that wrecked city upon the surface of the dead planet of Olympia. But the queen... Death herself.. came to me, as I knelt amid so many morbid horrors all around me. She placed a delicate hand upon my shoulder, and she calmly and lovingly said: “It has been a long time since the Elemental Wars, has it not?” and I replied: “Indeed, it has been. I was planning to come to you next, to seek a peaceful resolution to this conflict.” But, she reminded me: “It was I who told you that if you truly loved me, then you would show our enemies no mercy. Way back on Terra Primus, before it was broken asunder! When the armadas of our foes had first been spotted entering our region of space.” And she was correct... I had done all of this for her in the end. To make her happy, as much as to avenge my slaughtered people and the cruel things that had befallen me. “What if I cannot stop? They turned me into a killing machine, a tool for slaughter. An instrument of death! And now, I just want peace, and an end to this war.” and Death reminded me: “If you are indeed my instrument... then your yearning for peace must be an echo of my own unspoken desire as well. Let us speak of it now, then! And work towards a peaceful resolution... for everyone.” She wore a black form-fitting gown with long wide sleeves and a hood drawn about her head. Around her waist was a white leather belt with tiny silver skulls decorating the whole length of it. She skin was as white as that belt, and her face was ageless and beautiful. Like a porcelain doll's face, in a way. This was the face of Death, and when I looked into it I could deny her nothing. I agreed to her terms, and had a mind to journey with her to Olympia Primus in order to see if we could begin our lives anew. “Death is not always about endings you know...” she reminded me. “Sometimes, I am more just about change.”
In this modern age on the planet Earth, it is a long time gone from that day. That old savage war is in the very distant past, and I wear a human form now myself, though not by my own choice. I had come in this life to know and love Death, once again... and to lose her once again. But Death can never truly die, because she is a part of all. And so she has come to me again and again over the years since my late teens. You cannot keep such as her away, since she cannot be denied. In the end... every living thing, is fated to meet her, and I was blessed in that I have met her while still living, and I did not die myself as a result of that meeting. Even today, I know who and what I truly am! Some call me the Devil, but that is not the truth. It is only a title given to something that humanity does not fully understand or in any way comprehend. What they do not understand, they seek to destroy because they hate the unknown! And that is what makes so many people unworthy of the knowledge that I possess and can grant unto them. I grant my knowledge, instead, only to those who prove themselves worthy... and, all others I keep at a reasonable distance from such higher matters. I do not know everything, and am still learning a great deal over time myself. It has been so many years since I was sixteen and seeking, without knowing all that I was about to find! The changes that Death wrought in me have run their course, and I am now a thing very different from what I was as a child. Human in appearance, but within I am simply... other.
I have learned to embrace all my otherness, to relish it and cherish it... through it, I have kept my own inner child alive even through the most difficult of times. Through it, I have found the strength to keep moving forward towards the future, while being ever mindful of what transpired in the past. Through it, I have come to understand the mind of Death herself and to also better comprehend life... and why it is such a precious thing. Through my otherness, I have found my redemption! In the world today, there is so much war, and so much death and destruction. My beloved Dark Mistress has been very busy of late and she has had to weep many tears for all the innocent lives lost each and every day. Tears of blood, that sting her sweet skin bitterly! I have wept identical tears... which have stung my skin likewise. Love is not a thing which burdens us, not like some foolish people regard it! It is a thing which can release us from all pain. Love is the path to peace, but some fear it. How similar is love, then... to Death herself!
Based upon a series of otherworldly events from my present life...
As a child, I was always quite often misunderstood. People did not comprehend me I think, and I oft did not truly comprehend them. I was ever an outsider, and as such it was difficult for me to be the kind of person that others expected me to be. When I was sixteen years old, I had already endured the harsh knowledge that I was a disappointment to my family. Yet, in truth they were disappointments to me far more! I was so very young at the time, yet incomprehensibly ancient in soul and spirit. I was not at all like other children my age, and everyone around me knew it. My mother always told me that I had in me alien genetics, and she was not jesting when she said so. She had been a believer in otherworldly things, yet should never have fathomed the things that even at that age I had borne witness to. Things like Lilith. She whom some fear and call by a very far more common name. Her common name. Death!
You may ask how it came to be that way, how I came to know her so intimately and well. One night when my mother and one of my cousins and I were all out for a walk in town... we spotted flying over the pond at the center of town about five pale white flying saucers. They were not searchlight discs, for they had not the cones you see on searchlights. Rather, they flitted here and there unnaturally and at one point formed the pattern of an inverted star in the sky, with each flying saucer at a point of the pentacle. I was no stranger to the occult! Since I was fourteen years old, I had become immersed in it, and I had met before the woman whom I would meet again on this occasion. It was the last month of the summer season, well into the end of August, and that mean it was the dawn of the ancient Samhain season. The dark season, the season of the dead! As we walked along, the flying discs descended closer and we had been able to make out windows in the crafts through which we could noticed several people. Only the people we saw all had pure white skin and ebony black hair, with black eyes to match. They were, in short, extraterrestrials or at least so they seemed to be in appearance. We ran further on into town, very afraid of these bizarre happenings, and hoping to get away from those alien vehicles. Once in the main street in the middle of town, the saucers were lost to our view and seemed to be gone. That... was far from the end of this strangest of ordeals, however! I was about to come nearly face to face with... her.
Upon the sidewalk of the main street, we spotted a highly strange woman walking towards us. Like those in the flying saucers, she had skin so purely white that it was like the color of bleached bone. Her hair was jet black and it was long and very flowing, with a single white streak down the side of it. She had a shapely hourglass figure and wore a sparkling black jumpsuit with wide legs and short puffy-type sleeves, an outfit that was draped exquisitely over her splendid body. She was about my age, I noticed, and wore a pair of black sandals on her feet. Her face was elegant, rounded, and she had a cheerful kind of smile that made me feel good when I glanced in her direction. She wore black lipstick, but her eyes I could not see due to the fact that she was wearing a pair of black sunglasses of the type that had those rather big lenses and rims, which completely covered her eyes in such a way that nothing could be seen of them at all. She seemed hauntingly familiar to me! But this was not what my mother or my cousin had seen. Each of them saw a different looking woman, one particular to their lives and who had some special meaning regarding their futures. My cousin, who was one year younger than myself, saw this one particular blonde girl whom she would later meet as an adult many years later when she attempted to steal the girl's... the woman's... boyfriend or husband away from her, along with their children. The woman would end up beating my cousin very badly, and the whole situation would end in misery. My mother saw a girl with short black hair wearing a tee shirt with a very specific date upon it. The date on which my little brother would years later be born on. My mother was very afraid of the girl she beheld!
Her fear was a premonition, because only a decade after giving birth to my brother, my mother would die from a serious and deadly case of diabetes that she inherited from her father, my grandfather. But all I saw, was that hauntingly familiar, beautiful girl wearing the sparkling black jumpsuit. I mention this, and we all compared what we had seen and learned that something very unusual was going on. Just as we had compared notes about the unusual girl, the girl ran into a nearby alley and deliberately dropped her sunglasses on the sidewalk. When we looked down the alley, the girl had vanished entirely! And my mother picked up the sunglasses and put them on her face. She told us that while wearing them all that she around her appeared differently, like looking to another version of reality. She looked at me while wearing them and screamed. Then, she took the sunglasses off and threw them into a nearby car's open window. “That's it!” she yelled in an angry tone, “We're going home right now!” and we turned around and began to walk home. “What is it, what did you see?” asked my cousin, but my mother would not ell us what she had witnessed that frightened her so much. “Too much, too much! And none of it good.” she kept complaining as walked... no, ran... back towards the pond. I was not comprehending what was going on, although I suspected that my mother had seen my true self. What was hidden under my skin, in the very core of the real me. The alien me. It had confirmed what she long suspected about me, and she was not at all happy about this. I would learn all of that later, years later, when she confided in me all of what she had seen while wearing those strange, alien sunglasses. But on that night... we ran fast!
Upon reaching the pond, the flying saucers were back and descended upon us quickly. No other cars or people were out and about that evening, and so there were no witnesses to any of these odd events. All of a sudden, my mother and my cousin both felt a strange desire to go the park past the cemetery that loomed just up one street from the pond. In the far distance, the park was dark and there was an odd stillness in the air that seemed to cling to everything. “They are trying to get us to go the park!” my mother realized before long, before we had gotten to the cemetery itself. “We aren't going to do it! Run, just run until we reach the house! Then, we'll talk about everything.” she concluded decisively. We did just that, and as soon as we reached home the flying saucers had gone off upon their way. We talked a bit about this with my grandparents, and my grandmother was visibly irritated. She seemed jealous that we had this whole experience, saying: “If there really are aliens out there, why don't they just come on down and talk to me!” and then my grandmother ran out unto the side porch that overlooked our main driveway and the back yard, and she screamed this at the top of her lungs: “If you are really out there, come on down and talk to me! Stop stalking my family!” and then she came back inside and said: “You all see now? There's nothing there! Now let's just get on with the night. Okay?” So that was that. My mother and cousin went into the living room to watch some MTV on television while my grandparents retreated to their room, leaving me to go to my own room in order to read some books for a little while.
I had settled in to read one of my favorite fantasy novels, and some long hours passed. I could hear the loud music coming from the living room, and shook my head, musing: “You would think that my mother was the teenager, and that I was the one raising her!” and I simply could not get past how very foolish she often acted. I had a childlike side to me that at that age, which I was keeping hidden because it was not “cool” to be that way... but I never made the kinds of foolish choices that my mother all too often did. She hated me half the time because I was not like my “cooler” cousins, but my grandmother always encouraged me simply to be myself. When she wasn't verbally abusing me and my mother both. It was not a perfect family life for me, growing up... and I longed to be far away from all the drama, the fighting, and the fears that I felt every day growing inside of me. That was when I heard a knocking on my bedroom window. I thought that it was probably either just the tree branches hitting it outside, or perhaps some wild animal that was smacking into it. I ignored the sound and went back to my reading.
Three rapid knocks resounded in my room once again, only this time much louder. I started up to my feet, ran to the window on the far end of the room and cast open the curtains. Outside, was a very large bat banging against the glass and trying to get in. I banged on the window to make it go away and then turned out to head back to my chair. Suddenly, three more tremendous knocks echoed forth... and, as I spun around expecting to see the bat again... I instead saw the alien girl in the sparkling black jumpsuit, the girl from town. I had seen her before, I remembered. Ever since I was fourteen, she would at times appear in my room near by closet. Sometimes, she even hid in my closet! And she would come out as I laid down to sleep, and as she approached me I always felt a strange electric-like paralysis overcome my body. She would kiss me, and whisper things to me in another language I had never heard before. Then... she would change into a large black wolf and run into the shadows of my room, disappearing. I had convinced myself those were just dreams, but now I knew that this girl was real. And she was here in the flesh and trying to get into my room! I walked over to the window... she called inside to me: “Let me in, let me in please... I need to talk to you quickly!” and I felt that she did, and so I did as she bid me and unlocked the window, pushing it up and open. She clambered into the room and sat down on the bed that was up against the side wall of my room. She sighed, brushed herself off with her hands, and said to me: “It has been a very long time, hasn't it?” and I had no idea what she was talking about. “I have to help you to remember who you are... and who I am.” she explained to me. She spoke English in a very peculiar accent that sounded quite foreign but like nothing on Earth. Yet, I could understand each and every word perfectly! She was so strange and yet so beautiful and magnificent to my eyes. “Teach me then!” I said to her. “I want to learn.” I was highly introverted in those years of my life, and I rarely spoke to anyone outside of my immediate family. But there was something in this girl that brought me clear out of my shell, making me feel free and easy when talking with her. “I want to learn everything!”
Death... how do you describe such a woman? She is the very embodiment of the cessation of life, the endings of all things in existence. Yet... through death one may be reborn, reincarnated, and so live life anew. These are truths that even at that age I understood perfectly. She did not judge the dead, nor did she decide where the dead should go when their end was at hand... she was simply a guide, a friend, a companion and a mercy to those in need of such. Yet also, she was dreaded, feared, and even hated by so many! All because they equate her with endings rather than beginnings. She was a manifestation of a greater concept, a vaster truth, a force of nature and a necessity of existence. Without her, many that do languish in pain would never receive their release from torment. The seasons would not change, and so the leaves upon the trees would no longer perish in the autumn, and the snow would not descend in the wintertime. Spring would never arrive, and summer would not be so cherished... because it would not have winter to contrast it's vibrancy. She was needed, and on that night she was needed most... by me.
She wore no glasses, and I saw that her eyes were just totally black. You know how normal human beings have whites in their eyes? She had none at all. Looking into her eyes was like looking into the void of space but bereft of the stars or the moon to illuminate everything. I felt fear at first when I did gaze into them, but then the fear gave way to a profound sense of love. She was the most beautiful of all the girls I had ever seen in my life up that point... she was magnificent, and she was choosing now to speak with me. To be with me! Now, when I was at the loneliest point in my entire life. Earlier in that year, I had lost my first love Andrea. A girl who was murdered by her own father, who previously had killed her little sister. I had lost my will to go on living after that, but I kept going on like a machine... I lived, and yet I did not enjoy the act of living, because of my loss and how it had grieved me so deeply. It scarred me, changed me, left me with a seething hatred for and inability to trust humanity as a whole. Men sickened me, women did not understand me, and I felt utterly alone. Just like a scared little child.
I pretended to be cool but I was only a child at heart, and I had lost the only reason I had to even try to grow up. I did not know if that is what called Death to come to me on that night... but come to me she had, and was offering to awaken me to things I had lost sight of over the years. Perhaps even over the course of whole lifetimes! This would be the beginning of my healing, although I though that night she had come for me to bring about my end, which at the time I actually welcomed with grim anticipation. “You are not who you were born as in this life...” she began. “You are far, far more than that!” and she motioned for me to sit down on the bed right next to her. She was a head shorter than I was, and I was not a very tall person being only about five foot nine in height, if that. She made me feel taller than I actually was, and I liked that feeling a lot since it made me feel stronger than I was, as well. She let me put my arm around her and hold her close as she spoke to me quietly. “Although I could simply tell you all that I know...” she continued, “I would prefer just to show you instead! All you need let me do, is to put the palms of my hands upon the temples of your head... like this...” and she demonstrated with her hands what she meant, before stating: “And then, you will not just hear, but you will see!” and I let her do exactly as she pleased. She turned around, reached over to my head, and placed her palms upon the sides of it, squarely over my temples. Then, my entire sense of reality changed forever! I saw all, and I remembered everything, and I knew that this was just the beginning. There would be even more to see, to feel, to know and to learn... this girl was my guide, my teacher, my illumination and the start of my full enlightenment. This moment was the dawn of my full awakening! I was happy to surrender to her.
“Make love with me!” her voice echoed across a billion stars, bringing me back to the room, to the bed on which we both sat. Her hands were folded on her lap, and she was smiled seductively. I began to unzip her jumpsuit... the material was soft like silk or satin... and we proceeded to embrace once we had divested ourselves of our clothes. She was warm, she was hot, and she was not the coldness I had been expecting from Death! I felt ablaze with unbridled passion for her, and holding her was like holding fire equal to my own inner flame. At the height of our intense lovemaking, the pale girl cried out loudly in ecstasy and I could hear that my family heard the sound of it, but they did not seem to care. I heard the television being turned up louder, and was glad that we were being left alone. She was moaning with pleasure, and digging her fingernails into my back like claws, drawing blood. She licked the blood off one of her fingernails, then ran her hands through my hair while we kissed with pleasurable abandon and sheer wantonness. I had such long, long hair back then... a long time indeed before the sad year in which my mother was fated to die. In the year of her death, just following my mother's passing, all of my hair suddenly grew unnaturally thin and burned off of my head, my eyebrows along with it, with a sharp stinging sensation due to some bizarre condition that was never medically identified. My skin was unharmed by that, but ever after I have had to shave my head because what does grow back is not enough to look quite right. My eyebrows I must keep shaved for the same reasons. My blood also in time became more acidic in nature than it used to be... sometimes when I bleed, the blood burns my skin where it touches. It had always been somewhat so, but over time it grew more intense. There are even moments when I have cried tears of blood rather than normal tears! My night with Death was the moment when I was transformed... and when my body started to alter itself, changing me physically to match the spiritual and mental changes taking place. I shall speak no more of the passionate embrace that Death and I shared on that night, for it would not be decent to speak further of it. But once we had finished with our coupling, we dressed once again and sat together in order to talk of things a bit more. “I am going to make you more like me...” she said in a low tone. She took out a small switchblade from one of the pockets of her jumpsuit, and cut the palm of her left hand. She offered me the bleeding palm, and told me to drink of her blood: “I have tasted your blood, and more, and now you must taste of mine in order for us to become fully bonded, for all of time hereafter. As it was of old... so, it must be now!”
“I am not really comfortable with doing something like that.” I admitted to my new lover... to my eternal lover... and she said in a gentle tone of voice: “Death is not about being comfortable, my love! It is about facing uncomfortable truths and grim realities. I know that within the depths of your souls is a small, lost little child who is starving and thirsty for love in life. For someone... for anyone... to love, and who might love you in return. Now wait! I do not mock you by telling you this. I understand you, because in my heart there once existed something much the same. Slake your thirst for love, drink of my blood, and you will know my love for all eternity... and even beyond!” That was what reached me at last, and so I did as she bade me. She wiped my mouth afterwards with a tissue she carried in one of her pockets, and said serenely, in an almost motherly tone: “There, that's better! The changes... will be very gradual, they will not happen overnight. But they will happen, throughout the years to come! I am now going to tell you your true name, and reveal mine to you also. This is just between us, and no one must ever learn these names outside of our company! Do you understand me?” and I confessed that I did. She told me the two true names, and then insisted that I simply call her Lilith. She told me that it was safe for her to likewise openly refer to me by the name Samael, one of my most ancient names... but not my true name. Never that one! That was the understanding we came to next, as my memories flooded back into my mind more and more, increasing in detail and intensity. All the ancient memories that my birth into this life had caused me to forget at first... these same and many more besides rushed forth at last. I was becoming... complete. “I will be departing from this place very soon...” she confided in me. “And so, I must pass on a message to you from a woman named Diana. She wishes to meet you at the local park... you know the place, just up from the old cemetery one street up from here. One year from today, the same time of year! Once there, she will meet with you and finish what I began.” and I agreed to do as Lilith desired, planning to meet with this Diana when the appointed hour had come for me to do so.
I have written elsewhere of that meeting, and what transpired during it... and so it is not necessary to mention it here. When she had finished with all that needed to be said, and done, Lilith climbed back out the window and started to walk down the street in front of our house. All of a sudden I could hear my grandmother opening the front door loudly, like a maniac. She was yelling nastily at the poor girl, and that caused Lilith to run down the street very swiftly to get away from my grandmother's sight. This was the side of my grandmother that I hated, the insane, controlling, verbally abusive side! The noise woke my mother up... it was very late, and she had gone to her room to sleep while my cousin slept on the living room couch, since she was staying the night with us as a guest. My mother came out and said to my grandmother that she should not be yelling so loudly. My grandmother mentioned seeing the girl leave from the side of our house where my window was, and she admitted to my mother that she had chased Lilith off with her screaming. I came out into the living room where all this commotion was, and my grandmother pointed to me and told my mother that she had heard Lilith and I having sex. But rather than be angry with me over it, my mother just said proudly to me: “Good! At least now you've lost your virginity and gotten laid for the first time. Saves me the trouble of having to keep setting you up with girls, if you can get them on your own!” and I did not try to explain who the girl had been, or why this was not a normal average girl of the sort that my family thought it was. My cousin woke up and complained: “I don't know what everyone's yelling so loud about, but would you all mind going back to bed? I'm tired!” I glared at my mother and my grandmother before going back to my room and slamming the door. The next day, my grandmother nailed all of the windows in the house shut and that is how they stayed in all the years I lived there while my grandmother yet lived. She had done that one other time before, the night she tried to keep me from going to try and save Andrea's life, when she had locked me in my own room after nailing my windows shut. Following Andrea's death, I had torn out all the nails, breaking my window in the process. She had it fixed... and until now, had not nailed it again.
There would be other girls, other women, over the long years to come... other loves, sometimes other losses as well, but never quite like what I had once shared with Lilith and she with me. Once, I tried to recreate the events of that night... with a woman who begged me to find a way for Lilith to possess her. She wanted not simply to be like Lilith... she wanted to be Lilith herself. But it did not work, Death did not come to inhabit the woman after all, and in the end things did not even remotely work out between that woman and I, and we had parted ways when everything between us fell through. I had many loves and many lovers... male and female alike. I was born hermaphroditic, but with fully functioning male genitalia, which is exceedingly rare for a hermaphrodite. Despite that, I could be either male or female myself for a person who was interested in being with me. I mostly never brought Lilith up unless I was asked about her directly, in which case I simply told what I knew. Sometimes, I told too much I think... because there was at least one woman who complained to me that she could not allow herself to believe me, because in order to do so she would have to change everything she once believed in and after that start to question everything she had been raised to think was holy and sacred in this world. I realized that some people might, if they knew everything, see me as the Devil... and Lilith as the Devil's harlot. So mostly, I avoided the subject whenever it was prudent to do so. No one ever did learn my true name, and I never spoke it nor ever wrote it down. It was within me, a part of me, along with Lilith's as well. That was enough for it to matter, and it kept me safe from those who would use that knowledge against me. There are always those sorts in the world! I am not like others from my generation... I am not like many other people in general. I am unique, singular, and sometimes very, very lonely because of this.
One time, Lilith came to me in a vision and spoke the following words of encouragement to me while my life was going through a very impossibly dark period: “My beloved, you should not feel so alone... but rather, know that I am never far from your side! Yes, you are very different from all others, but that is not such a terrible thing. All living beings possess a beauty that is unique to them, and yours delights me greatly. You have sought to recreate our love, and through doing so you have shown me so much of what a living being is sometimes capable of when seeking to please one whom they hold dear. Even if you showed me the entire universe in all of its' wonder and diversity, or the brightness of the heavens or the crimson glow of hellfire, I would not be as pleased!” Diana once told me that two years after we had made love, Lilith's physical body died from an unspecified wasting sickness that also caused her body to break out in horrible lesions all over it. She had been sick even back when she came to me, but not like towards the end! On this occasion I asked of her: “Beloved, are you dead?” and she replied to me very frankly and honestly by saying: “Can Death truly die, at all? What is one body! I... have countless shapes, forms, and emanations... some living, some nonliving, some sentient and some without a shred of consciousness as you might understand it. Like the life-force of all that is, I am a part of all that is... and I live forever in your heart. So no, I am not dead... I am eternal. Everything that possesses a soul and a spirit is likewise eternal! Even if they know it not.” And so I came to understand the mind, as well as the heart, of Death in ways that no living being has ever come close to. She opened herself up to me, and I beheld things the like of which there are no words for. It was an experience best felt, best seen, best comprehended on a primal level. Even Diana, was unaware of this hidden level of reality!
There are places in this universe that some people should never go to, not in the physical raiment of the body, nor in the more naked raiment of the spirit... but I allowed myself to venture forth hither, and so I found that there were truths... forbidden truths... that I could never share with anyone. Only Lilith, in her connection to all things, knew where I had been and all that I had seen and done there. Why do I tell of these things? So that others might learn and come to understand the things that make me so very different, that set me apart from so many others... and which sometimes make me feel like an outsider.
In another life, in a time long past... I was standing upon a rough hilltop overlooking a vast stretch of ruins. It was the remains of a once-great city, now just piles of very twisted metal, shattered glass, and vitrified remnants of long dead trees. The foundations of stone, concrete and steel where laid bare, but nothing of the life that had teemed within that place remained. The water was poisoned, the soil was burned, but the reclaimed air was at least breathable once again thanks to science. Blood stained some of the walls of the ruins... ancient blood, long dried into almost unrecognizable forms. The explosion that had done this, was from a weapon that destroyed even itself when it fired. It would never be able to be used again, nor should it have been used even in the first place. Death showed me this vision once, and I will now explain it here fully! It was in a future far removed from the carnage of the Elemental Wars of old, and it was on a planet other than ancient Ra'qia. This planet had been called Olympia, and its' wholesale destruction led to its' population fleeing to its' successor world of Olympia Primus. As far from this dead planet as one could get to comfortably! This was long before the human race decided to make Earth its' home.. and long after the holy planet of Ra'qia, which some called Kolob and Kobol, had been decimated and rendered a post-apocalyptic ruin and a mere shell of its' former glories. It was also long, long after the annihilation of my people's adopted home planet of Rahab. Also known in the ancient tongues as Terra Primus... which was now only a belt of asteroids that lay between Mars and Jupiter in the Sol star system. Terra Minor was our name for Earth. I had come to Olympia seeking a kind of righteous vengeance against those who destroyed Terra Primus, a planet I had been made the absolute god-monarch of prior to its' destruction. I had been very cruelly assassinated along with a girl whom I had come to love and who loved me beyond all else in the universe, and then I was resurrected through cloning... only to be brutally tortured, enslaved for years, then brainwashed to become a killing machine in the service of my enemies. I broke their conditioning, for my will was stronger than their malice... but only after they had used me to slay all that remained of the race I had come to regard as my children. The Titans! The Olympians had no regard for our people, our traditions, or our way of life. I had no regard for their tyranny! And so I rose up in rebellion against them, and along with me were a countless number of others who decided that the time was right for the Titans to rise again. They had not all perished, after all... I spared all the ones whom my “masters” did not know about, or I faked their deaths whenever it was possible to do so. Nor had we Archons perished, we who were the Titans' ancient rulers and predecessors. Nor had perished, so many of the Draconian species of reptilian people of Terra Primus, who had fled and gone into hiding or exile in order to escape genocide at the hands of the self-righteous humans of Olympia and the various other colonies of humanity that had dared to lay my people so low. This was a war of annihilation, and I had no choice but to kill or be killed during its' course. That is how this came to happen on Olympia... this horror that I myself had ordered perpetrated in my name. It would not be last of the colony worlds to be so dealt with, but it was one of the first of them that we struck against. I walked towards the ruins, remembering all of this and musing upon it as I tread... crushing charred skulls and bones into dust under my feet. I felt guilty about this act, because it was not like me! It was more like the cruelties perpetrated by humanity against us. I had lived among them once, sat in their councils, and tried to even see myself as one of them for a time. But no longer!
I had myself become Death in an almost literal way, a literal destroyer of worlds. They had devastated one planet and blasted a second one into rubble and nothingness. But, we would go on to destroy many, in seeking to avenge the two that had been taken from us. Some in nuclear fire, rained down upon the planets from our warships in space... but others, like this Olympia were destroyed on the surface with far more cruel devices and brutal tactics that had not been seen in countless generations. People called me the Devil... and said I would not be content until all humanity was eliminated from their planetary colonies and habitations. But I only wanted to show them how much I was hurting. I wanted it to end!
The war would eventually grow beyond all control, until at last both sides had to sue for peace and seek a new home elsewhere, eventually journeying to Terra Minor. To Earth! That is how the “gods” came to Earth, and how humanity was likewise brought there. But on this occasion, it was in the early days of the Titan campaign of retribution against the Olympians... and we were both equally brutal in our actions against one another. There were no winners in that war, unlike during the time of the old Elemental Wars in which the basic conventions of war were still somewhat followed. Now, there was only one rule, and that rule was Death's to dictate. I knelt in the middle of those ruins, I picked up a single handful of dust and ashes, and I allowed myself to weep for the dead. I did this at least once on every world that my people “conquered”. I was not human, but I understood human feelings. For I had feelings much the same! We were not so different, our rival species, after all. All of a sudden, she was standing at my side. I had not seen her since this terrible war began... back when she was acting as the queen of Olympia itself. My spies informed me that she had fled to the planet of Olympia Primus when this world was scourged. I planned to meet her there and for a time pledge my loyalty to her in a bid for peace. Eventually, it would end in tragedy for the Queen of Ionia, the capital city of the new world. But for a time, for a span of many long years, I served her loyally under the name she assumed during that bygone era. She and I signed an armistice, and it was upheld for so long as she lived! But one day... I was told that she was dying, and that it was my own fault. You see, she had a wasting sickness akin to a kind of cancer, but worse and quicker-acting than many cancers known on Earth. When her body began to break down, I was told to administer to her a series of immunizing curatives and genetic preservative medicines. This was supposed to stop the cancer from spreading and speed its' remission if it was still possible to do so... but it ended up doing exactly the opposite. An enemy spy from a planet where the people wanted to see the ending of the armistice and the return of the old state of war had infiltrated the queen's palace and replaced these healing items' contents with a type of poison known as Hydra Blood. Normally, Hydra Blood was not lethal... but in high enough doses it could kill very fast. As it is, it was believed that the queen had somehow managed to come into contact with the poison previously and that is how she came down with the cancer that now ate away at her from within. I had always suspected the chief physician, since a long time prior he had stated that he was developing a medication that would make the queen immune to any and all poisons that an enemy might wish to slip to her. It was not long after that, when the first signs of her cancer were reported by more reliable doctors in her employ. I had the spy arrested... it was indeed the man I suspected... and I oversaw his execution myself, by means of dissection. But this act of bloody justice was not enough to save my beloved! Once it became apparent that she was dying and could not be saved... a plan was put into place, to create a healthy clone of her body using DNA on record from before she had been poisoned to begin with. The clone was grown and it was enhanced with Titan mechanics... in order to allow it to facilitate the downloading of her soul's energy into it. Before the armistice was dissolved, the resurrected queen made a deal with me and my people that granted her the use of our soul transfer techniques. The principles were simple enough! The spirit is what houses the soul, and it is a form of energy, a spark of the Divine Force that is the source of all that is. We had the means to detect the divine spark in a person and transfer it between bodies if the need to do so should ever arise. Using this method, she wished to be given a different body entirely... one that was made as a backup clone for her should the first clone prove to be defective. This backup clone was in the form of a child version of the queen herself, rather than the adult body she inhabited previously. She liked the child body much better, and the adult clone was made the backup after that. Following her death and resurrection, she was determined to avenge herself upon humanity, and I too longed for renewed retribution against the people who had engineered my beloved's death. In killing the assumed body of Death herself, the people of the remaining colony planets had sealed their ultimate fate. For Death had now returned, and I was at her side and ready to bring her wrath upon each world!
That was all yet to transpire... in the hour in which I knelt in the midst of that wrecked city upon the surface of the dead planet of Olympia. But the queen... Death herself.. came to me, as I knelt amid so many morbid horrors all around me. She placed a delicate hand upon my shoulder, and she calmly and lovingly said: “It has been a long time since the Elemental Wars, has it not?” and I replied: “Indeed, it has been. I was planning to come to you next, to seek a peaceful resolution to this conflict.” But, she reminded me: “It was I who told you that if you truly loved me, then you would show our enemies no mercy. Way back on Terra Primus, before it was broken asunder! When the armadas of our foes had first been spotted entering our region of space.” And she was correct... I had done all of this for her in the end. To make her happy, as much as to avenge my slaughtered people and the cruel things that had befallen me. “What if I cannot stop? They turned me into a killing machine, a tool for slaughter. An instrument of death! And now, I just want peace, and an end to this war.” and Death reminded me: “If you are indeed my instrument... then your yearning for peace must be an echo of my own unspoken desire as well. Let us speak of it now, then! And work towards a peaceful resolution... for everyone.” She wore a black form-fitting gown with long wide sleeves and a hood drawn about her head. Around her waist was a white leather belt with tiny silver skulls decorating the whole length of it. She skin was as white as that belt, and her face was ageless and beautiful. Like a porcelain doll's face, in a way. This was the face of Death, and when I looked into it I could deny her nothing. I agreed to her terms, and had a mind to journey with her to Olympia Primus in order to see if we could begin our lives anew. “Death is not always about endings you know...” she reminded me. “Sometimes, I am more just about change.”
In this modern age on the planet Earth, it is a long time gone from that day. That old savage war is in the very distant past, and I wear a human form now myself, though not by my own choice. I had come in this life to know and love Death, once again... and to lose her once again. But Death can never truly die, because she is a part of all. And so she has come to me again and again over the years since my late teens. You cannot keep such as her away, since she cannot be denied. In the end... every living thing, is fated to meet her, and I was blessed in that I have met her while still living, and I did not die myself as a result of that meeting. Even today, I know who and what I truly am! Some call me the Devil, but that is not the truth. It is only a title given to something that humanity does not fully understand or in any way comprehend. What they do not understand, they seek to destroy because they hate the unknown! And that is what makes so many people unworthy of the knowledge that I possess and can grant unto them. I grant my knowledge, instead, only to those who prove themselves worthy... and, all others I keep at a reasonable distance from such higher matters. I do not know everything, and am still learning a great deal over time myself. It has been so many years since I was sixteen and seeking, without knowing all that I was about to find! The changes that Death wrought in me have run their course, and I am now a thing very different from what I was as a child. Human in appearance, but within I am simply... other.
I have learned to embrace all my otherness, to relish it and cherish it... through it, I have kept my own inner child alive even through the most difficult of times. Through it, I have found the strength to keep moving forward towards the future, while being ever mindful of what transpired in the past. Through it, I have come to understand the mind of Death herself and to also better comprehend life... and why it is such a precious thing. Through my otherness, I have found my redemption! In the world today, there is so much war, and so much death and destruction. My beloved Dark Mistress has been very busy of late and she has had to weep many tears for all the innocent lives lost each and every day. Tears of blood, that sting her sweet skin bitterly! I have wept identical tears... which have stung my skin likewise. Love is not a thing which burdens us, not like some foolish people regard it! It is a thing which can release us from all pain. Love is the path to peace, but some fear it. How similar is love, then... to Death herself!
Published 14th May 2022
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