Merlin 3:29 “Lilith Immaculate”
~ @mjbanks
Lilith stands where Sino had stood less than a day ago, in hills and rising darkness, smelling the blood and fire from the game, not knowing specifically who is in the city of rings, with a general premonition in a purely magical sense of how many conjurers are in the fireworks war, and the severity of conjurations despite her wellbeing. Watching the occasional blast, her stunning glare alluring stare innocently seductive becomes black eyes ensorcelled to the slow of time, watching where thru her vision darkness rules over the light.
Lilith: “Fenrir, darling; ravage, damage, tear and scorn, leave blood to attract the bats, and make a mockery of them.”
She stares as if to assess him, moments, until he leaps forth bountifully.
Down in the city where the warlocks mete their mettle, the witch Ceres faces werewolf, Sino puts his fiery fingers into the side of the beast’s neck and she pikes it in the heart with a side-stretched arm. The spike slides thru with magical force and ease as she walks beside the creature, only to take the bloody spear exiting from behind it, a clean dainty hand of carnage folding to nothing short of blood. Fenrir and reinforcements leaping into the city cause Sino to prepare for a more explosive black magic war in aid to her, but gone she has and are thus his to solely deter.
Lilith walks thru the street with a seductively reticent walk, as the wolves attack and battle witches and wizards and warlocks and warriors, fates of hesitant powers unfold the chaotic disasterpiece, stars shunning the malice in a theater of tempered resolution that defense in evil would seem underwhelming, as the tide of conflict shocks the spies in the shadows. She keeps to her walking as the hateful avarice of indignant apathy, killing the wounded until a brave soldier finds her to be suspiciously calm and attacks her, wherefore she converts his steel that he may fall onto his own sword, sliding over it against his wishes as she continues pacing.
Werewolves attacking Sino’s plausible recruits, gathered new and serrated kinship by the dayside, as he abandons them as bait, spotting Lilith in cruelty. She waits at an alley keeping perception in parity between the lane and the center in periphery, eventually holding her hand to signal a werewolf in attack to halt with prey grasped. Looking between the walls, she waves at a desperate magician to find solace, and thereby offers inescapable malice. She outstretches her hand and twists the werewolf’s soul, preventing it from killing its wizard prey with her agonizing magic, it howls as she approaches, her hand glows white and explodes anent the beast, blasting it aside with shredded wound not healing and liken to fresh offal. Fires raging and quelling by magic, the surrounding screams unbridled, her captive victim shaken and singed, is only young.
Lilith: “I have disregard for beasts that are more minions than pets. Where is the conspirator Sino?”
Cao (Guojiu): “He is behind you.”
Lilith turns and Sino is there and Cao has vanished, light-footed running with the ground behind him temporarily shallow quicksand, by breaking a fang from the werewolf as he had long intended, and instantaneously disappearing in the blink of an eye, one glance and she turns again to her target.
Lilith: “If you're going to kill kings good and bad, I'll fill the void as it were, and be better at worse, be you reckless or abandon, I shall hence be bad to worse.”
Sino: “Why do, you, care who I kill?”
Lilith: “I care to kill, your intellect attracts you to power, over a monarchy pithy, you destroy so that you may fix, what in place you could not make better – and this is your fate!"
Lilith outstretches her hand, quickly with the tide of the underworld at her command, the air afore her extension becomes vaulting black fire, fomenting bright laced with hot whiteness flames, spreading like a seething and miring web. Sino averts by returning magic defense a spray of red fire that cracks thunderously thru the air manifestly that fades over her, dissipating like the mist and gathers behind her as the ashes of atmosphere. He throws an explosive canister that expounds its potential, but she catches its blast and denies its fury, crushing the kilned pieces into the dust of immortal decay, withholding the immolation and swinging it thru the air, coursing it with the detrimental death ethereal magic and returning it to Sino as he vacates with utmost expediency of urgency outmatched.
Lilith: "Are you running, Sino? I expected ever more."
Sino: "Such it is little in difference between holy and hellfire."
His shouting from behind a boulder heavy broken piece of wall, lifting and stirring between commotions, the walls left standing beginning to burn in places toward their braces, acerbic multifarious ratiocination stirring with adrenaline and instinct.
Sino: "Did Merlin send you?"
Lilith: "Do you imply Merlin the madman? ...his future is dark, this is an adjustment of fate as much an attack, for you as it is him..."
A long pause as Sino runs now of her silence seemingly absent, in haste every moment hence, the hieing pace of running steps, from a pouch he grabs a glass marble and places it on a dusty ledge of a stonewall, desperate to remain obscured by the ongoing city of conflict, and running to his next locale. Departing the marble fills with red smoke, in of air and water changing color and swirling labors as he continues looking thru the pockets of the dead magician of the lesser Arcana. While noticing wounds of a dispirited nature, a werewolf vaults to him and he grabs its forearm with unnatural strength and strangles it with his other hand, soon gripping in both hands choking it as if it were a vermin pup. Utter madness in both of their eyes until its demise.
Of his search for objects from the dead, by yet another fallen wizard, he searches one whom he had not met, a yeoman or disciple apprentice learning the arts in this academy, now walls of carnage, whom had kept things of prestidigitation and children's parlor tricks.
Sino: "You should have been saved, youngling."
Sino continues pacing the broken encircling streets, searching for mages with signs of smoke stains on their dead hands, killers justified standing exhausted and victorious over bodies, wolves still hunting begin the sport of combat with their isolated preys. A song of war, some encircled by townsfolk, others by alchemists or by both, franticly some escaping on foot, some magicians, some humans whom are benefice in their help of escaping, some strategic and intent on ending witchcraft this moment with forest advantage, in the city awhile Lilith pacing death's trail catches Sino run thru her peripheral vision.
Lilith: "You should not be helping the Valkyrie; a lesson must be given..."
The marbles begin to fill with a new grey smoke and now melt, Sino’s eyes not solely losing focus as he begins hexing.
Sino: "Halt your heavy hand. So Hel sent you? Have you come to keep the peace that Hell demands?"
Lilith: "It is enough to keep the Valkyrie in their place, for what, you, have done, we have a special place for you..."
Lilith steps into the lane before him twenty paces and stops, looking in the eyes hesitant of the fate. With only one new step of her Sino raises his hand, she hesitates staring eyes, bringing her second step forward a black illumined smoke comes from his hand, shared with the other hand two fires. Spreading his arms until black fire to both sides of him, his favorite black lighting fills the air soon igniting the ashen red mist of melted glass that has since become vapor in the air adjacent. A massive explosion, shaking ground and sky with rising fire, as solid walls become massive stones flying at Lilith. She turns to shield herself with an arm. With Sino already fleeing as smoke drifts around her, a bright white shielding aura burns thru the rubble, she walks, kicking a stone the size of a barrel wheel like a pebble, a sign of disapproval, a sign of anger, there is one word, a name, she mutters.
Lilith: "Fenrir..."
As she walks from the ashes of the wake, a calm disposition controls her, as approaches a likely giving of little respect. Hearing his name thru shadow of silence, Fenrir stops toying with humans, mere mortals who have encircled him without his fear present, wounding one in leaping bounteously in escape, of which eschewing egress makes Sino’s departure also in full. Fenrir approaches unchanged, still in mannish lupine form, strengthened and bound by the moon.
Fenrir: "Buried?"
Lilith: "No, go the woods take all directions! Find the conspirator! Kill all in your path!"
Pooled blood rippled with the shaking of the ground caused by his inner cadre werewolves taking to the hunt, she scoffs that still he is lead by his scent of all simple things.
The antipathy of her frustration unfettered by concience she walks defined by disappointment in the dearth of anarchist foments. The battles lost or slayings innocent victorious are games of hunt afoot, deleterious persecutions of tantalizing gruff-coated razorbacks and devilish sharp smiles of sinister harlots, unsavory malice instinctual ingraining conflicted forethought thru preservation, innocence lost on warriors, witches, wizards, werewolves, but none too much assessed as demoniac entertainment as by her.
In so much dismay, the warrior known for the very speed of his fighting skills holds two swords brandished like whips. Trying to battle werewolves as they disinterestedly depart, escaping thrice of fate's creuel thorned grasp he darts from slender alleyway, covered in dirt and dust and blood, only to collide with strolling Lilith. The back of his right shoulder to the front of her left, it almost shifts her footing and assuredly disgruntling her with dirtying her dress with his debris. Her tyranny switches to fury, her toe lifts and her arms stretch toward the perpetrator, quite deftly fast, lunging two steps for each one with her talons forward, running her claws into his chest and round his heart, thru the bones of his chestplate, tearing it from his breast, without the slightest smile to her face.
A red hand of running blood and dying beating heart, a new smile graces her face and eyes without darkness in the color and murky with silver, lines of red rolling down her arm and onto her dress.
Lilith: “Only, I will cover myself in blood and only blood.”
A blast behind her and she spins to face it, tossing the otherwise clean blood arterial heart aside while flinging her arm out, pale skin with blood on her lips, and the tip of her passing tongue, dashing into the fight anew.
Merlin, running around concrentric chaos, flying thru blasts, hiding from sight better in shadows than in moonlight, a macabre dance Lilith sees him as paths intersect. In the clearing ahead of her a body flies from light, and there next stands Merlin, pausing and turning to her noticing, from her immediately he runs, as she calls to him with feminine clarity.
Lilith: "Imagine me following you until you die, Merlin, I only talked with your broken pupil, and I now find the liege who broke him!"
With a wave of her hand, she moves aside the fire and coals to clear the sand for her reproach, rivers from the ashes of light and the storms of silence between the screams ceremonious to her. She walks into a fire and a portal traversed exits a fire elsewhere in the city, cornering Merlin he throws an explosive jar at her, he flees as she discards the flames like the wind thru winter.
Lilith: “How very typical of man, make noise and run.”
Lilith follows him turning thrice thru corridors the night with fire, as if the day, Merlin free of her sight, but still feeling trapped by the sight and sound of werewolves prowling hidden rooftops, landing on the ground a stone's throw from him. Merlin lunges at her, with a wave of her hand she casts him aside like a paper door, thru market cart and fire and into wall he finally falls on the ground, she walks to him.
Lilith: “I am the birth of death, which you, smooth and ugly albeit, are part and partial know not your place. I outmatch you with all this fire. Your former student, you will catch him, and destroy him."
One werewolf ready for her word to destroy, she raises her hand and it calms.
Lilith: "Or I will have two hearts to devour. Do you understand me?"
Merlin: "I fear don't have a choice..."
Lilith: “You are weak; this is a teachable moment, Merlin. My wrath has such importance that there must be witnesses to my path or to watch me dying. Let my contempt pass thru you to Sino, do this as bade, or there will be neither for you when I find you next."
Merlin: "A bid farewell, this is the only way, and is what I was doing when you attacked the fort."
Lilith: "I could not have known. Where is the one whom refuses death, Merlin?"
Merlin: "He’s here somewhere…"
Lilith: "Have not reservations, for I have let you live, and lies are not the strength of a good man like you ...do my bidding, stay alive..."
She walks from him, his head barely over the ground and vision still clarifying, viewing sideways her, departing in the hour of dusk and defiance.