Chapter 38
Lilith shut the door after Nidhogg slipped in, the wood closing like a lid on a silent coffin.
The Little White Dragon squared her shoulders and walked to the round table, under Undead stares like a field of spearpoints glinting in moonlight.
Two knights scraped their stools aside, leaving her a hollow like a missing tile in a chessboard.
She flicked her wrist; frost bloomed like a winter flower, and an ice chair formed.
She sat, calm as a still lake, while their empty gazes pressed like cold rain.
“Hello,” said the knight opposite, his voice dropping like a pebble into a deep well.
She jolted for a heartbeat, a sparrow startled from a branch.
Then clarity settled like dust; it wasn’t the Undead speaking, but a Reaper Fragment pulling threads through them from afar, using some method Lilith didn’t yet grasp.
“Even that?” Curiosity pricked like a thorn, but the Little White Dragon kept her face smooth as snow.
Emotion tucked away, she held a mask of ice and let her eyes stay quiet.
“Of course,” the Reaper Fragment drifted through the helm of the towering Black Knight, like ash under a visor.
“The Moonswallow Mist is part of me now. If I wish, I can speak through any Undead body.”
“Divine Fragments wield calamities with iron reins. But my foolish sister refuses the lash, hiding in houses made by the living to dodge her own power. Laughable.”
“Sister? You mean Litt?” Lilith asked, voice a blade wrapped in silk.
“Litt? That’s the name you slapped on her?” The Reaper Fragment snorted, a dry reed snapping.
Lilith’s brow tightened like a drawn bow, but she didn’t flare.
Nidhogg’s hand settled on her shoulder, heavy as a mountain, and the Little White Dragon nodded, letting the river flow past.
“Suited to a coward,” the Fragment jeered, words ringing like silver bells under black armor.
“A shard of the Grim Reaper who threw away her authority—only a name used by the continent’s creatures fits her.”
The laugh spilled dark and bright, like moonlight on tar, making Lilith itch to spring and plant a fist.
“Nice talk. And your name?” Lilith asked, teeth set like a locked gate.
“Before you ask for a name, offer your own,” the Reaper Fragment cooled, voice like winter steel.
“You don’t even know basic courtesy?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question. Your mother didn’t teach you? Oh, right—you don’t have a mother.”
Lilith smiled, a petal with a hidden thorn.
The Fragment sucked in a breath, sharp as a knife, but Lilith gave no room for a retort.
“I’m Lilith. No surname. Lilith is enough.”
“Hmph. That’s not the name I meant,” the Fragment sighed, frost on glass.
“But since you’ve given me that, I’ll give you mine.”
The towering knight rose, shadow pouring upward like ink.
In Lilith’s eyes, that black shape snapped into the memory of a blade at her throat, a hawk stooping over a mouse.
The Reaper Fragment looked down with a contempt that burned like salt.
“I embody the punishment for denied death, the most agonizing death—Eternal Life.”
“Eternal Life?” A bold question mark popped over Lilith’s thoughts, bright as a lantern.
“Immortality is one of the Grim Reaper’s powers?”
“Of course,” Nidhogg said, voice earth-deep, steady as root and rock.
“Death’s authority rests with the Grim Reaper. Granting death belongs to the Nameless One.”
“If They don’t pronounce it, what waits is the torment of living forever.”
“I get it,” Lilith nodded, thoughts moving like a cold stream.
She never mistook immortality for a blessing; aging isn’t the Reaper’s mercy, and if it were, They wouldn’t be kind enough to keep you ageless.
Not dying, yet aging without end—that ending she refused.
She remembered a schoolbook, Gulliver’s Travels, its pages smelling like old leaves.
A cursed people lived forever and grew older and older.
After kin and friends vanished, after even their language washed away like sand, they trudged on in endless pain, staring at a horizon that never came.
“What a vicious curse,” Lilith murmured, words like smoke.
“Thanks for the compliment.” Eternal Life bowed slightly, pride shining like polished obsidian.
“So you approached the Undead because of that authority?” Lilith guessed, laying pieces like stones in a go-board.
Eternal Life and the Undead fit like lock and key.
“But their undying isn’t yours, right?”
“Yes.” Eternal Life nodded, agreement soft as falling snow.
“Their undying demands a price—usually memory.”
“So even the Undead, after a few deaths, will choose something bloodier to buy a full wipe of their past, a crooked way to live anew.”
Memories tear like pages from a diary, their ashes drifting like moths.
“Moonswallow Mist’s immortality offers no such mercy,” Eternal Life breathed, smile thin as wire.
“Endless life grinds desire like grain under a millstone, until they turn into puppets at my strings.”
She explained it as casually as naming a lunch, a knife hidden in a napkin.
“What a sick taste,” Lilith said, a frown knitting like storm clouds.
“You Divine Fragments and your calamities are a pain.”
“We?” The Reaper Fragment lifted a brow you couldn’t see, but Lilith felt the ripple like wind over grass.
“You do have a way with words. Since I gave you my bottom line, shouldn’t you give me your true name?”
“No.” Lilith rose with a coolness like dawn frost.
She didn’t know what ‘true name’ meant, but she wouldn’t admit it.
She wore bravado like armor, a fox borrowing a tiger’s roar.
“When you’re about to die, I’ll tell you,” she said, standing small but fierce, a flame in a lantern.
The little dragon had to look up at the tall knight, but her tongue was a blade that didn’t bend.
“Stay cowering in the back. I’m heading to the deepest level now, and I’ll rip your hood off and drag it across the floor!”
Her last syllable hadn’t fallen.
She drew the Ancient Ark in her right hand; the longsword kissed the round tabletop with a tap, charging with a hum like stormwire.
She cut straight for the Black Knight beside her, a crescent of steel flashing like moonlight on ice.
Nidhogg slid aside, fluid as a snake through reeds, and grabbed another Black Knight by the helm, slamming his head onto the table with a thundercrack.
“Ambush!”
