FIVE TALENTS – LILITH

I’ve touched on the devils and most of my human cast, but one other character is pulled from biblical mythos for my story: Lilith. Some apocryphal myths hold that there was a woman made with man before Eve, created from the dust as he was rather than his rib. This first woman, Lilith, was ejected from the Garden of Eden (and existence some might say) for believing she should be equal to Adam (gasp!) In Five Talents Lilith, because she was neither killed nor truly left as a part of creation enjoys a paradoxical immortal existence: a woman but not truly human. She and Gast have a “past” which came to an abrupt end when she disappeared from Hell a half century ago. I use one of my “asides” in the novel to introduce her:

LILITH – A HISTORY

Human records do tell of a Lilith, but her inclusion in biblical mythos is apocryphal at best. She would explain that her inclusion in existence itself is similarly apocryphal, and smartly change the subject to something even further out of your depth before you could properly understand how little you understood about her response.

You see, Lilith, like all beings were made by the Creator and- like some we have encountered- is among the immortal beings. Unlike the other immortal beings we have thus far met, she was not created in Heaven and banished to Hell from which she emerges to manipulate the human world, she was created on Earth and has occasionally stopped into Hell when the fancy took her.

Because of her humanity, and thanks to her marginalia existence, she has come to resemble  something neither human nor spirit, instead picking and choosing the facets of existence and life which suit her moods. Boredom, she would say, is her greatest enemy. Time passes slowly for her. With eternity behind and before her, she would say the only real fear she has is drudgery.

This perspective made it immediately clear to Tie that she was the inspiration for Gast’s plot to overtake Aba as the head of Wrath when they had their vacation in Berlin.

This perspective made it clear to Gast why she had left, or so he felt: he was just another part of the drudgery she despised so much. In the face of that rejection and her disappearance, he had thrown himself headlong into being that cog for the past half century with the kind of joyless gusto reserved for accountants in tax season.