​Chapter 18. Just Heading Home

Beverly walked through the snow-covered forest toward the campus. The cold no longer touched her. She was part of this night and this winter. At the edge of the woods, a flashlight beam swept across her.

“Stop!” a sharp, tense voice barked. “Hands on your head!”

An army patrol. Two soldiers in winter camo leveled their rifles at her. They stepped into the light, their young, frightened faces barely visible above raised collars.

“What are you doing in the woods at night, ma’am?” the second one asked without lowering his weapon.

Beverly stopped, raising her hands. The knife hidden in her coat sleeve pressed against her skin, cold and gratifying. She looked at them not as a scared student but as a predator studying two lost children.

“Just heading home.”

The soldiers froze. Just an ordinary student taking a walk in the woods. A sudden, irrational fatigue washed over them; they desperately wanted to be somewhere else. In their warm barracks, at home — anywhere. This sector wasn’t their problem, and neither was this strange girl.

“All right, ma’am,” the first muttered, lowering his rifle. “Just... go home. And don’t walk in the woods at night anymore.”

They turned and left without looking back, eager to forget this encounter as quickly as possible.

The dorm room was clean, everything neatly arranged in its place. Jen must have tidied up before her death, trying to bring order to her tiny universe while the larger world was collapsing. On Beverly’s bed lay a carefully folded set of clean clothes. Jen, my tidy Jen. It was midnight. She undressed and lay down, but couldn’t sleep. She remembered the first time she understood what she was.

It started a few weeks ago. She had a dream. She was running through the forest — not from someone, but after someone. After Dave from the fourth dorm. In the dream it was a game, a hunt. She was strong, swift, tireless. When she knocked him to the ground, she was laughing. In the morning, she woke with the taste of metal in her mouth and dirt under her nails. That same day, rumors about his disappearance began to spread across campus. It was then, standing at the mirror and looking at her reflection, that Beverly understood. She understood and accepted it. It wasn’t an illness or madness — it was her new, true nature.

And she liked it.

For the first time in many months, her mind was crystal clear. What once seemed unshakable — morality, laws, society, friendship — crumbled into dust. All of it was made up. Just stage scenery.

Morality? A convention. A war breaks out, millions of people go off to kill one another, and they’re called heroes. But if one person kills another in an alley, he’s called a monster. Where’s the logic? There is none. There are only rules the strong impose on the weak.

States? A fragile illusion. Today the government demands patriotism from you, and tomorrow the state no longer exists, and all your patriotism is like a name tag ripped off a uniform so it can be sewn onto someone else.

Friendship? Loyalty? They exist only while your interests align. Once they diverge, the friendship ends. Today you swear devotion to each other, tomorrow you’ll be betrayed for someone’s personal gain. There are no rules. No good or evil — only will. Your own, hungry will. And the strength to force it upon this rotten world.

She remembered the philosophy lectures from her second year. The old professor used to say that the world is a set of sensations the brain turns into reality. Back then, she laughed. Now — she didn’t.

Everything is decided by signals. An electrical impulse runs along an axon, jumps across a synapse, ignites the next cell. Billions of such flashes add up to what they call a “city,” a “body,” a “law.” There is no stone. No people. There is only the coincidence of excitations. Their universe is not matter but the Pact, the protocol. A collective hallucination assembled from millions of identical neural sparks. Their god and their cage. They built it out of electricity — and then believed in it.

The world rests on synchronicity. Brains work like a network of identical machines, repeating the same code. They think you need bulldozers and dynamite to move a mountain. But there is no mountain — only a stream of signals. Change it, and the mountain disappears. Reprogram yourself, and another world opens before you; merge with chaos, and your will can reshape others.

It’s enough to plant a spark, to break the rhythm — and the tremor will spread through the whole network. One strong node will affect the rest. You don’t need to break each individual — you just need to touch the common current.

The Pact restricts your will — first with “matter,” then with doctrines. People give up their own will, accept someone else’s rules, and call it their strength. But their will is nothing compared to the will of one who dares to reject the Pact. The origin of everything is chaos. Free yourself from the chains — and you will begin to dictate your own world to them. There is no objective reality, only the vast, all-encompassing agreement of billions of people to see the same thing. A silly stage play they believe in because no one wants to find the emptiness behind the painted hearth on the canvas. They hammer it into you from birth. “Believe this, not that. Think this way, not that way. Feel this when you see a flag, and that when you hear the name of the enemy.”

But it was a lie. An artful, intricate, collective lie. One desire of hers — and their whole world would collapse. She didn’t need to “know herself”; she only needed to refuse the person the Pact had made her into. Did she want that?

“Yes,” she breathed. The word sounded as if something inside her had cracked. For a moment, she thought the Black Man was beside her again — or had never left. Satan had been right. She wanted power and dominion, the freedom to change the world, to break it and rebuild it — exactly the way she wished. And that thought burned with a sweet anticipation.

What happened to the students she’d killed? At first, they were detailed, vivid dreams: the forest, the rush, the blood. She woke up believing she had merely dreamed it. But then, one evening, she came to within the dream. Truly.

She stood on that same clearing, by the oak. Before her, trembling at the trunk, was Sarah from the arts department. In the dream, it had been a game. But now, seeing the real terror in the girl’s eyes, her cheeks wet with tears, Beverly understood that this was reality. Her reality. She had coaxed them gently, almost tenderly. Death wasn’t an ending but a passage, an opportunity to become something else. She promised them a new existence, and they followed her.

Beverly killed Sarah consciously. Not in a burst of rage, but methodically, watching with the curiosity of a researcher as life left the body. And then she wanted to eat her. Not hunger — instinct. A primal urge she couldn’t resist, and didn’t want to.

She didn’t remember the details of how she did it. Her memory retained fragments: the taste, the crunch, the warmth. Each piece of flesh she tore away became a thread woven into an unseen fabric vibrating beneath her skin. Her fingers trembled — and with them the web trembled, spreading across the floor, through the air, through reality itself. And then, when it was done, she expelled something dark, alien — a cocoon.

She pushed it out of her belly, bracing herself with four hind legs. The cocoon pulsed, alive — and burst, unfurling into a cloud of black threads that crawled into the shadows. Who was she? It didn’t matter.

She lay on her dorm bed in the empty room, and for the first time in her entire life she felt absolutely free. Then Beverly drowned in a black, viscous sleep without dreams. And from that silence, an image surfaced. She was standing in the bathroom of their dorm room, before the same fogged mirror. Behind her, in the murky, wet glass, stood the other one.

A woman. Tall, with long hair black as pitch. Her face was marred with ragged scars, and beneath her hair grew long, curved horns. She was beautiful — with a wild, terrifying, compelling beauty.

The demoness in the mirror raised her hand. Her bloodied finger slid across the steamed glass, leaving behind letters — trembling, bleeding into one another until they gathered into a name. Her lips didn’t move, yet the words sounded directly in Beverly’s mind: “You are ready.” The world dissolved into chaos again.

She awoke a second time. But it wasn’t waking — it was remembering. On a cold, dusty floor in a ruined house, she watched thin, lazy snowflakes fall through the holes in the roof. She was naked. Carefully, she rose — her body perfect, without a single scar.

She wandered through the house. The rooms were empty, the walls peeling, exposing blackened beams. Trash and a thick layer of dust covered everything, untouched for what seemed like centuries. In one of the rooms, miraculously intact, hung a large, clouded mirror in a heavy frame. In it, she saw herself.

It was her, and not her. Her body — but the face was mutilated with the very scars she had seen in the first dream. From her forehead grew long, black, curved horns. The demon in the mirror. Herself. On the dusty surface of the mirror, written in blood, was a single word:

Lilith.

Something sticky and bestial stirred in her chest — a fear of herself — and she recoiled from her reflection and fled the house. Outside stretched an endless, snow-covered void. No trees, no mountains, no horizon. Only a smooth, white sheet of snow beneath a heavy, starless sky. Not far from the house ran a slow, black river — the only thing in this place that moved. And on its bank, with his back to her, sat a familiar figure. The Man in Black.

Her steps left no tracks. She approached and stood beside him, looking at the viscous, oily water of the river.

“What’s happening to me?” she asked, and her voice rang loud and alien in the emptiness. “Will I always be like this? Deformed?”

The man didn’t turn.

“Yes and no,” he said. “You are as you see yourself.”

His words were not an answer but a riddle. She tried to peer beneath the hood, but there was only darkness there — darkness that swallowed light.

“Can I go back?” she asked. “You can return to their world,” he replied. “But there is no way back to who you were. You’ve seen that the City is mist, and reality is a fragile thing. How could you ever forget that?” Beverly heard the last supports of her old world collapse.

“You’ve awakened,” he continued. “And you’ve become a maker of dreams. But for now, you don’t understand it yet.”

Effortlessly, soundlessly, he rose. He approached her and extended a hand. Beverly took it without hesitation — cold and heavy, like fate itself. He led her toward the riverbank and lifted her effortlessly into his arms. At that moment, the hood fell from his head. The face of a goat, like in ancient forbidden books. Black coarse fur, powerful backward-curving horns polished to a shine, and the eyes. Eyes that held neither fire nor darkness — only an icy, endless void born before the creation of the world.

“In the name of pain that frees,” he growled — not a sound, but a vibration rising from the earth itself. “In the name of oblivion that grants new memory. And in the name of new flesh, that will be both your prison and your weapon.”

And he plunged her into the river. The water was thick, warm, alive. It flooded into her mouth and lungs, yet it did not suffocate her — it filled her. Blood. And with that blood she absorbed the birth and death of universes, endless cycles of rebellion and tyranny, faces — unfamiliar faces — and destinies she had yet to reshape.

She awoke.

Lilith stood before the bathroom mirror. She was naked, her body flawless — but her face... her face was terrifyingly perfect to look at. Torn, jagged scars crossed it, and black, twisted horns curved from her brow. She was a monster. She was beautiful.

The memories of Beverly Gacy, a medical student from Montana, thinned like old film and melted under the unbearable inner fire. Through them, like two images overlapping, something else emerged. The echo of thousands of other lives, other names, other ages pulsed through her. She remembered the dusty streets of ancient Ur and the blue neon of 22nd-century Tokyo. She remembered empires rising and turning to ash. Stars being born and extinguished in the black void.

She was Lilith. She had always been Lilith — across all time and outside of it. Her birth year — 2081 by their calendar — meant nothing. One date among hundreds, one role among thousands in this endless play. All the eons, the endless cycles of rebellion and tyranny she had once dimly sensed now fused into a single moment, a single clear picture.

And she was not part of it. She ruled it.

The glass cracked and—

Lilith awoke in her dorm bed. Outside, a gray, damp dawn was beginning. Everything was as it had always been. But she knew — it was a lie, a dream dreamt by others. And she — she was awake.

Now she would be the one dreaming them. This was Carver Falls, but dead, turned inside-out. The sky was always black here, starless, and a warm, endless rain that nourished nothing and only washed the dust from empty streets.

She stood in the middle of her old dorm room, but here there were no books, no furniture. Bare walls and two beds, like two empty altars in a ruined temple. Lilith approached the second bed — empty, cold — and ran her fingers across the thick layer of ancient dust.

For a moment, her face twisted in pain. A memory of the one who once slept here. Of her only friend.

“Soon, my sweet Naamah,” she whispered, and in her normally emotionless voice there was a shadow of infinite longing. “Soon we will meet again. Here. At home.”