Of The Few Who Remain: Lilith

Lilith waited in a dim room with her eyes closed. She was waiting for an old friend. She had very few old friends left these days. She supposed that followed naturally from being one of the oldest beings left in the world… or at least this metal box. It could only ever really be a mere shadow of a true world. Lilith had been so very young the last time she had seen a true world. Sometimes it was harder to tell if the time before everything had changed felt more real, or the time after. She had spent so long here. Most of her life, and yet she still thought of the old world that had been taken from her in her youth as home. Strange that, to have spent so long in a place, and still not think of herself as belonging to it.
Lilith let out a breath she didn't know she had been holding. She remembered a night long ago, on a world with a horizon. She had always been fascinated by looking out. The stars had been her passion. Astronomer they had named her, a scholar of the stars. Strange how the people now, in this place, deified scholars, and yet knew so little of actual scholarship.
Lilith remembered her observatory on the night long ago. She could picture her equipment, the old dishes from entire days spent on her work. She distinctly remembered that one of the lights had been out, plunging part of her workspace into a deep darkness. She had been meaning to get it fixed. She couldn't remember if she ever had. She could remember the moment she had seen something new in the sky. She remembered the rush of discovery. She remembered her friends. She remembered the joy of exploration. Those first years had been so good. Each room held some new discovery, each system they managed to coax to life brought new wonder to the world. They had been the ones who were going to usher in a new golden age for their people. They had been going to pull an entire world back from the brink of war. Maybe they had, but Lilith was fairly sure she knew what had happened when the otherworldly construct that had united the peoples of her world had suddenly left without warning. The first order of business would have been to find someone to blame. The old grudges would have been back with a vengeance. With her discovery on that night in her observatory, she had probably started the war she had wanted to prevent… just a few years later than it would have started otherwise. Maybe that was a victory.
She wondered if it made it better that she had been on Everfall when The Navigator had betrayed them. She wondered if her imaginings of the war that she hadn't been able to see engulf her home were actually worse than the reality of it. Regardless of whether the war had started on the world they had left, or how bad it had been, it had certainly come here, on Everfall. The First Wars they called them now, but of course, they weren't. They were the same wars as the ones that had come before, the ones that had been brewing back home. Lilith had known the tenuous peace wouldn't last, especially with the powers of The First City tightening their control. The two hundred years population control policy probably would have been enough to spark the war, but it hadn't been even half of what The First City had tried to force the people to accept.
For her part, Lilith had left before things got bad. She and her people had found the one place the war wouldn't reach. Lilith remembered her old advisors. Her old friends who had known the world of her youth. One by one the dangers of the dark decks had claimed them. She had tried to hold on to what they once had. With each passing year, though, the ways of the old world were slipping further, even from her people, the ones dedicated to remembering them. Each year brought her people closer to the monsters that Opus propaganda now painted them as. Her advisors had slowly become a court of poisoners, spiders lurking in their webs. The pragmatic policies put in place to keep her people alive had turned into real prejudice. Even her offer of sanctuary to any who would work for it looked more and more like the slavery that Opus said it was with each passing year.
Lilith's people were drifting. Spiraling slowly, and she could do nothing to hold on to the soul of her home that she had tried to engender in them. Now only she remembered.
“My lady,” the voice broke Lilith from her musings. Her guard stood at the door. Learen was a young man, and a good guard. Respectful, and dedicated to her vision. Some of the younger generation still were, but the number was fewer and fewer with each passing year.
“There is a man here to see you,” Learen said, “he won't give his name, just says to introduce him as the wanderer.”
“Send him in.”
The man who entered was careful with his movements, not frail, but slow and intentional. He had never been either of those things back when they had met. He closed the door behind him. Lilith looked at the man who walked the world. She had barely noticed him when he had joined their team. The young and enthusiastic engineer turned cartographer. She had been young then too, but she hadn't thought she was. The man was older now. His face was lined, and his hair had gone white, though he wasn't quite old yet. Lilith smiled at the man who was one of the last of her old friends. He grinned back at her. It wasn't the grin of his youth. It was sadder, more knowing. It showed something approaching wisdom. Lilith's heart ached to see the years of pain in that smile. But they were both here, both still alive. They were the relics of the old world who still remained to tell its story.