written on their seams (caos | lilith/zelda)

[fiachairecht]

written on their seams. chilling adventures of sabrina, lilith/zelda. alone in the greendale wood, zelda and lilith take a walk into one of zelda's dreams. 1.6k words, rated m.

The world was made with words. If I looked hard enough, I could read those words still. They flowed in the veins of the world, written on their seams.
— Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeannette Ng

The practicalities of Lilith's dreamwalking are strongly influenced by Changeling: The Lost's practise of oneiromancy, with some specific gestures towards Lilith-dreams as described in Dancers at Dusk.

Zelda fits her fingers across Mary Wardwell's chest, into the hollows where her jagged ribs rise against too-thin flesh, and watches Lilith spill through the cracks.

It's new, this, and unbearably old all at once. The future unspools unwillingly from Zelda in dreams, and yet Lilith has lived a hundred thousand futures already, and talks of thousands more as if her words have brought them to life midair — or, more often, against Zelda's lips, her breasts, between her thighs. Lilith has turned her attention to creation, to spinning out forms of life stained with an intoxicating, bloody newness, ones that she will not allow Zelda to dream the ends of.

Zelda dreams less, these days, since Sabrina's baptism and the beginning of Lilith's war. And when she does dream she dreams often in Lilith's arms, mind twinned with hers as together they walk the lines of sleeping witches' thoughts, leaving behind in the Wyrd small tokens of Lilith's world to come.

And what is the skein of dreams but nudges to and from fate's Wyrd, and what are we but the Wyrd made flesh?

Lilith doesn't sleep, but her moonlight-silvered chest rises and falls in an approximation of it anyway. She knows how much Zelda likes watching her in these moments, and Zelda in turn knows how much Lilith likes being watched. All the creatures of the wood could watch them together, birds and stags and other far more nameless things, and Lilith would only laugh, drive her fingers deeper into Zelda, pin her tighter to their bed of moss, bite down harder with teeth too sharp to have ever belonged to a mortal.

And Zelda would let herself be bent, let herself worship, and wonder at the centuries she'd spent convincing herself that devotion to the Dark Lord could match this.

The wood is far from silent. Zelda can feel its fingers pulling at her, far less substantial than Lilith's but just as insistent. The moss crawls over her bare arms, soft and cold and undisturbed by the wisp of air as Lilith laughs. Zelda props herself up with her free arm, lets her fingertips trail from Lilith's ribs up her neck until they can rest against her lips, her closed eyes.

She's closed the eyes of hundreds of the dead who have passed through her mortuary over the years, and, before that, the eyes of nosy mortals who had ventured where they shouldn't and murdered witches who should have been able to venture farther in safety. None of those closed eyes had danced the way Lilith's do, rolling back and forth in Mary's skull like marbles that don't quite fit anymore.

(She wonders, briefly, if Lilith had closed Mary's eyes before stepping into her body, or if Mary had met both her death and her new unlife with clarity.)

For all that Zelda enjoys Mary's body, and loves Lilith's presence in it with a fervor near-unfamiliar to her, it is too obvious sometimes that Mary's skin is simply patches over Lilith's true form. What to mortal eyes is a woman unchanged is, to Zelda in moments when Lilith's patience for Glamour runs low, an ill-fitting costume to be styled and painted and fucked and ultimately do nothing but hide the true source of Zelda's desire from her.

And in those moments, Zelda catches herself wondering what it would be like had Lilith chosen to wear her skin instead.

Lilith laughs again, nips at the fingers resting on her mouth. "Why wonder when you can dream, sweet girl?" she murmurs, not bothering to open her eyes.

Zelda sighs, only now feeling the faint psychic flutter of Lilith's thoughts at the edges of her mind, something that isn't quite invitation or invasion but is just as undeniable as either. Her dreams, like her body and her devotion, have always been freely given — Lilith's for the taking before Lilith had even asked, though Zelda would not admit it to herself any more than Lilith would remind her — but for all the time they've spent in others' dreams, they have yet to venture into a true dream of Zelda's.

Oneiromancy was hardly safe at the best of times for one touched by Batibat, even though one's own dreams were the easiest to enter. And yet with Lilith at her side serving as Guide, she has only ever felt strong, winding the Skein back from Batibat's hand string by silver string. "A dream of a possible past?" Zelda asks.

"Of what might be." Lilith sits abruptly, eyes still shut, and Zelda's hand jerks back almost of its own accord. "There." She points over Zelda's shoulder, and when Zelda turns, she sees a new, narrow path opened through the trees, a wavering row of deep purple lillies sprung from the moss to mark the way forward. "The first gate."

Zelda's breath catches in her throat. "You would take me?"

Lilith leans forward and kisses her in answer, long and deep. When she brings a hand to Zelda's cheek, Zelda can feel the heartbeat in her palm, undimmed by the vines of ivy and light spilling from her finger-bones. "But of course. I want to see this too, all of me inside all of you ..."

She trails off, and Zelda shudders, presses her still-damp thighs together. "I want—" she says, before faltering. How to choose which she wants to put into words first, when Lilith is already so adept at robbing her of coherent thought?

"I know," Lilith says, and when she opens her eyes they're so wide that Zelda imagines for a moment she can see herself reflected in the pupils. She stands, and offers a hand to Zelda, uncaring of their mutual nakedness. "Shall we?"

Zelda takes her hand. Anything else is simply unthinkable: this is Lilith's will, for all it may have been Zelda's idle thought in the beginning, and it would be more than she could bear to show herself to be unworthy of such elevation.

Their feet make no sound on the earth as they walk, and the Greendale wood falls silent too as they pass the first gate. The Skein has no need for the noise of witches or demons or gods, its music is its own and Zelda laces her fingers tighter through Lilith's to prevent herself being drawn off the path. She doesn't see the second gate, or the third, but Lilith must, because the forest shifts to clear winter and then hazy spring around them, autumn's briskness left behind in the material realm as they track the elegant monstrosity of their merged form.

Desire courses through Zelda at even that thought, and she yearns against reason to pull Lilith to her again, to bury her hands in her hair and her tongue in her cunt and never emerge. Around them the dream shifts, flowers bursting from the ground even as clouds gather overhead.

"Time enough for that," Lilith says quietly. "It's not why we've come here."

But it was, in a way beyond that which either of them could articulate, and the heat burning through Zelda deeper and deeper as they draw near a blackberry thicket sings in her blood of an answer to be found. The brambles claw across the ground, climb the rapidly thinning trees, and Zelda holds her breath.

Lilith reaches out a hand, when they're almost near enough, in greeting or in anger or in preparation for a spell Zelda will never know, because a gash opens across her palm before she can open her mouth. "Well," Lilith says in faint surprise, watching her borrowed blood drip to the ground. "You as well, I suppose."

"The final gate?" Zelda asks. Her own dream shouldn't be so firmly locked to her, but Lilith changes everything, and at Lilith's nod, Zelda brings her hand to the brambles. The thorns are sharp enough that she feels no pain, just the tightening knot of arousal in the pit of her stomach as she, too, watches her blood fall.

Where it mingles with Lilith's on the grass a knife of mist rises to slice through the thicket, a sweeping arc to build a perfect curtain of berry-streaked rain.

In the centre of the revealed clearing, Zelda kneels. Her features are obscured by the rain veiling the final gate, but even so Zelda can see the way her counterpart's smile stretches too far across her face, the wan green pallor of her hollowed-out cheeks, the way the fall of red hair over her shoulders turns too quickly to tongues of flame.

Lilith gasps, reaching out absently with her bloody hand to gently stroke through Zelda's hair as they slowly approach the gate. "Truly the best of both of us," she says, and Zelda can't bring herself to disagree, even when the kneeling form's head rotates in a full circle before staring straight at them as if it had heard. Where the flames kiss her breasts her skin is burning away to green, the ashes dancing around her.

To be so consumed, to be set so alight by Lilith's fire - Zelda wants, and wants, and opens her mouth in a soundless scream, and when Lilith slips her fingers inside Zelda bites down with such force she is sure she would have hit bone were it not for the questionable safety of the dream.

Lilith is trembling when she works her fingers free of Zelda's teeth. "We are such a beautiful thing," she says rapturously, and she takes Zelda's face and kisses her bloody-bright. "Sweet Zelda. My prophet. Mine."

Zelda yields to her kiss, to her touch, and the tears streaming from her eyes are lost as the dream dissolves to the current moment's truth around them.