The water was warm.
That was the first thing that surprised him. He had expected cold — the shock of it, the violence of a lake in the middle of a war swallowing a broken body. But the Springs received him gently, the way sleep receives someone who has been awake too long, and as he descended, tumbling slowly through the red-lit depths, the pain began to leave him. Not heal. Leave. As though the water was not fixing the wounds but simply excusing them for now, setting them aside the way you set aside something heavy when you finally find somewhere to rest.
His eyes were open.
The light was everywhere beneath the surface — deep crimson bleeding through the water in slow waves, pulsing outward from somewhere far below him, rhythmic and ancient. It illuminated nothing specific. It illuminated everything. He could see his own hands drifting above his face as he sank, the steel gone from them now, just hands — just Elliot's hands, a thief's hands, slightly too calloused for his age — trailing upward as the rest of him went down. Above the surface, broken and fragmented by the water, the daylight pressed down in pale gold shafts, the sun still burning indifferently over Tarth as though a war was the most ordinary thing it had ever been asked to watch.
I wonder if this is what dying feels like, he thought, with the peculiar calm of someone for whom the question had stopped being hypothetical.
Warm. Quiet. Red.
Not so bad.
His eyes closed.
When they opened again he was standing.
Not in water. Not on the hill above the Springs. Somewhere that was neither and both — a space that had no edges and no ceiling and no particular light source but was simply lit, the way a room is lit when you have lived in it long enough that you stop noticing where the light comes from. The ground beneath him felt solid but looked like nothing. The air tasted faintly of something he couldn't name.
He had been here before. Briefly. In dreams he couldn't quite remember upon waking.
"You look terrible."
He turned.
Lilith stood a few feet away, her arms folded, her expression the particular combination of exasperation and something warmer that she had never once acknowledged in all the months he had known her voice. Here, in whatever this place was, she had a form that was not his neck, not his back, not a grotesque sprouting mouth — just her. Herself. Whatever that meant for a being as old as she was.
She was looking at him the way she always looked at him. Like he was simultaneously the most promising and most infuriating thing she had encountered in several centuries.
"You fought Lucifer," she said.
"I did."
"As a human."
"I am a human."
"You are barely that at this point." She tilted her head. "You announced yourself by name."
"I thought it was a good line."
"It was an idiotic line." A pause. "It was also a good line."
Elliot smiled. The smile pulled at something in his chest and he remembered distantly that his chest had a very large wound in it and then the memory floated away again, irrelevant here, wherever here was.
He looked at her properly. "We've come a long way from the rock."
Something shifted in her expression. Just slightly. "Yes," she said. "We have."
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It had the quality of silences between people who have been through enough together that they no longer need to fill every gap with noise. He thought about the bargain — the absurd, one-sided, terms-not-fully-explained bargain he had agreed to before she finished speaking. He thought about the training, brutal and humiliating and occasionally genuinely frightening. He thought about every fight where her voice had been the thing between him and an ending. He thought about the campfire after Eddard, and Adriano's shoulder, and the gate, and running through the sunlit streets of Tarth while the city burned and her voice in his mind saying run, now.
"You kept me alive," he said.
"You kept me alive," she replied immediately. "Don't romanticise the arrangement."
"I'm not. I'm accounting for it."
She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again her voice had changed — not softer exactly, but less armored. The particular edge she maintained in every conversation, the disdain that had always been present even in her warmest moments, had receded into something that was simply true.
"Elliot." His name in her mouth, plainly, without prefix or suffix or any of her usual theatrical delivery. "I have existed for longer than your civilisation has had a word for time. I have been worshipped and feared and bargained with and hunted. I have had generals and armies and kingdoms and titles." She paused. "I have never had anyone I could trust."
He didn't say anything. He knew when not to speak.
"Every being I ever allied with wanted something. Every creature who ever served me was serving themselves. Every bond I formed was a transaction." Her eyes met his. "You are the only exception I have ever encountered in all of that time. And you agreed to be that exception before you had any reason to."
"I agreed before you finished explaining," he pointed out.
"Yes." For the first time in his memory, she smiled — not the cold smile, not the contemptuous smile, not the smile that meant she was about to say something withering. A real one. Brief, and genuine, and somehow older than anything he had ever seen. "That was precisely the reason."
He felt the water around them, distantly — the slow red pulse, the descent continuing even while they stood here, the golden daylight above the surface growing fainter as the Springs pulled him deeper.
"What happens now?" he asked.
"Now," Lilith said, unfolding her arms, her posture shifting into something resolute and very still, "you leave it to me."
"Lilith—"
"I am not asking." Not harsh. Certain. "You have carried me through this war on a body that should have broken four times over. You have bled for me and burned for me and stood in front of Lucifer himself and announced your name. You have given me everything I did not know I was allowed to ask for." She took a step toward him. "Let me do what I came here to do. Let me carry this last part."
He looked at her for a long moment. The thief's instinct — the part of him that had survived every bad situation by maintaining control, by never fully surrendering the read of any room — told him to argue. To find the angle. To negotiate.
He let it go.
"Okay," he said.
She nodded once. Then the space around them began to dissolve, the edges of wherever-this-was softening back into the red warmth of the water, and Elliot felt himself begin to fall again, slow and warm and weightless, the mindspace receding like a dream you try to hold and can't.
She was below him.
The water shimmered around her, the crimson light moving through it in slow currents, and Lilith descended no longer a voice or a presence or a grotesque mouth on borrowed flesh — but herself, fully, materialised from the Springs as though she had always been here and everything else had been the exile. Above the water's surface the daylight still burned — he could see it distantly, a pale gold ceiling fractured and rippling, the sun continuing its indifferent arc over Tarth and the war and the broken wall and all the people bleeding on the hillside. Down here none of that reached. Down here there was only the red, and the silence, and her.
She was luminous in a way that had nothing to do with the light around her — ancient and terrible and unutterably beautiful, the kind of beauty that preceded every human concept of it, that the very idea of beauty had probably been invented to approximate and never quite reached.
Elliot watched her from above, sinking slowly, and forgot for a moment that he was wounded. Forgot the war. Forgot Lucifer at the edge of the hill and the crimson surface above and everything that waited beyond the water.
She was moving upward. Ascending toward the surface with purpose and grace, her form cutting through the red-lit depths without effort, her eyes already fixed on something above — on whatever came next, on Lucifer.
She was not looking at him.
She did not see him reach toward her as she passed. Did not see his hand extend, fingers trailing through the water where she had been a moment before, closing on nothing.
The words left him before he could decide whether to say them. Quiet, swallowed almost immediately by the water, carried nowhere, rising toward no one.
"I love you."
She was already gone. Ascending, swift and luminous and ancient, toward the surface and the daylight and the war and the thing she had come here to finish.
Elliot smiled faintly at the empty water above him, the pale gold of the sun breaking through the crimson in thin, scattered shafts, illuminating the space where she had been.
Then he closed his eyes, and let the Springs take him deeper into the red.
Lilith emerged from the water and stared down the princes who stood there, Asmodeus was shaken but Lucifer stood tall, neither perturbed nor provoked.
"Lilith." he uttered.
"Morningstar." she said with a smirk on her face.
Their magic filled the entire area as the war ceased in Tarth, fighting seemed useless to all beings involved as they sensed the overwhelming magic of the war's newest entry.
In the depths...Elliot closed his eyes as he felt the gap where Lilith existed being filled, not by a new being or his old magic that existed there before but a new invigorating magic. And in that moment, the young lad opened his eyes which burned with a new fire.