Eve suffered for many long years.
Her mind, mutilated by everything she had experienced, had long ceased to be a cohesive whole. Memories tangled together, layered on top of each other, and gradually lost their boundaries. Sometimes she even forgot herself, unable to tell which of the countless memories belonged to the real her and which were merely another shard of someone else's agony.
This didn't happen often, but every such episode left fresh cracks in her consciousness, chipping away at her self-confidence and destroying her already fragile mental equilibrium.
Only a few things kept her from breaking completely.
The thirst for revenge against those who had condemned her to this fate. The desire to free her home from foreign rule. And the hope of one day returning to the ones she continued to love, even after tens of thousands of years of separation—her husband and children.
But desires alone were not enough.
To challenge the Demiurges of this world required power—immense power—and an army, for an individual will always be weaker than a collective. But even that might not be enough against the two beings standing at the dawn of all creation.
Especially when one of them was watching her almost constantly.
The Root of Evil never let her "chosen one" out of her sight, as if fearing that she might one day try to break free from her designated role. She constantly monitored, guided, and while she didn't directly interfere, she didn't leave Eve a single chance to openly raise a rebellion either.
Everything changed about three hundred years ago.
It was then that Eve managed to do something she could never have even dreamed of: step outside the boundaries of the Three Worlds and create her own space—a world of eternal Darkness, inaccessible to both Roo and God.
For the first time in many millennia, she found a place where she could act freely, and it was there that the preparations for the rebellion began.
Year after year, Eve gathered supporters, amassed power, and laid plans for the future, never letting the hope die of one day overthrowing those she held responsible for her suffering. However, it seemed her preparations had not gone unnoticed.
One evening, she was handed six soul shards. Each one pulsed with a strange energy, unlike either Light or Darkness, and contained fragments of someone's personality within. With them came an order: implant these shards into her closest servants and consume one herself.
Eve didn't know what exactly Roo was trying to achieve. Was it another test, a punishment, or part of some grander design? She could only guess, but she had no choice.
She understood that such an intrusion could permanently shatter her mind, and so, before carrying out the order, she decided to meet with the only person she still trusted.
With Adam.
Despite thousands of years of separation, he listened to her. It was then that Eve gave him the Forbidden Fruit, inside which she had hidden one of the soul shards—the most powerful one of them all. For some unknown reason, this specific shard contained traces of the other five, as if it were their foundation.
After that, Eve carried out the order and consumed the shard meant for her—the weakest of the six. It held almost no power and barely any memories, but even that proved to be enough.
Her mind, already spiderwebbed with countless cracks, couldn't withstand the new blow and finally shattered completely...
POV Eve
Silence...
The first thing I realized as I surfaced from what had become my usual endless nightmare was the silence.
The billions of voices of dying creatures no longer echoed in my head; the obsessive whispering in my own voice was gone; and the panic that washed over me time and time again whenever I tried to remember who I was had vanished.
For the first time in many thousands of years, my thoughts flowed calmly and clearly, free from the pain, chaos, and foreign suffering tearing me apart.
I... I felt like myself again.
Slowly opening my eyes, I looked around.
A twilight reigned here, completely unlike the one I was used to. In my world, the darkness was almost material—thick and practically tangible. Here, it felt light and shifting, as if woven from mist or smoke.
There were also no mountains here, no rivers, no endless forests. On the contrary, the space around me looked completely empty, as if the world hadn't quite been finished yet.
"Where am I?.." I whispered, barely audible.
Even my own voice sounded somehow unfamiliar to me.
I tried to stand up, and only then did I notice that I was completely naked. My cheeks instantly flushed. After everything I had been through, being embarrassed by something like this was silly and ridiculous, but my body reacted before my mind did. Hastily covering myself with my hands, I got to my feet and looked around warily. No one, just endless twilight...
Suddenly, something fired in my brain—memories were rushing back, but not like before. Not as an insane torrent of images, not morphing into a chaotic mush of thousands of lives and millions of deaths. No, now they lined up in a neat, orderly chain: formulating the plan, gathering the army, invading Heaven, the battle, and... Abel.
The world seemed to stop.
His focused, so-grown-up face flashed before my eyes, followed by the sight of my spear piercing his chest, and then his lifeless body hitting the ground...
And Adam's gaze, the exact look of a man who had just had a piece of his soul ripped away...
A strangled sob tore from my chest involuntarily.
"No..." I clamped a hand over my mouth. My throat tightened so painfully that it was hard to breathe. "No... no... no..." Tears of grief streamed down my cheeks.
This wasn't what I wanted, not what I lived for, not what I amassed power for all these thousands of years!
I wanted to protect my family, to return to them, and in the end, I myself destroyed everything I was trying to save...
My legs gave out. I had almost collapsed to my knees when I felt another presence.
I whipped around and froze—a few meters away from me lay a painfully familiar man, just as completely naked as I was. His chest was heaving as if he had run a marathon, sweat streamed down his face, his fingers were trembling slightly, and his golden eyes were staring up into nothingness.
For a moment, I simply stopped breathing.
"Adam..." The name slipped from my lips before I even registered what was happening.
How?
When did he get here?
Why didn't I notice him sooner?
All other thoughts instantly vanished, and I darted forward, dropping to my knees beside him a second later.
Alive.
Adam was real, not a memory, not an illusion, not another nightmare.
I gently took his large, warm hand in mine.
"Adam..." My voice betrayed me, trembling and breaking into a quiet squeak.
He slowly turned his head toward me. His gaze was unfocused for a few seconds, and then it was as if he recognized me, and his eyes widened slightly.
"Eve?.." Adam's voice was hoarse and exhausted. Then he suddenly averted his gaze, and... his ears turned red. I blinked uncomprehendingly, while Adam awkwardly tried to shift his position and cover himself with his free hand. "Lucky that when an alien 'godling' took up residence in my head, he was at least wearing clothes."
Despite everything going on, I almost laughed through my tears. That ridiculous sentence completely shattered the last remnants of my composure.
"I'm sorry..." I gripped his hand tighter. "Please... forgive me, Adam...." The words spilled out on their own. "I didn't want this... I swear... I didn't mean to..." Abel flashed before my eyes again, my spear, his blood... I squeezed my eyes shut. "It was like I was locked inside my own body. I even saw it all happening, but I wasn't fully aware and couldn't change anything..." Adam flinched. I noticed, and the pain inside twisted deeper, but he didn't push me away, didn't pull his hand back, didn't even turn away. That only made me want to cry harder. "I missed you all so much..." My voice finally broke. "Every second, every day, every century... When someone else's pain was tearing me apart from the inside, when I forgot my own name, and even when I wanted to die..." I looked into his eyes. "Only the memories of you kept me from death." I smiled through my tears. Just a little. "Of how you smiled when I called you all for dinner, how Abel used to chase his little wolf pup and train him, how Cain used to spar with you..." My chest tightened painfully. "You were all I had left." I made no attempt to hide my feelings—there was no point anymore, because for the first time in a long time, I was finally myself.
I allowed myself to say all this, even knowing what I would hear in return. I knew I had long since lost the right to hope of returning to that life in Eden...
But instead of the anger I was so terrified of seeing, a strange expression appeared on Adam's face: embarrassment and panic...
He rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily.
"Eve, listen..." Adam hesitated. His voice sounded deeply uncomfortable, and he clearly had no idea where to look. "I... I understand. For certain reasons, I had to... Ahem, experience all the fucked-up shit that's been torturing you all these years, and I don't blame you for Abel..." He grimaced, betraying his own lie. "Or rather, I'm trying not to blame you," he corrected himself. "I understand that it wasn't exactly you, but..." Adam sighed heavily, finally looking me dead in the eye. "I'm feeling pretty fucking awkward right now, Eve... And not just because we're flashing our bare asses in your subconscious."
"What?" I froze, not understanding. "What do you mean?"
Adam gave a guilty, crooked smile, gently pulling his hand free.
"Well, you're kind of pouring your heart out to me right now, saying things that are so important to you, and I feel like shit because while you were holding on to the past, I kind of moved on." He hesitated. "I... Well, basically, there's another woman." Adam scratched the back of his head, looking like a teenager caught doing something wrong. "And she means a lot to me. And... it's not just her. I'm not the Adam you remember, Eve..."
My heart clenched painfully.
Just one sentence, but it felt like someone had slowly driven a knife between my ribs.
I stayed silent. Adam did too.
He was clearly waiting for my reaction. I don't know what exactly he expected, but there was nothing, because deep down, I knew he had every right to all of this.
For thousands of years, I was absent from his life. For thousands of years, he lived without me: suffered without me, changed without me, and... loved without me...
How could I possibly expect him to just wait all this time?
No.
That would be far too cruel on my part.
Did it hurt? Yes, unbearably.
But it was fair...
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then looked at him again. I saw a familiar expression—Adam genuinely cared about me.
Even now, after everything I had done, he didn't want to hurt me, but he also refused to lie...
"You haven't changed, Adam..." I drew out the words, looking at him sadly. A phrase he had casually dropped resurfaced in my mind: 'For certain reasons, I had to... Ahem, experience all the fucked-up shit that's been torturing you all these years...' Was he the one who saved me? Did Adam help me claw my way out of this nightmare? Did he live through all of that to save me? "Thank you." I couldn't help but smile through my tears.
Yes, that was so like him—sacrificing himself for his family...
That was Adam through and through.
POV Adam
Yeah...
What was it I said again?
"I am a fucking genius!", I believe it was?
Well then—forget it!
The guy who said that was an idiot! An idiot, a moron, a cretin, and so on down the list, because a normal person doesn't dive headfirst, with zero guarantees, into the mind of a being who has been going insane for several tens (well, it's pushing twenty now, right?) of thousands of years!
Seven thousand times...
That's roughly how many "memory" fragments I had to endure. Seven thousand times I found myself on the verge of just laying down and never getting back up.
At first, I thought they were actual echoes of memories from dying civilizations, but then I realized it was way more complicated. They weren't the events themselves, but rather their "emotional essence," something like concentrated evil or pure, unfiltered suffering.
In the first fragment, the world was consumed by Holy Fire; in the second, everything living drowned beneath endless waves of liquid Darkness; in the third, people spontaneously exploded for no reason right in the streets of their own cities... Somewhere, creatures slowly starved to death; somewhere else, they lost everything they loved. And every single time, I lived through that shit right alongside them—I felt their terror, their agony, their despair, and their craving for death...
Everyone knows the Fruit of Knowledge is supposed to grant an understanding of Good and Evil. The Fruit Eve ate was uncapped, and so, being a creature of Light, she was forced to confront all the evil that God and Roo had ever observed.
All of it.
While my Fruit worked with restrictions, only showing me the aspects of Evil I didn't yet understand, she was forced to experience absolutely everything. The girl's mind simply snapped under the weight, which isn't exactly surprising...
Honestly, I was barely holding it together myself after that.
After every particularly brutal fragment, I'd end up on the floor, trying to remember how to breathe. Sometimes it lasted for minutes, sometimes hours, or even days. Honestly, I have no clue, because time here felt... non-existent.
But I kept going, plunging into Eve's "memories" over and over, living through what she had lived through. The fragments I "viewed" eventually vanished, allowing me to move "deeper," though the sight, let me tell you, was pretty fucking creepy (literally a Frankenstein's monster).
At some point, I finally saw the real Eve—she was right in the center of her giant horror-replica, as if locked inside her own mind.
I felt that I really could wake her up, but if I did, she would just keep suffering, which I... didn't want.
That was when the last shreds of my anger toward her completely vanished. I won't say I forgave Eve; the memory of Abel was still too raw. But the suppressed hatred faded, leaving behind only regret and a desire to help. I guess that's what made me keep going, even though the urge to drop this whole thing and tell it to go to hell crossed my mind regularly...
During that time, I managed to think about a lot of things (skipping past the musings on the futility of existence and other such crap), including Abel's death.
You know what?
Fuck that!
I refuse to believe this is the end! I got transferred from one fucked-up world into another fucked-up world, where angels, demons, artifacts, pocket dimensions, and living embodiments of Light and Darkness with god complexes exist.
And you want me to believe that death is the end?
Hell, Hazbin fans in my past life came up with a ton of theories about my angelic ass making a return to the show: ranging from God Himself resurrecting angels, to something more logical, like me respawning in Hell as a sinner after I died (though why the fuck that would happen, I'd love to know).
Well, now I have a genuinely important reason to meet with the Demiurges—I want to bring my son back to life.
Yes, that is exactly how this works! I don't give a shit if "resurrecting" someone "ruins the narrative impact," if it "cheapens death" or "lowers the stakes." I'm not a fucking character in a book, I don't give a fuck about that!
I want my fucking son back, so don't bust my balls about it, you sons of bitches!
As for God and Roo...
The more of Eve's "memories" I saw, the less I bought her version of events. No, I'm not going to justify the Demiurges, especially considering the sheer volume of suffering they forced their own creation to endure. But the image of cartoonish villains destroying worlds just for kicks simply refused to materialize—there were too many inconsistencies and all sorts of questions I just didn't have answers for. So I decided to shelve any conclusions for later—first, I need to figure out what the hell is actually going on, and then decide whose face needs caving in.
By the time the last memory fragments began to fade, I was barely conscious. As usual, the fragments detached from the main mass and slowly drifted down, falling right through the "floor."
I don't know what happened to them down there, but supposedly everything should be fine. Otherwise, I'm actually going to lose my mind—having to go under the "floor" to look for them... That would be a huge pain in the ass...
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Eve kneeling in front of me. And that's when I genuinely panicked. Not because she wasn't wearing any clothes—I'm perfectly fine looking at a beautiful girl, there's nothing wrong with that—but the main problem was who exactly this naked girl was, and what kind of physiological reaction she was going to trigger in me, considering I was also completely buck naked...
And explaining to a woman who is dear to your heart, whom you haven't seen in several tens of thousands of years, why you're deliberately staring exclusively at her eyes or the top of her head turned out to be unexpectedly difficult. Especially when that woman is so incredibly beautiful, and you really don't want to offend her on top of it all...
So, when she grabbed my hand, I tried to focus solely on her words and feelings. And the longer I listened, the heavier my heart felt, because every single word she said was sincere.
She really had loved us all this time—loved me, Abel, even Cain. And she held on to those memories as if they were the absolute last thing she had left.
And the shittiest part was that I believed her unconditionally, because I had seen it all with my own eyes. I felt what Eve had felt, and I went through what she herself had gone through.
That was exactly why the conversation that followed was so agonizing for me—I genuinely didn't want to hurt someone who had only just started to get her mind back.
When I mentioned Lute, the expression on her face changed. It was almost imperceptible, but I still caught it—my empathy had leveled up way too much during all this, and because of it, I suddenly felt disgusted with myself.
I saw her hope, her dream that she had carried across millennia, and I shattered it with my own two hands. But I didn't have another choice—I fell in love with Lute, and lying... I wasn't going to lie to her, or to myself.
Yes, once upon a time I truly loved Eve, and the original Adam loved her this entire time, and a part of those feelings will always stay with me, because things like that don't just disappear completely. But I haven't been that Adam for a long time. Now Lute is by my side, and I wasn't going to hurt her either.
I hope Eve and I can start over—become friends or something. I do care about her a lot, after all, but I'm not going to force anything...
Although, maybe Lute wouldn't actually mind?..