A Thousand Mortal Coils

The autumn wind carried the scent of chrysanthemums and grief across the cemetery lawn. Lilith stood at the back of the mourning party, her dark hair swept elegantly beneath a wide-brimmed hat, watching her own funeral through amber-tinted sunglasses. The irony of mourning herself yet again, maybe for the 600th time, hadn’t lost its edge, even after six thousand years.

“A brilliant scholar,” she heard someone murmur. “Such a tragic loss.”

Sarah Thorne—the identity she’d worn for the past twenty-three years—had vanished in a hiking accident three months ago. The search parties found only a shredded backpack beside the rushing waters of the Columbia River Gorge. Now her colleagues from Portland University’s Ancient History Department gathered around an empty casket, their faces painted with the particular sorrow reserved for lives cut tragically short.

“She changed my life,” a student sobbed. “The way she talked about ancient civilizations... it was like she’d been there herself.”

She remembered her first transformation in the lands of the Midianites. The being had come to her as light and shadow intertwined, its form shifting like desert mirages, as she drew water from the well just outside of the village. Her people called such entities angels, messengers of their gods.

“Who dares draw water at night?” the being had whispered, its voice like wind through ancient caves.

“I am Liliu, daughter of Raham,” she had answered, her voice trembling.

“No,” it whispered with a serpentine hiss. “You are more than your mortal form can fathom... far more than even you dare dream.” The being grew incandescent, blazing with such fierce radiance that reality itself seemed to crack around their edges, and she shielded her eyes.

It enveloped her in encompassing effulgence, and she consumed its essence with primal hunger. Around her, the desert night erupted into flame, incinerating her past life into ash as divinity coursed through her veins.

When her new husband saw her next, his eyes widened in terror. The woman who returned to the tribe was not the same one who had left.

“Your eyes,” he had gasped. “They burn like the sun itself!.”

The first drops fell softly, then multiplied into a relentless percussion across the cemetery lawn. Her colleagues hurried away under black umbrellas, their shoes squelching in the softening earth. The sound transported her back to the day she left the fertile crescent when the great drought finally broke.

“The waters rise!” The ancient screams still echoed in her memory. “The gods have abandoned us!”

She remembered how the parched earth had cracked and buckled as underground aquifers burst free and how entire villages disappeared beneath the deluge. The floods had reshaped the land, decimating populations that had already been weakened by years of drought.

She had watched from a hillside as the waters claimed the valley where she’d first been remade in the being's image, washing away all life for hundreds of miles. The few who scurried away fast enough were forever traumatized by the flood that had shattered their whole world. They rebuilt, as humans so often do, but never lost the fear that a torrent would take it all away.

She bore witness as prophets rose like weeds and faded into legend, each carrying fragments of a greater truth. The Semitic tribes of her ancestors shed their pantheons one by one, their many gods dissolving into the singular divine.

She remembered how the silver bells chimed against her skin as she twirled, each note singing memories into the wind. The desert night pulsed with ancient rhythms - tambourines, drums, and the whisper of tent canvas snapping like wings in the breeze. Her feet traced patterns in sand that had witnessed the birth of cities, of empires, of gods.

Now new prayers soared from stone towers that pierced the firmament. Their shadows stretched across crumbling ziggurats where her people once burned incense to star-crowned deities. The mighty gates of Babylon, which had welcomed processions of priests bearing golden idols, lay buried beneath centuries of shifting sand.

Yet even as the muezzin’s call rolled like thunder across adobe rooftops, she could still taste the honeyed dates of temple offerings on her tongue, still hear the ecstatic songs of priestesses echoing through time.

In Damascus, she stood in the window of her ancient home, the mosaics along the walls as vibrant as when they were first made. She watched the marketplace below, merchants still haggled in languages as old as trade itself, their gestures unchanged since the first coins changed hands beneath Mesopotamian suns. The air still thickened with cardamom, frankincense, and myrrh - scents that had perfumed the altars of a thousand forgotten deities.

“The spices smell the same,” she whispered to herself one morning, centuries later. “The same frankincense, the same myrrh.”

“Indeed, honored one,” the aged merchant replied, not knowing he spoke to one who had walked these streets when they were new. “My ancestors have traded here since the first stones were laid.”

In Uruk, she had ascended to high priestess of Inanna, her bare feet tracing sacred patterns across sun-warmed temple stones. The assassination came as sacred incense burned low - carefully orchestrated flames that devoured tapestries and consumed flesh, while smoke writhed like serpents around ancient pillars stained with generations of prayers.

Before the fire, she had whirled in gilt-edged robes through marble halls, her voice lifting hymns to a goddess she knew was as ephemeral as morning mist. Her devotions were a beautiful performance, every graceful movement a lie told in perfect faith. When the flames came, they offered more than death - they granted her freedom from a role that had grown dangerous in its visibility, a cosmic curtain fall on yet another life’s performance.

Her path led eastward, then, into the lands of tribes whose gods were strange and hungry. The proto-Slavs had welcomed her and taught her their magic—blood rites and bone-speaking, the whispers of ancient forests.

“Speak to the bones,” the Babaroga had commanded. “Let them teach you their secrets.” The volva initiated her, and the magic hummed in her veins.

She learned to reshape herself among them, molding her flesh like clay, though each transformation left her bones aching with remembered forms.

Rome came later after slavers caught her in a raid. They’d sold her for a fortune, not knowing her true worth. The senator who bought her—for thrice the asking price—had been the first of many wealthy men she’d enchanted.

“Such unusual eyes,” the senator had mused, trailing a finger along her jaw. “Like looking into the depths of time itself.”

She began collecting fortune then: jewels, gold, property. She carefully hid each lover’s gifts, building the foundation of her eternal wealth.

The Crusades nearly broke her. Walking the streets of Jerusalem again after more than a thousand years, she felt the weight of ages press upon her. Every stone, every corner held memories that threatened to overwhelm her.

“This was my home,” she had whispered, touching ancient walls. “Before Rome, before Byzantium, before all of this.”

“Who are you talking to, woman?” a Templar had demanded, his hand on his sword.

“Just an old fool’s prayer,” she had replied, hunching her shoulders, assuming the role of a local nobody.

Versailles and its opulence gave her one last taste of unfettered opulence without concern for tomorrow. She’d played the game of courtly intrigue too well, risen too high in Marie Antoinette’s circle as peasants starved.

“Ma chérie,” the queen had said, “you simply must tell me your secret. You haven’t aged a day in a dozen years.”

When the revolution came, she’d fled in the night, leaving behind her luxurious estate but keeping her head. She wandered east, through lands where ancient powers still held sway, where the refined artifice of court life gave way to older, rawer magics. The wilderness called to something primal in her nature, something that had been suffocating beneath layers of silk and powder.

The solitude of Germany’s Black Forest offered both sanctuary and transformation. There, among towering pines and whispered legends, she became the witch of village tales—ancient and grotesque one moment, young and beautiful the next. The locals left offerings at her door, never knowing that their legends walked among them in a dozen different forms.

“Grandmother,” they would whisper at her door, “please accept these gifts and spare our children.”

It was in those dark woods that she first glimpsed the adjacent dimension—the realm where all myths dwelt together, where gods and fae and creatures of legend moved freely between shadows. She learned that her own transformation had been just one thread in a vast tapestry of supernatural existence, parallel to but separate from the mundane world.

The storm unleashed its fury, each icy drop striking like a judgment. Lilith remained unmoved before the casket, which held nothing but flowers and satin pillows.

Time stretched around her like an infinite road—she had centuries to spare, standing sentinel at this monument to her mortal self. Tomorrow would bring reinvention: a new name whispered into existence, a fresh identity carved from possibility, a life unburdened by the past.

But in this moment, she let memory flood her senses—life after life running together in her mind, like the collection of all of existence coursing through her veins, immortality’s essence poured down her throat by an entity ancient as the cosmos itself. Neither seraph nor demon, it had moved like fire, primordial and greater than all the world’s gods.

And she, too, was just another immortal that humanity would never know existed, walking unseen among countless others who had transcended the limits of what mortals could imagine or create in their own image. She turned her back on a life laid to rest and drove away to nowhere.