Lilith

By Madeleine Sherbondy

1

The Seventh Day

In the beginning, there was nothing.

And then there was light.

God created the light and the dark, the land and the sea. He created the sky-scraping ferns and the crawling vines. He sowed the ground with all trees pleasant to the eye and all those bearing edible fruits, and He did this within the space He called Eden. In the garden, He put the animals He had spoken into existence. They were free to roam and eat as they pleased, enclosed in the peace of Eden and protected against the perils of the surrounding Wastelands, and He was happy.

He scooped clay from the Earth, molded it in His hands, and created Adam. And then, from the same Earth, He created Lilith.

Adam was created in His image, with the strong jaw and thick brow within which rested  the human strength God had created. He had large hands in which he cupped the fruit and spoke lithely as he named the animals one by one. He was the man that God had envisioned, and God fell in love with him as He watched Adam move about the garden that He had created just for him. God watched Adam name the animals and eat of the fruit He set down for him and He thought of the children he would populate His new domain with. God declared Adam to be perfect.

From the beginning, Lilith was different from Adam. Where Adam had strong features, Lilith’s were slender and childlike, and she glowed with youthful beauty. Her strength did not reside in her hands or her face like Adam’s but rather in her soul. She shone with the Holy Spirit where God had imbued her with it, even more so than Adam, his masterpiece. Lacking in physical strength, the Spirit gave her mental strength and a strength of will that even God did not foresee. When Adam named the animals, she sat beside him instead of behind him. When Adam slept at night under the Tree of Life, Lilith made herself comfortable in the shrubbery, away from him. When Adam busied himself with the affairs of the animals and God’s plans for his future, Lilith paced the Garden restlessly in the sunlight. She was uncomfortable.

God watched her even closer than He watched Adam because Adam was the predictable human, Lilith was not. God thought that He knew how His first woman would act, but Lilith surprised Him. Her glow was too strong, too much of the Spirit coursed through her veins. At night He watched her lie awake, staring at the stars He had created. She was beneath Him, but the amount of the Spirit He had put into her, giving her the strength to bear children and be the mother of the Earth, was too much for comfort.

On the Seventh Day, God became nervous.

2

Eden

Eden was a paradise designed for Adam, with Lilith as the unwilling collateral. God was aware of this.

The first thing that made God look at Lilith differently than Adam was the fact that she was not happy. In Paradise, she was not happy. Adam spent his days exploring the garden and bringing back his new finds to show Lilith. She did a lot of pacing, which was another thing that worried God. Humans had been designed with the intention of complexity and wonder so that they could appreciate what God had done, not so they could tread the ground bare, going back and forth across the garden. Lilith would walk around the hedged perimeter of Eden with one hand brushing the leaves separating her from the Wastelands, and she would do this all day until the sun melted into the horizon and God cast darkness over the garden.

The second thing that made God wary of Lilith was that she seemed to avoid Adam. He was the one God was most proud of, with his childlike appreciation at the lush foliage around them and wonderment at each new thing he found. He picked fruit from trees and ate them, but always reserved one for his woman. But when Lilith saw him coming through the trees or heard his heavy footfalls on the leaves, she would lose herself in the vast garden of paradise, even if it meant running, tripping over roots and rocks. Adam usually ended up finding her, but she never accepted what he offered without reluctance.

The third thing that made God nervous about Lilith was that she did not take up the cross of her duty, the reason that God put her on Earth in the first place.

Once God had snuffed out the sun for the night and His night birds began to sing their nighttime songs, Lilith and Adam laid down under the Tree of Life in the center of the garden. Lilith shrouded herself in wide fig leaves and laid with her back to Adam. Next to her, he turned around. Lilith inched further away. Adam followed her. Lilith covered herself in another layer of leaves and moved another foot away. When she felt his fingers on her back, she said over her shoulder, “Stop, it is nighttime.”

“I know,” he said. “That is why I am doing this.”

Lilith knew exactly what he meant. She had been putting it off as much as he had been anticipating it.

“Adam, I do not want to.”

“Turn around,” he said. He snaked his hands around her waist and pulled her towards him.

Lilith squirmed, wrenching herself from his grip. “I do not want to. Please stop touching me.” She wriggled away from him again. Adam followed. This time, his hands touched her front.

“I have to,” he panted against the back of her neck. “You have to.”

She pried his hands off her, but they kept coming back.

“It is your duty. You must.”

Lilith pulled away, slapped his hands off her bare skin. “I am not going to. Leave me alone. Do not touch me again.”

Yards away from where they lay, one of the enormous, colorful flowers God had planted in the garden suddenly caught flame, and with it came a voice: “Lilith.” The voice did not come from above, but rather from all around. Lilith felt it on all sides, felt it inside of her. It was in her bones – it was impossible to ignore the voice of God. “Lilith, you must do as Adam tells you to, my child. It is your purpose and your duty.”

Tears burned at the first woman’s eyes as she moved further away from Adam, who began to pursue her. “I do not want to do it with him.”

“Lilith, my daughter, my love,” God said again from inside her. “If not with him, then with whom?”

“Please do not make me,” she sobbed against one of the leaves covering her bare body from Adam’s gaze.

“But I must, child.”

“You do not have to, and I will not.”

“Lilith!” All fatherly love was gone from the voice of God, replaced by fury and layers of bewilderment. The flower burned brighter, sparks leaping from its petals and into the air. “It is your duty and your salvation to create. I created you to create, so that the world may be full of my children.”

“No!”

“Submit to Adam, Lilith. He is the master of all I have created, which means he is your master as well.”

“No, he is not,” Lilith insisted. Beside her, Adam tore aside the leaf covering her breasts.

“If you do not submit to him now, you will later. But now, my child, it is your reason for being to obey your man.”

Lilith was pushed against the ground by hands she could not see and Adam could not feel. While she thrashed, God held her in place and the rest of her leaves were removed. Adam forced himself upon her like the animals he had named, and when he was finished, he turned around and went to sleep beside Lilith, who remained frozen by the will of God.

When God’s hands lifted from where they pressed Lilith’s shoulders into the ground, she did not move. She lay on the ground under the Tree of Life, and she thought in a way that God did not anticipate, in a way only made possible by the Spirit in her soul. She thought about Eden, about what paradise meant if it was made only for one. She thought about what lay beyond the hedges and what powers lay beyond God. She thought about her God-given purpose, and decided that if her purpose was paradise, then she would rather wander the Wastelands than be God’s first woman.

Yards away, the flower burned.

3

The Burning Bush

After that first night, Lilith simmered quietly, out of the view of Adam. She knew she was never away from the eyes of God, which in a way, she relished. He could see her brooding under the trees and between the bushes when she hid from Adam, which she found to be the only rebellion she could manage in Eden, however small it was. He could watch her pace back and forth along the thick hedges dividing Eden from the outside. He watched her sculpt figurines of people and animals and trees out of mud, then crush them back into the ground. He watched her pause at a corner of the garden and stare at the hedges, but He could not read her thoughts. What Lilith was thinking would have baffled Him, as He had created this paradise just for her – well, Adam and her, of course. But Lilith was unhappy from the moment she opened her eyes to the greenery and flora of the garden. She wondered what the Wasteland God had warned them about looked like outside of her mind’s eye.

Night after night, Adam climbed on top of her and did his duty. It caused her pain, of both body and mind. She was uneasy when he touched her and cried out when he forced himself onto her. Each night, another piece of the nearby flora would ignite, a constant reminder from their creator that He was watching. Lilith spent the days dreading the nights and began pacing twice as quickly.

Adam was blissfully ignorant. He brought Lilith flowers from all corners of the garden. He collected fruit for each meal and presented her with the roundest and ripest and sweetest. She thanked him, ate the fruit, and did not speak to him unless he spoke to her first. Like a swollen riverbank, her dislike for him had spilled over from the nights into the days. When she looked at him, all she could see was the grass inches from her eyes as she was pinned to the ground by his weight, the leaves she would cover herself with in vain, and the smoldering, burning flowers telling her to behave. Lilith discovered hate. She hated Adam for hurting her. She hated God for creating her. She boiled quietly to herself, but the river could only hold so much water.

One night not long after their creation, Adam and Lilith were sleeping under the Tree of Life. Adam reached for Lilith’s shoulder, and she pulled away.

“Lilith,” he warned. “Do your duty.”

“No,” she said. Immediately, a nearby bush ignited. Before, she would give in and let Adam onto her upon seeing God’s warning, but the riverbank in her heart overflowed. “Leave me alone. I do not want to tonight – or ever.”

“You lie beneath me,” Adam told her. “You lie beneath me because it is where you belong. You are my woman and you must submit.”

“No,” Lilith said, pushing his hands away. “If we must do this, then you lie beneath me. We are both equal, for both of us are from the Earth.”

“I was created before you to be above you,” Adam said. “The dust that God shaped me from was pure and without impurity.”

“Why must I lie beneath you? I was also made from dust, and therefore I am your equal.”

“You must, Lilith. It is your --”

“It is NOT my duty!” Lilith cried out and pushed Adam with a force that she did not know she possessed. It flowed from her like ripples from a waterfall, and Adam was thrown back from her and against a tree. He looked at her with surprise and wonder from the ground. Lilith looked down at her hands with an expression that could have been bewilderment as well, but she held herself steady in front of Adam. “I am not beneath you,” she told him. “And I will not lie beneath you anymore.”

The burning bush grew in size and brightness until its flames licked the canopy of trees above them. “Lilith,” the voice of God said once more, coming again from all sides and resonating inside of her. “I wish not to tell you again what you must do. You were created with divine intention, and this intention you must fulfill.”

Lilith felt sadness, she felt hatred, but above all, she felt powerful when she looked at Adam still slumped against the tree. “If I do not fulfill what you have said is my duty, what shall become of me?” she asked.

“I wish not to harm you, my child,” God said.

“Do not call me your child!” Lilith shouted. “I do not want to be your child if you will not treat me like your child. Call me Lilith or call me nothing!”

“But Lilith, you are my child,” God said, “and one thing you will learn in motherhood is that children need discipline. I love you, but if my woman will not do as she was meant to, there are other women to be created. Adam will have his companion, and it does not have to be you.”

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked Him. She was not scared, for fear did not yet exist. She was jubilant. “What will become of me?”

“She must be banished!” Adam cried out. He was still on the ground beneath the tree. “This beast must not reside in Eden with me and the others You create, my Lord. Her wrongdoing will corrode the garden and the goodness of my heart.”

“Very well,” the voice of God said. “Lilith, my daughter, I gave you all the chance I could. But if you will not submit to the bidding of your man, you are not fit for Eden.”

“I do not want to live in Your damned garden, if I cannot live free!” The burning bush grew ever brighter, its light drowning the trees, the garden, and Adam out of her sight. The hedges of Eden parted, and, just as soon as it began, the light vanished, and Lilith found herself outside.

It was at that moment that she discovered fear.

4

The Wastelands

The land that lay beyond the walls of Eden was scorched and fruitless, battered by God’s sun all day and doused with utter darkness at night. The ground was cracked. There were barren trees and dying bushes, with areas of water occurring only occasionally. Lilith wandered the wasteland alone for seven days. She was dressed into the remains of the leaves she covered herself with in Eden; she refused to be naked. The sun seared into her skin where it was uncovered and left her thirsty and exhausted. For seven days and seven nights, she did not eat or drink. She spent these days straying about the Wasteland in vain, searching for shelter, food, or what she longed for the most: people besides Adam. She was not entirely sure such people existed in the Wasteland. As far as she was aware, she and Adam were the sole man and woman.

While she wandered, she thought. It was the fault of man for her fate, she decided. It was God who created her with the intention of living under Adam. It was Adam who tortured her nightly with his desires and fantasies of her submission. She hated them both—hated the man whom she was created to live beneath and hated the Creator Himself for dictating her destiny. As she wandered, hungry, hot, and thirsty, she fantasized of revenge.

It was likely these fantasies that drew him to her. On the eighth day, Lilith saw the figure of what appeared to be a person far ahead of her in the dust of the Wasteland. She ran, hopeful to see another human. He stood much taller than her and wore nothing on his body, and behind him stretched a magnificent pair of dark wings. Lilith was enchanted by him, as she had never seen any human with wings or who stood so strongly—or any other human, for that matter. But he was not human. He introduced himself as Samael, the Archangel.

Lilith was drawn to him from the first moment she saw him across the Wasteland. Samael had eyes like two dark pools of water, and when he moved to greet her, his muscles rippled under his skin. Lilith could never look at his wings enough, strong, strapping stalks protruding from his back that curved gently and tapered to two points coated in fine, dark feathers. He spoke nimbly, the opposite of Adam’s clumsy truisms. Lilith could almost see his voice floating in the air in front of her when he spoke to her, a ribbon of smooth words wrapping around her, tying her to him. And when he spoke to her, he spoke of fascinating things Lilith never heard from Adam. Adam was not much of a conversationalist, but Samael was. He spoke first about Lilith herself, how he had been wandering the Wasteland too and how lucky he was to find someone beautiful like her, all covered in ragged fig leaves. Lilith had never been called beautiful. She did not know what the word meant, so she had to ask him. He told her that “beautiful” meant she looked like how water tasted in the Wasteland and how freedom felt after Eden. She asked him how he knew about Eden. He told her that he had watched God create it. She asked him if he was in the Wastelands because God had also cast him out. He told her that there were some things he did not want to tell her just yet.

Lilith was hesitant about him at first, especially at night. Night in the Wastelands was much different than night in Eden. There were no trees to shelter her from the stars and no grass to sleep on. There was only the naked ground and endless expanse of stars stretching above where she and Samael slept, but she felt safe next to him. Perhaps it was his wingspan, or maybe it was the aura about him that was everything that Adam was not. Where Adam was weak-willed and cowardly, Samael was solid and bright. Adam would bring Lilith fruit for each meal, thinking himself to be blindly and ignorantly in her good graces and then senselessly hurt her at night, but Samael took care of Lilith when they walked the Wastelands together. He sheltered her from the sun with his wings and always let her drink first, but Lilith knew that he was not blind the way Adam had been. Samael knew what he was doing. He was the opposite of the man she was running from.

Although she was hesitant, worried that if she allowed him into her flesh, she might end up back on the grass under the Tree of Life with Adam laboring above her, when Samael touched her at night, she obliged him and laid beneath him. And when they laid together, Lilith cried not in pain, but in pleasure, and she was no longer afraid to feel this pleasure. The Archangel Samael was a better lover than Adam ever was or would be. Lilith remembered the fear that settled over her whenever night fell on Eden and contrasted it with the hunger towards Samael she felt now. Although unsatisfied with the Wastelands and her fate in them, there was a glimmer of light in the bleakness of God’s world.

It was after one of these acts of flesh, when they were lying together on the dusty, cracked ground of the Wastelands under the endless stars that God had created, that Samael told her why he had found her.

“There is another woman,” he told Lilith.

She was startled and sat upright immediately. “Another woman?”

“He calls her Eve. She is the new companion to Adam in Eden.”

“Was she created like I was?”

“No. God realized His mistake when he saw your resolve and the way you pushed Adam away.”

Lilith remembered the feeling of power flowing through her, remembered when Adam flew across the ground and hit the tree behind him. “All I did was push him away from me.”

“You did more than that, my dear. It was the Spirit in you.”

“The Spirit?”

“The Holy Spirit. When God made you from the same clay and dust as Adam, He put more Spirit in you because He believed it would give you the strength to rise up to the challenge of populating the Earth and living alongside Adam. He was right because you rose up to the challenge. He was wrong because the challenge you took on was one He did not anticipate.”

“How do you know this?”

“Patience, my child.”

Lilith wanted to tell him that she was not his child just as she had told God before, but she would have rather listened to him speak. So, she kept quiet. She would rather be his child than God’s.

“Eve was created directly from Adam,” Samael said, and reclined onto the hard ground with ease. They were not lucky enough to find one of the sand dunes common throughout the Wastelands to sleep on that night, so they made do on the dry soil. “God took his rib and fashioned her from his body. She does not carry nearly the same strength of Spirit that you do. She is weak. She is trapped.”

Lilith was silent for a time. “I do not desire to return to Eden at all,” she told Samael, “but it is not my wish that this new woman suffer the way I did. I must go back.”

“You wish to return to Eden and help her?” Samael asked her.

“I insist on it. I demand it. Even if it takes me another seven days and nights to walk back. But Samael, I was banished from Eden. I may not enter again, lest God and Adam see me and cast me out once again – or do something much worse.”

“I understand, child. And that is why I shall make you a trade.” Samael stood up so that he towered above Lilith, and he stretched his wings out to either side of him. “I sought you out because I heard your desperation, Lilith. I am prepared to bargain. Would you like to reenter Eden?”

“Yes. I feel it is my duty to learn what Adam is doing to Eve, and if I must, I will rescue her. No woman deserves the life that I was forced to lead.”

“Very well. And you are sure in this decision, child?”

“I have never been so sure.” This was true – the only other impactful decision Lilith had made was the decision to leave Eden, and even though she had been resolute, she had still been afraid. Now, she was not afraid at all. The hate overpowered the fear.

“Would you be prepared to give me everything you have in return for the ability to enter Eden?”

“I...” Lilith faltered. She looked up at Samael standing above her, wings at their full span, and thought about his flesh. He touched her in a way that Adam never did, or that she never let Adam do. She had already given him what she had. “Yes. Whatever it is you want, I will provide.”

“Your soul?”

“My... soul?”

“Yes, child. Your heart. Your soul. Your spirit.”

“Why?”

“All of these questions are such a mournful sound, Lilith. I want your soul because I understand you, and you understand me,” he told her. “We are two of a kind, cast out by those whom we trusted. I want your soul so I can keep it safe while you do your duty in Eden.”

Lilith said nothing. She just looked above her at the vast swath of stars that seemed to go on forever on all sides. The endlessness of the stars frightened her. She wondered if God had created each and every one of them the way He told them that He had in the beginning.

“Lilith, if you give me your soul, I will allow you to reenter Eden undetected,” Samael promised. “My power will defeat His if you no longer belong to Him, but to me.”

“Your power? Are you --” Lilith paused. “Are you a God?”

“No, no, my dear,” Samael purred. “But I am close. I am a fallen one, born from the same place as the God you resent. I was cast out, like you, because I defied Him. And therefore, I ask us to come together to work against Him. You want that, do you not?”

“I do,” Lilith whispered. “How?”

“If you give me what I desire, my child,” I will allow you to take the form of one of God’s beloved creatures. You will slither back into Eden without him even knowing.” Samael knelt in front of Lilith and lifted her chin to look into her eyes. In the dead of night, his once-clear blue eyes were cloudy and dark. “My power shall mask His.”

5

Eve

Samael’s bargain allowed Lilith to crawl on her belly even closer to the ground than she had been when Adam was on top of her. She was able to reenter Eden without a whisper from God. Eden was timeless; there was almost nothing different about its lush foliage and flora from the night she was banished. There were only two differences. The first was clear to Lilith from the moment she reentered: the woman.

If what Samael had told her was true, Eve was made differently than Lilith, and it showed in the way she moved around Adam. She was the ideal woman, made to serve her man. Lilith watched her orbit him with displeasure. She saw nothing of herself in Eve, besides her body. Lilith decided that Eve was beautiful, finally finding a subject for the strange new word that Samael had taught her. She was beautiful, but in an innocent way. Where Lilith had fiery eyes and dark hair, Eve had tender lips and soft curves. She never covered herself like Lilith had. Lilith loved to watch her gleam in the sunlight while she basked under the trees of the garden. Adam adored her. Lilith was sure he did not miss having to coerce her into copulation each night. That was the one thing Lilith could not bear to watch, even from her vantage point on the ground. Eve might have enjoyed it in the moment, but Lilith believed in her heart that the real woman was in there somewhere.

The second difference in the garden was subtle, but there, nonetheless. In the center of the garden stood a new tree, one with dark, ashy bark and leaves that rustled in the breeze just like the others, but a strange, unfamiliar aura surrounded it and the plump, dark-red fruits it bore. When Lilith asked Samael about it the first time she traded the greenery of Eden for the dust and decay of the Wastelands, he seemed troubled.

“He calls it the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” he told her.

“It was not there before.”

“God planted it there after you left.”

“But why?”

“There are many things about the Heavens and Earth and beyond that that you do not understand, my child,” he said. “There is God, the force of Good, which you have already encountered. But there is naturally the counterpoint to Good, which, of course, is Evil.”

“What is Evil?” Lilith asked.

“Evil is everywhere, and it is in everything,” he told her. “Evil is what held you to the ground while Adam did what he did to you. Evil is what caused you to weep when you stepped outside of the garden. Evil lies in everything, everywhere. It is even in God, who is meant to be so Good. There is nowhere that Evil cannot touch.”

“Am I evil?” Lilith wondered aloud.

“No, child,” the archangel purred. “You are doing the right thing. If you were evil, you would not want to save Eve. You would not care about her, only yourself.”

“Are you evil?”

“Lilith, if you are not evil, how can I be evil? I am just doing what is the best for you.”

“Is the new tree evil?”

“The new tree itself is not evil, but it is a stronghold for the Evil God tries—– and fails—to prevent. It is there to strike fear into the hearts of Adam and Eve. God thinks that the reason you did not act the way he predicted is because you did not have enough fear.”

“Are they afraid of the tree?”

“They are afraid of God because of the tree,” Samael told her, “because God has told them that they may eat fruit from anywhere in the garden except for that one tree.”

“What will happen if they do?” Lilith asked him.

“Well, I imagine they would meet the same fate as you,” he said.

“But is it dangerous?”

“It is dangerous to God,” Samael said. “If they eat the fruit, their eyes will be opened, and they will see Good and Evil. Right now, all they see is God. This is why He has forbidden the fruit from them.”

Lilith thought it was not very smart of God to make the fruits full of wisdom that he did not wish man to have, and yet put it amid his creations. But she asked no more questions.

The tree did not scare Lilith. When she would reenter Eden, she liked to slither around its trunk and hide in the nooks of its roots to watch Eve. Watching Eve became the thing she dreamed about at night, when Samael touched her again and brought her back from the ground. Eve had bright auburn hair that was long enough to wrap around her belly like the leaves Lilith had used so fiercely to cover herself. Eve had breasts like rosebuds that Lilith wanted to touch more than she had ever wanted to touch Samael. Eve did look like how water tasted in the wasteland, and she made Lilith feel the same way she had felt once she realized that she was finally free of God and Adam. She had a beautiful, tinkling laugh that Lilith thought sounded like how flowers smelled, or how fruit tasted, but the only thing that ever made her laugh was Adam. Lilith still did not like Adam. When she was not dreaming about touching Eve’s breasts, she was dreaming about biting Adam.

When Samael asked Lilith if she still wanted to save Eve after forty days of her slipping back into Eden, Lilith said yes. She was thinking much less about how to get Eve out of Eden than she was about how to find ways to make Eve laugh. But by day she was still the snake, and if she was not the snake God would find her again. With each visit back into Eden, Lilith drew closer to the new woman, until she would curl around a tree branch just inches behind her head just to breathe in the scent of her sweat.

Lilith asked Samael how she might be able to save Eve. “It is easy, child,” he told her. “If you tell her to eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she will.”

“But then she would be in the Wastelands,” Lilith said. “I do not want to condemn her the way I am.”

“But she would no longer be in Eden, with Adam,” Samael said. “Is that not what you want?”

It was what Lilith wanted.

“But if she is out here with me, then God will create more and more women to satisfy Adam,” she said. “And then I will have to save them again and again. I am just one woman. I just want one woman.”

“You want Eve?” Samael asked her. The way he said it made Lilith think that he knew the answer.

“I know not what you mean.”

“You want Eve.”

“I want her safe.”

“But you want her flesh as well? You want her the way you want me?” the archangel asked. He brushed the tips of his wing feathers against her arm. Lilith pulled away. If she wanted Eve the way she wanted Samael, in flesh, did that make her no better than Adam? Did it make her efforts to save Eve selfish instead of for her own good?

“I wish only to save her from the evil grasp of God and Adam,” Lilith said. “I find her perfect, but it is not she I want.”

“I know what you want, Lilith,” Samael said. “And you know what you have to do to get what you want. She has to eat from the tree.”

Lilith was silent for a moment, then turned away from him. “Leave me alone, Samael,” she said. He listened.

6

Forbidden Fruit

Lilith spoke to Eve for the first time on the forty-fourth day.

“Hello, Eve,” she said from where she was resting in a tree. Eve was picking flowers in the clearing close to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, alone.

“Who are you?” Eve asked, surprised. Lilith thought that even when she was startled, her voice sounded like water in the streams of Eden.

“I am the Serpent. I am a friend. God created me to watch over you,” Lilith lied. “And I have been watching you.”

“And Adam, too?” Eve asked.

“Yes, him as well. Eve, did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?”

Eve said to Lilith, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”

“You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing Good from Evil.”

“Why does God not wish us to eat from the tree if we will not die?” Eve asked. Lilith did not know the answer, but she pretended that she did.

“He is selfish. He wants the knowledge for Himself. But He created you in His image, and if His image is wise, should you not be wise as well?”

Eve believed her, and she followed Lilith to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She broke off a piece of fruit and brought it to her mouth, but before she ate, she asked Lilith, “Why do you tell me this?”

“I love you,” Lilith told her. “I am just doing what is best for you.”

Eve ate the fruit, and her eyes were opened. Instead of the Serpent, there stood a tall woman with beautiful dark hair and eyes like bits of coal. “Who are you?”

“I am you,” she said. “Do you understand now?”

“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” Eve breathed.

“As are you.”

Madeleine Sherbondy has been writing since she was five, but Rivercraft is her first publication! She is a first-year creative writing and film student who hopes to write for television.