The Shroud was stilled to become the barrier around the GodEye and Coera, far out beyond the paths drawn by the stilled gods, where the GodEye is just a faint glimmer. She is impenetrable, except to whoever has the key and knows where an how to use it. / The key is the the Key of Adam, because he was the one to seal the locks, and what the key actually is was a secret he kept -/ Except that it is a thing of Coera, and a relic of the war with the Enemy. / The Key has been lost and found numerous times, and those who hold it are alternately said to be blessed or cursed. Adam himself says he no longer knows where it is, but it will be found and used at the proper time and not before. / Some Men know what it is. / Many powerful men and gods have possessed the key and not known it, and many poor and negligible men and gods have possessed it and known it, and for an age it has been lost entirely, and where it is now none can say. / When Man is ready to fulfill the prophecy for which they are purposed, they will have the key and know how to unlock the boundary.

After the war in Heaven and the sealing of the barrier, Coera was blighted. So many species that had been attended by Elders and gods now were on their own, without even the benefit of faeries to guard them. Fruit-bearing trees of the Garden were overrun by the tall, prickly trees of the wild. The flowering insects became prey to the creatures of the wild and gave up their blossoms. Grasses kept their grain to themselves, or protected them with tares. The first diseases appeared / The Garden became a hunting ground for the monstrous children of Lilith; the children of Adam and Eva were trapped between the rivers and the ocean.

So the GodEye turned Coera again, separating sea from ocean and land from land, and Adam and Eva led their children out from the Garden and scattered them among the lands as one broadcasts seed. / Ahri-El stood guard at the gates of the Garden, and those children of Lilith foolish enough to attempt to hunt there he trapped and killed.

Adam and Eva wandered another six hundred years, until Adam was over nine hundred years old. Their lives were difficult, and their children contentious, but they were harder people then than they had been in the Garden, and they were better able to protect themselves and feed themselves and fight off the children of Lilith. The location of the Garden was lost -/ Perhaps Ahri El guards it still, and hides it from the eye of Man to protect it. / Adam felt that he was not meant to be the forever inheritor of Coera – since it belonged to Man as a whole – so he laid down his life; both he and Eva slept and returned their bodies to the dirt of Coera. / Adam’s spirit followed the threads of the fates to return to the GodEye, but Eva remained in spirit with Coera. So Adam became a god of the sky and the storms – interceding with the GodEye and bringing rain and refreshment to the soil, but also showing his temper when he loses it. / Eva became something different – she took on the role of a benevolent faerie of Coera, or of Nature, or of Man if he would have a Faerie – and she looked after all creatures who should have been Lilith’s charge and became their Mother.

The GodEye caused the Age of Coera to turn so that the stars moved, and that is the Age of the Garden.

What do you mean, the story does not end that way? / Eva ate a fruit? / What is a sin? / Dear child, you are confused. Adam has told us this story you know, but we thought he meant it as a joke that any of Eva’s children would believe the slander of Lilith. It was Lilith who tasted the forbidden “fruit” in Adam’s blood, but Eva is and has always been blameless in the judgment of the GodEye. / Have you not seen that Lilith is the whore, and Eva the saint, and Adam the broken spirit unable or unwilling to commit wholly to either of them? That is the story of your species.

Yes – of course there are species on other worlds. Coera was the first, but she was not the last. / She is the only one, though, who shoulders the duty of the prophecy.

Before the barrier could be sealed, both the GodEye and the Shroud had gifts to give. / The Shroud was the daughter goddess of one of the Seven Primordials, whose number include the Enemy, the Twins, the Queen of Secrets, The Queen of Creation, and the Greater Shroud. The Seventh is She-who-Underlies. / The Greater Shroud came and filled the space between the Shroud and the GodEye, and though she mourned and praised the sacrifice of her daughter, she wove strands between the body of the Shroud and the GodEye – strands deeper than the world we know; too deep even for any but the Primordial gods to weave – and these were the fates. / The fates were not gods, and they were not distinct minds, but they were not inanimate, either. They were like half-angels, tied into the ether of She-who-Underlies, and without personality. / They are like a forest of trees, none by itself complete, but together much more than one. The Elders have made that comparison, and have even tried to make fates of the trees. / With varying results. / With poor results. / The fates were a machine, and some have said that their machinery, on however subtle a level, is what inspired the mind of man to build machinery. / They were god-beasts like Courothei before the Enemy filled her with mind, but they are beasts of duty rather than hunger. They are tasked with guarding the souls of Man.

The Fates complicate things, but their role is important. They were the ones to make guardian angels of the genii, to bind motes of the GodEye to the immortal, sentient spirit of Man. / They charged the guardians to protect the man or woman they served through the life allotted to them -/ But it’s not the same for each person. / No, one Man may be allotted forty years, another four-hundred. / Some receive no allotment. / But it’s not as if a man or child would die with no allotment remaining, only that Fates have determined they had the time necessary to their purpose, and they’re on their own. / Their guardian genius may still protect them -/ Or they might not. But the Fates do not intervene beyond the allotment. / This is a significant point, because the guardian genius of most Men is weak, and can do little to save them. The Fates weave together the different worlds -/ Not the Hells, or She-who-Underlies, but the fractured worlds caused by choice – by what was and what could have been, you see -/ They piece the fractured worlds back together into a whole, discarding the pieces of what is or could be that they do not want, so that what was and what could have been are selectively joined to become what should be. In so doing they ensure that those who should live live, and those who may die do. / It is a complex thing, worthy of the minds of gods and not ravens or men; it is enough to know that the gift of the Shroud was an allotment of life, so that the children of Adam could not be wiped out by the children of Lilith; that they would live long enough to carry the next generations.

The Fates are an alarm system – by watching the way in which the fractured world is rejoined, they see what minds are in danger of premature death and warn the guardian spirits by a strumming pitched to a unique frequency. / The strumming of many threads all at once portend disaster or war. / Gods who watch the threads carefully – or who bribe the Fates with favors – can learn a bit of the future of individual souls or the whole world in this way. / But since the Fates are not personalities they have few desires, and it takes a clever god to bribe them.

One more thing the Fates do now, though this was not part of their original design – they provide safe passage to the souls to and from the GodEye. / The souls of the dead are ferried by their guardian angels away from Coera, where they are at risk of predation, following the intersecting threads of fate. In the GodEye they store up the treasure of their experiences, wisdom, and talents to build their godbody, then return as a mote of a soul for reincarnation. / Not every soul returns to the GodEye -/ Especially not in this age. / Especially. Most of the old dangers are long since gone, and few new souls are inclined to put up with the judging glare of the GodEye; they are likely to wander the land for a few years while they forget their purpose, and return to flesh. / They are less likely to achieve enlightenment this way -/ But so many of the one hundred and forty-four thousand slots have already been taken, few souls make still strive for sainthood. / It is true.

When Adam came, it was not as Lilith had expected. He did not climb the mountain as a small man to tremble before her fearsome might. He descended in a pillar of fire, and wore his godbody as one might a suit of armor. He held a lance of fire, and did not tremble. / He had been fighting in the war in Heaven, and had seen many things more frightening than her. / Still she approached him, speaking honey words, but in his godbody he saw through her deceit and saw the marks of Courothei on her, and in them the signature of the Enemy. She asked him for a kiss, and he plunged his lance into her belly, where grey-black blood oozed out as thick as tar and burnt her scales.

Lilith did not scream or cry out. She only smiled and told Adam that she would see him again, and shortly. Immediately he realized his mistake, and understood that he had not seen the depth of her duplicity. From within his godbody, he saw Lilith’s spirit rise up to join Courothei, who waited with Lilith’s own cast-off godbody. Courothei laughed at him with disdain. / To this day, Adam regrets that he took Lilith’s first life, and blames himself for what happened after.

At some point Lilith must have realized that she served the Enemy; she was too clever to remain ignorant. / She bloated with power fed to her by Courothei, and led the army of the Enemy in an offensive against the GodEye as she had done before against the Enemy. She became the hand of the Enemy, and in exchange for his promises she did great hurt to the GodEye and his army of Angels. / Worse, she learned songs that should not be learned. The Enemy could not force his way from the Pit, but he could be summoned out, and through the mouthpiece of Courothei he taught Lilith the song to unbind him. / He must have revealed himself to Lilith as the father of the GodEye, from what she has said since. She was promised a place by his side as his new consort and the universe’s Lady of secrets. / Certainly the battle raged, and none can say how long it lasted, but Lilith underestimated the GodEye and was struck, as Coera had been struck, and she became the NightEye. / In a bit of irony, she did become an equal of the GodEye, though without his power or life-giving nature. / She is still white as her dragon body and stained where Adam pierced her side. / She was not the only god to be stilled by the GodEye; there were hundreds of major gods, and these are the planets and their moons which you Men have only just begin to see with your weak eyes, and thousands more you have not seen.

When the war was over, Adam returned in his godbody armor to the surface of Coera. Only a small band of his children remained, and they hid in the trees of the Garden out of fear of Lilith’s children. / Adam drove back Lilith’s children to their caves, but he would not kill them unless his hand was forced, and he would not tell Ahri El where they hid. / This created a division between Adam and the GodEye. / Adam’s eyes turned up to the night sky – and to the NightEye – as you might look on the tomb of a loved one. But his children were of the world, and their eyes turned to their hands before the stars, and Adam knew their memory for the War would be short.

Some among the godlings and Elders came to the aid of Adam’s children, but most began to flee the Garden as Lilith’s children grew more bold, and many fled Coera entirely, for they knew the strange signs were not warnings of the wrath of the gods, but a war in Heaven. The Enemy was not one to have only one plan at any time; while he wooed Lilith through the mouthpiece of Courothei by night, by day he used her as a beacon to draw in his allies. The Shroud, who had grown complacent in her loneliness, did not notice the danger until the army of the Enemy was upon her.

The heavens were in a turmoil, and war raged around the GodEye. For Man the times were frightening when the ground shook and the air burned and crackled, when their flowers withered and the dragons returned to prey upon them. But they could not know the violence the gods did to each other, or what battles the GodEye fought among the hells, or what grave wounds the Shroud received as she used herself to shield Coera from the grasp of the Enemy’s forces. The angels would not speak of it, even to the Elders. / It was a dark time for the Elders, who had committed themselves to flesh and to the fate of Coera.

When the GodEye did not appear in the sky for a week, and the children of Lilith spilled into the Garden under darkness to kill or take the children of Adam, several of the priests climbed the mountain of the thrones to beg Adam for help, and instead found him in the company of Jabra El. / They hid in the bushes but couldn’t understand what Adam said, because it was a song the tongue of Man cannot sing. Then Adam and Jabra El both ascended in a pillar of fire, and the children of Adam despaired. / It was a dark time for Man.

For Lilith, the time was productive. She had realized that while the Garden once seemed vast to her, it was only a tiny parcel of the world she ruled, and she had ignored the rest of it. She explored, and she grew in power and strength. She met with Elders long forgotten, and those who she could flatter and win with honeyed words (following the advice of Courothei) she did. Those who would not join her, she destroyed and (again following the advice of Courothei) she ate of their innards and living blood and took their strength to replenish and enhance her own. / Where the dragons still had shepherd Elders they joined Lilith and at her command entered their species to raise them to intelligence. Where they had faeries, Lilith directed her children to eat the faeries and replace them and then enter the species, and that is how the dragons became the owners of their own minds and souls. / It is said Lilith could not turn ThalassAlon and AeZhur and killed them or forced them into hiding, but they were never heard from again. It is said she sought out Keta, who still lived, but that Keta feared Lilith as a trickster and could not be coaxed out of the deeps of Coera. / The forests of Coera became the slaves of Lilith, and in place of fruit and flowers and beauty, they grew course and rough and quickly to blanket the land and hide her beneath their branches. / For the faeries, and the flowers and grasses and the whole of Coera, the time was dark.

It is easy to understand how a trickster goddess, whose very nature is to change her face, might bore when trapped in a single, unchanging body of flesh. In that time, because Man owned his souls and there was no disease, he did not age, and he would not die unless killed. Lilith, as queen of the world, could not be killed. / It is perhaps less easy to see why the queen of the world might desire the attention and acceptance of her consort mate, though he was so much less than her. That he had betrayed her in the Garden, and defied her commands to come to her in the caves, and hidden himself entirely from her -/ She did not know that he had ascended with Jabra El. /- These things burned in her. / Some say it was a desire for greater power that drove Lilith to her betrayal, but this was only one thing in her mind. / Courothei whispered to her snatches and pieces of the war in the heavens, but did not tell her its nature, or that those who fought the GodEye were allies of the Enemy. She told her that the angels of the GodEye had lost confidence in their god, that he would not – and could not – face her on Coera where she was queen, and that if she would but shed her body she could become the equal of the GodEye, or replace him entirely. / If she wanted Adam with her always, Courothei whispered, she could eat him. Not just a bite of flesh, not just a mouthful of blood, but consume him entirely and he would be hers, in the flesh and out. The power she would gain from him would be unlike any she had known.

With the Ethycan gods in retirement and Coera inherited, there was no longer cause to hold Festival and Miakh El did not make his yearly visits. Ahri El remained outside the garden on his unending hunt. Man was left to do with the Garden as he would, and because Man mated at twilight in the habit of Lilith and Adam, the GodEye did not see their new habits. From time to time -/ After each seven years /- Yes, about that often, an archangel might come to visit Adam, but he did not speak of Lilith’s blood-drinking. / We don’t know if it was because he was ashamed, or because time and habit and the strength of his children had made him forget the GodEye’s wrath.

Unexpectedly, the archangel Jabra El came walking in the Garden one evening, with the thought to sing with both Adam and Lilith when they were together. At first he was alarmed that he could find only the youngest children, but soon he remembered that it was the time of day that Man coupled, and he saw that the adults were lying in their favored spots under bushes or low trees where each could have some privacy. / When he interrupted one pair to ask where Lilith and Adam might be found, and the female of the two bore blood upon her lips, he was so alarmed he struck them both with his rod and they died. He interrupted another couple and found blood upon her lips and again was so alarmed he struck them both and they died. / Jabra El is called the angel of death. / Or he is called the Justice of the GodEye. / The third time he saw blood upon the lips of the woman he stayed his hand and demanded of the male to know why he allowed his mate to drink his living blood. The man, fearing for his life, pointed to the woman and said, “She demands it of me.” The woman, fearing for her life, pointed to the hillock where Lilith and Adam coupled. “Our parents were the first, and they taught it to us.” / Jabra El left them alive and trembling, and mounted the hill. He saw Lilith on top of Adam, and she was drinking his living blood from a wound in his arm. / Jabra El wept, because he knew the anger of the GodEye would burn. When Adam heard the angel crying, he pushed Lilith away and hid himself out of shame. Lilith was brazen because she was the queen of the world, and told the angel not to cry about what he could not understand. Because he had no flesh, and did not have children of the flesh, he could not understand the needs of the flesh. / She said that what they did they did for the good of the children, and it was this habit that allowed their children to thrive as they had. She called on Adam to stand by her, but he hid himself from the angel. / Lilith claimed the idea was hers, and still did not tell Adam or Jabra El of Courothei. Lilith had been a goddess of secrets, and did not divulge any against her will. / Jabra El flared with anger at her proud display and struck her to kill her, but his rod glanced harmlessly aside. He could not kill her while she stood upon Coera, because she was its queen and had its strength.

So Jabra El cursed Lilith and rose in anger and as a flame shot up into the sky to join the GodEye. / By day there were signs of the GodEye’s wrath – he swelled, and shrank, and some days failed to rise at all, while about him there were rings and lines and great bursts of flame. By night the stars moved more quickly than before, and came and went, and flared so bright that any who looked at them would be blinded. / It is said the Shroud herself moved in anger, and the night sky was filled with veils of color that shook the ground when they passed.

Lilith knew from this display that she could not stand against the GodEye’s anger, so she fled the Garden to live in the caves where the dragons had eluded Ahri El. There she was joined by Courothei, who revealed that she had allied herself with the dragons and hidden them from Ahri El, and she would do the same for Lilith. / Lilith requested, ordered, and begged Adam to join her in the caves, but he refused. He was honorable and stubborn, and would remain to face the anger of the GodEye instead of hiding from him. Most of the children of Adam and Lilith went with their mother and became her children, for she was their queen. A few remained with Adam and became his children. / Their names are still honored when they are spoken.