Lilith was gone the moment Atlas laid his hateful eyes on her.
Gone not in distance—she could have reached him if she wished—but gone in a way that severed something deeper, older, something she had clung to for centuries with a mother's stubborn, wounded faith.
The moment his gaze cut through her, flat and cold and stripped of the warmth she once remembered in him, she vanished from the chamber like a dissolving thought. She didn't step away; she wasn't pushed away. She simply ceased to be present in that moment.
And she knew why.
The situation she envisioned for centuries—no, engineered, prepared, obsessed over—had not come true.
Not even slightly.
Her son had rejected her again.
The knowledge hit harder than any divine spear or demonic blade could have. It was a bruise made of memory and longing and failure, pressing against her ribs as she drifted through the timeless skeleton of the fourth layer. Her breath trembled in her throat.
