86. Conversations Over Tea

The gold line train car was empty when Isaac stepped on. He’d never noticed it in the past, the way Underside inhabitants avoided the platform like the plague when the golden train pulled up on the tracks. He’d always been too exhausted, too eager to finish his report and get home to pay attention.

Isaac turned his head and stared out the window as the train tracks sloped up a gradual incline before finally exiting the tunnel. The flowering hills of the realm passed by in a colorful blur, popping out against the inky black sky. Thousands of golden lights continued to rise upwards from the earth, soft and gentle, nothing like the burning flash that had emitted from Seaton’s tattoo.

The train came to a gentle stop, and Isaac hopped off his seat and stepped out the moment the doors slid open. He began the familiar trek through the blossoms towards the distant, lone house dotting the horizon. A curling stream of smoke billowed out from the chimney. Isaac frowned. He’d never seen that before. He’d always assumed the chimney, much like the rest of the building’s design, was for aesthetic purposes only.

Striding forward, Isaac had barely knocked once when the door flung open, almost hitting him in the face if he hadn’t dodged in time.

“Welcome, welcome!” Lilith’s voice rang out, and it sounded particularly loud after the silent walk through the flower fields.

Isaac wasn’t given a chance to respond or react before a hand was dragging him indoors, down the winding hallway and to the lounge, where he was pulled over and deposited by the sofa. The moment Isaac sat down, Lilith vanished again, ducking behind a thick maroon curtain decorated with black butterflies and scattered feathers.

It took a second for Isaac to reorient himself after the flurry of movement. He blinked his eyes a few times, taking in the familiar surroundings, and sunk deeper into the couch, which was as soft as ever. This wasn’t how he’d been expecting things to go at all, he thought.

Lilith soon reappeared with a teacup, which she set down on the table in front of him before taking a seat herself.

Lilith was dressed in one of her usual excessively elaborate, monochrome gowns, but there was a bit more black than usual. Typically her dresses were evenly split between black and white, which made them particularly chaotic to look at. Having a dominant shade calmed the entire outfit and the wearer by extension. It took a second for Isaac to process that this was still Lilith.

The woman gestured at the cup. “Go on! Not everyone gets a chance to try my wonderful tea, you know.”

Sighing, Isaac did as instructed. It was the same tea he’d had last time, the one that somehow tasted like he imagined the color gold would. It was actually quite good, inexplicable flavor aside, but his mind was too preoccupied to fully enjoy it. He set the cup back down, and the surface of the liquid rippled slightly with the movement.

“Look, Lilith,” he began, but the woman cut him off before he could continue.

“You want to know about the system, I presume.”

At some point she’d pulled out her own cup of tea, which she now swirled around a few times, eyes casually watching the golden waves, before she took a sip. Isaac frowned. There was a certainly lilting quality to the way Lilith usually spoke, almost as if she was constantly speaking a song. He’d never heard her voice so even before. It sounded deeper, like that. More grounded.

Taking a deep breath, Isaac nodded. “I already asked Fable about it,” he admitted. He furrowed his brow. “Is it really… necessary?” He gestured vaguely with his hands.

Lilith was silent for a few moments. The surface of the tea sunk back to perfect stillness. “For the record, Isaac dear,” she finally began, “I really am sorry you had to see that. I’d hoped you never would.” Her eyes shifted to stare absently out the window, where the rolling hills and golden lights were visible through the glass.

“I’m aware you might not agree with me,” she said in that same unnervingly even tone, “But yes, it is. What happened today was unfortunate, but I’m afraid I can’t afford to make exceptions if I wish to maintain peace.”

Isaac frowned. “I can see that, but do you really need to be so extreme? There’s other ways of keeping peace, you know.”

Lilith set her cup down. The porcelain made a light clinking sound as it hit the table. She smiled wryly. “I used to think the same thing.” The woman shook her head. “Unfortunately the Underside is quite a bit more complicated than that. To be frank, it’s an ugly place. An ugly place filled with even worse people. It would’ve destroyed itself if I hadn’t intervened.”

Isaac opened his mouth to retort, but Lilith seemed to anticipate the response and calmly held up a hand to interrupt him.

“Of course, I’m not saying everyone here is like that. Of course not. There’s plenty of beautiful things, too, and some truly wonderful people, as I’m sure you’re aware. That’s exactly why it’s worth protecting. Do you understand?”

Isaac stared down at his own cup. The golden swirls drifted freely along the dark liquid’s surface, twisting and looping without a care in the world. When he looked up again, Lilith was still watching him, patiently awaiting an answer, arms folded properly on the table and appearing so utterly unfamiliar. This was Lilith the Underside god he was speaking to, he thought. The person that so many resented and feared.

“No,” he said. “I don’t understand. I don’t know what the Underside used to be like. You can keep saying it’s necessary or whatever that means, but all I’ve heard are a few stories. That’s it. I don’t know shit.”

Lilith didn’t react to the words, nor did her smile falter. “That’s good,” she said. “It’s better for you not to.”

Isaac stared at her. “You know you can’t stop me from finding out more, right?” he said.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The woman laughed, and that, to Isaac’s relief, was familiar. It had the same bell-like, clear, ringing quality.

Once her laughter died down, Lilith shook her head, and there was a strange look in her eyes that Isaac couldn’t decipher even as her smile remained unchanged. “No, I imagine I can’t. All I can do is hope you don’t.” She took another sip of her tea, and her tone was lighter when she spoke again. “I suppose that’s your answer then, Isaac dear?”

Isaac frowned, mulling over the words and repeating them in his head. He thought back to that conversation in the train station, the old memories knocking around his mind, the soft glow of the tablet, the way words had echoed around the concrete. “Yeah,” he finally said, voice slow. “Yeah, I guess it is.” Once the words left his mouth, he knew them to be true. He looked up and met Lilith’s gaze. “Once I’ve learned more, I’ll sort out what I think about this whole System thing.”

“Aw, how generous of you,” Lilith joked. Isaac shrugged.

“I don’t want to make a snap judgment when I don’t know everything,” he said simply. He’d done that enough times in his life and been proven wrong again and again. Sometimes it was smaller things, like Igor and Olzu, or more extreme situations like Casimir. Often it wasn’t harmful, but other times the realizations came too late. He still remembered standing in Lloyd’s dusty room, staring down at the sketchbooks. The first time he’d stepped into his apartment and seen those photos where his brother had looked as much a stranger as the people he was pictured with.

Of course, logically he knew the only reason he could be so calm at the moment was because Seaton had survived. He didn’t know what would’ve happened if the merfolk had really died. Would he have expressed anger? Or would he have been unable to overcome the dissonance and remained disbelieving. The latter was probably more likely than Isaac was comfortable admitting.

Lilith hummed. “Well, let me know what you end up thinking. I only hope you never have to see the worst of this place.” She waved her hand, and her own empty tea cup vanished in a flurry of golden lights that quickly faded from view. “But enough of that. Tell me, Isaac dear, how are you doing?”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

The woman sighed dramatically. “My memory isn’t so terrible that I’ve already forgotten our little conversation earlier, you know.” She clicked her tongue. “I’m not that old.”

“Oh, that.” Isaac stared down at the table and shrugged noncommittally. “Well, I’m heading back to Chrowall after this, so there’s that.”

“Going to visit Lloyd’s grave?”

He winced slightly at the words. It never felt right to hear that name coming from anyone else, especially not an Underside resident. “Going to try to, yeah,” he muttered. He took another sip of his tea, which was somehow still warm. He rubbed his forehead, the earlier headache still present as a constant, consistent throb that he half expected to never go away at this rate.

“It’s alright to take your time, you know,” Lilith said lightly. Isaac snorted.

“Mortimer said the same thing.” He shook his head, shoulders slumping slightly. “He told me about his past. Igor too.”

“How was that?”

“You don’t have to play therapist, you know.” Isaac sighed. “Honestly? I’m kind of frustrated. Not at them, at myself.”

Lilith remained quiet, silently gesturing for him to continue.

“I could tell,” Isaac said, the memories of the conversations still vivid in his mind. “They really cared about the people they lost.” He stared down at the cup, taking a moment to gather his thoughts. He stopped and started a few times, but finally, the words tumbled out.

“I hated Lloyd for a long time,” he admitted. “Ever since we were kids, really. He was this distant person I barely knew. I didn’t even really think of him as a brother, but everyone kept comparing us. It was like Lloyd was some kind of god, the way people talked about him.” He shook his head. “After our parents died and he invited me to live with him, I was pissed. He’d never been there when I was young, and now he was trying to make things up?” He let out a frustrated noise. “Whenever I saw him, it was like I was looking at everything I wanted.”

Isaac paused to take another sip of his tea, draining the rest of its contents, and set it back down a little harder than he meant to. “We argued all the time. Practically every goddamn time we talked ended in an argument.” He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at some of the strands. “That night too. We were fighting by the street. I can’t even remember what it was about, and then—“ His throat closed, cutting himself off, and Isaac swallowed down the lump that had formed. He closed his eyes, taking a moment to reorient himself.

Breathe, he told himself. In and out. He wasn’t sure how long he just sat there, forcibly calming his breaths, waiting for his muscles to loosen from their tense state. Lilith didn’t say a word the entire time.

By the time he felt calm again and his thoughts were no longer a whirlwind, Isaac felt thoroughly exhausted. Every limb was heavy, and all he wanted at the moment was to sleep. He slumped backwards and stared up at the ceiling. When he spoke again, his voice was dull.

“How am I supposed to mourn someone I barely knew? Someone I spent most of my life hating?”

His mind drifted to Igor, continuously blooming the same flowers because those were his wife and daughter’s favorites. Mortimer who had cared enough about his friend to grieve him despite a lifetime surrounded by death. It was noble grief, Isaac thought. That was what mourning should be like. Done out of love, pure in intention, free of complication. It felt like an insult to even compare Isaac’s situation to theirs. What business did he have, to be weighed down for so long when the two of them had walked forward despite having far more right to be stagnant? He was nothing but an imposter, trying on a costume of grief that he didn’t deserve to wear.

The overhead light flickered slightly, Isaac noted faintly. So even an ornate chandelier like this one did that. His gaze fell back to the table.

At some point, Lilith had cleared away his teacup as well, leaving the table’s smooth wooden surface empty. His eyes wandered absentmindedly over to the woman, who was staring out the window again, eyes fixed on the golden lights drifting upwards into the endless void.

She looked tired, Isaac realized. There was a slight hunch to her usually perfect posture, her skin was a tad paler than usual, and her eyes didn’t sparkle the way they usually did. At that moment, it looked like she was gazing somewhere far off into the distance, beyond what he could see.

Lilith finally spoke, breaking the silence that had fallen across the room.

“I think it’s perfectly normal,” she began quietly, “to mourn what could have been.” She turned her head to face Isaac again, and the deep exhaustion present in her smile spoke of an unspeakable number of years. “Just as it’s normal to mourn the things we can’t have.”

Isaac stared at her. It took a moment for the words to process. His fingers squeezed into a fist, and the silence grew louder. Finally, it became altogether too unbearable.

“…It has to stop at some point, right?”

“That’s up to you,” Lilith said simply.

Isaac leaned back into the couch, sinking deeper into its surface, and rubbed his face. He exhaled a long breath. No more running. That’s what he’d told himself, wasn’t it?

Isaac dropped his hand. His eyes drifted back over to Lilith, and he smiled wearily.

“Do you mind giving me a few flowers before I leave?”

Lilith laughed, the sound easily filling the room.

“Of course not, dear.”