Be Careful What You Wish For: A Zombie Apocalypse-Chapter 484: The Truth In The Lies

"What did you mean by that?" I asked, not looking at Papa as we moved through the jungle. "About me being my mother’s daughter?" The idea of not having a mother made me want to jump for joy, and no Original God had a mother in the traditional sense.

To hear Papa say that I was my mother’s daughter, my heart sank to my feet, and it was all I could do not to throw a massive temper tantrum.

The vines rustled as we passed, the heat thick enough to make my dress cling to my spine. The birds had gone quiet again. Something was watching. But it wasn’t close. Not yet. Letting out a sigh, I almost wished that whatever was stalking us would come.

I was in the mood to fight.

Papa Khaos tilted his head as if considering how much truth to feed me. "You always were a curious little thing. Always analyzing each and every word."

"I’m serious," I sighed. The idea of Delliah LaRue being my mother since the beginning of time was causing me to break out in hives. I needed to know where she stood in the grand scheme of things. And if I really couldn’t get away from her shadow.

"I know." He smiled, soft but sharp. "That’s why I said it."

I stepped over a collapsed column covered in moss, frowning. "But I wasn’t born. I know that now. I wasn’t made the way humans are. I didn’t have a mother."

I refuse to have a mother.

"No," he agreed, voice quiet now. "Not in the way mortals mean it. Not flesh and blood. Not womb and labor. But you had two sources. A spark, and a sculptor."

I stopped walking, turning to look at him.

He didn’t stop moving, just kept pacing forward through the vines, his hands in his pockets like we were talking about breakfast.

"The Creator," I said slowly. "He’s the sculptor. You are the spark, the thing he took in order to create me... your opposite."

Papa chuckled, like I’d caught the scent of something long buried. "The Creator is neither man nor woman, neither light nor dark. It simply is. In the beginning, it reached into the void and found Chaos, me, stole a part of me... and it shaped it. Personally, I think the Creator was trying to find a way of canceling me out. That you and I would forever be locked in battle so he/she/it wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore."

"Me. It wanted to turn me against you."

"Yes," he confirmed. "But when you were first shaped, it’s not as you are now. You were raw. Wild. Eternal. Calm and chaos, order and disorder. So, it took the energy that made you up and gave you a form. A face. A body that could walk beside the first man and woman. It called you Lucifer and sent you into the Garden."

The jungle pressed closer. The leaves grew darker. Older.

"But I didn’t last there," I muttered.

"Take it as a compliment. No one with a brain ever does," Papa said, now beside me again. "You didn’t obey. You didn’t bow. And when you refused to be lesser, the Creator called you a devil and cast you out."

I let that settle. The weight of it. The familiarity. The echo in my bones.

"I remember... flames. And wings. And hunger."

"You remember being forgotten," Papa said. "They tried to erase you. Tried to rewrite the beginning without Chaos. But you were never gone. Only waiting."

I looked down at my hands. They didn’t glow. They didn’t hum with power.

But inside... I felt it.

"So, for all intents and purposes, the Creator is my mother?"

"If you are thinking like a human, yes," Papa said. "He is the only one who would ever dare to mold Chaos into something, thinking that it would be contained... that it could be manipulated. But you are you... and the world couldn’t control you, no matter what it did. He isn’t a mother in the way humans think of it. But a maker. And a coward."

My head tilted. "Why a coward?"

"Because it couldn’t handle what it had made," he said simply. "It sent you to the Garden, then flinched when you didn’t bend. So, it cast you out instead of admitting the very simple truth as to what you are: you were never meant to serve. You were meant to rule."

My lips curled slowly.

Yup, that sounded about right.

Even with everything that Père had done to me, he still couldn’t make me submit, not really.

"Still," I said softly, "why call me my mother’s daughter?"

"Because you shine like The Creator," Papa murmured, reaching out to tap a finger against my chest. "You challenge the order of things. You make the gods nervous. And most of all... you were the first to be thrown away for being too much."

He looked into my eyes, something ancient behind his own.

"You are The Creator’s aftermath. His defiance. His flame. And his biggest mistake." Papa let out a low chuckle, even as the very jungle around us seemed to tremble in fear. "But to me, you are nothing short of perfection."

A long pause stretched between us.

Then the jungle roared again. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm

Closer this time.

Something massive was moving through the trees—and this time, it wasn’t waiting.

"Come on, darling," Papa Khaos said, cracking his neck. "Let’s see if you remember how to burn things down."

My hands clenched at my sides as Papa’s words wrapped around me like roots. Heavy. Tangled. Familiar. And for the first time in what felt like forever, I didn’t feel small inside my skin.

I felt... seen.

"I wasn’t made to serve," I repeated under my breath. "I was made to burn."

"To burn things down," Papa echoed, eyes glittering, "and then rebuild them better than ever."

A warm wind blew through the canopy above us, heavy with the scent of something sweet and rotten. The vines at my feet shifted, curling ever so slightly toward me. Like they remembered.

Like they were welcoming me back.