The echo of the Banshee's wail still seemed to cling to the strange crystalline formations of the cavern in the Hollow Earth, an invisible shroud of dread and impending tragedy. The members of the expedition had froze, each interpreting the omen through the prism of their own fears and knowledge. Merlin and the Umbrians recognized the cry as a direct harbinger of death or a calamity of unmeasured proportions. Quetzal sensed a deep dissonance in the spirit of the underworld.
Enki, however, the Anunnaki with an analytical mind and knowledge that spanned eons and cosmologies, was processing the apparition differently. His golden brow was furrowed, not only from fear of the omen, but from a sudden, bold hypothesis that was beginning to take shape in his ancestral mind.
This spirit... Enki thought, as the last tremor of the wail faded. The 'Banshee'. The Umbrian magi describe her as an erratic being, an incarnate wail, tied not to a single place or plane, but to the very emotion of loss, wandering until she finds... 'the light,' as they say. A consciousness on the threshold, capable of perceiving and manifesting through the veils of reality.
She turned to Merlin, her golden eyes shining with a strange new intensity. "Wizard," she said, her voice cutting through the tense stillness. "This entity you call a Banshee... you claim it is a wandering spirit, an echo of grief that can manifest anywhere tragedy is about to strike, even in other realities if the veil is thin, correct?"
Merlin, still tense, nodded cautiously. "That's right, Anunnaki. Her lament knows no physical boundaries when fate is about to strike a fatal blow. But we have never felt her so... present, so far from the confines of Umbria or from the specific bloodlines to which she sometimes seems to bind herself."
"Precisely," Enki continued, his mind racing. "If she can manifest her essence, her warning, here, in this deep and forgotten layer of Gaia's physical reality, so far from its 'origin'... that implies that her perception is not limited by the laws that govern beings of flesh and blood, not even those of your kind of magic."
His eyes fixed on Aria, then back on Merlin. "We were discussing Lilith. The First Woman. Amitiel's lost lover. An entity of primordial power, erased from the chronicles, exiled or destroyed in such a way that her trace is almost imperceptible to us, to the Anunnaki, to the Netlin, perhaps even to Amitiel himself in his current state."
He paused, letting the tension grow. "But what if her essence, her spirit, still resonates in some hidden fold of creation? On a liminal plane, an echo within Gaia's consciousness, or perhaps... in a state similar to this Banshee's, a silent lament for a lost world and love, a soul that has also never 'found the light'?"
Aria felt a chill. "What are you suggesting, Enki?"
"I suggest," said the Anunnaki, and now there was a note of almost feverish fervor in his voice, "that if the Banshee, in her eternal and erratic search for lost souls and future tragedies, can sense the imminence of death and pain across the dimensions... is it not conceivable that she might perceive other consciousnesses equally 'lost' or 'veiled'? If Lilith exists in some form, however ethereal or fragmented, might not an entity like the Banshee, a wail that walks between the worlds, have crossed her trail, sensed her ancient and deep sorrow?"
The idea was as audacious as it was terrifying. To use the harbinger of death like a bloodhound to find a mythical figure.
"But what... what information could she give us?" Kaelen asked, pale. "The Banshee only cries out for death."
"Perhaps," Enki replied. "Or perhaps her wail contains more than you understand. If she could be... 'focused,' if her attention could be directed toward Lilith's specific resonance... could her cry, her presence, give us an indication? A direction? A confirmation of her existence or her nonexistence? Could I identify her particular energetic 'flavor,' if she remembers or senses it at all?"
Dracula regarded Enki with a new, cold appreciation. "A desperate gamble, Anunnaki. To attempt to interrogate a harbinger of the grave. Fascinating in its impiety... and likely suicidal."
"Spirits who lament," Quetzal chimed in with his ancient calm, "often see the paths the living have forgotten, and feel the echoes of souls that have not yet fully departed or never did. They know the hidden ways of Xibalba and the shadows of the heart. But their knowledge is always shrouded in pain, and their answers, if they exist at all, are rarely direct." The tension in the cavern became almost unbearable. The echo of the Banshee's wail seemed to linger, and now, the idea of using that same entity like a tool for a near-impossible quest floated in the air. Would they dare interact with a being who only heralded misfortune? And what horrors might they unleash if they tried to direct the Banshee's attention to the forgotten tragedy of Lilith and Amitiel?
Enki gazed into the darkness from which the last echo of the scream had come, his golden eyes glowing with a mixture of cold intellect and a boldness bordering on madness. "If the Banshee can manifest here," he said, more to himself than to the others, "so far from her supposed 'anchorage' in Umbria, then the laws that bind her are... far more flexible and strange than you believe. And if she can perceive pain and loss across the worlds... what greater loss, what more ancient and primordial echo of pain could there be in the history of this solar system than that of Lilith, the First Woman, betrayed, erased, and whose lost love turned a Netlin into a cosmic monster?"
The question remained suspended, an invitation to a path fraught with incalculable dangers, but also, perhaps, the only clue they might have to find an answer to Amitiel's enigma.