Read Online The Stone Light by Kai Meyer - Free Book Online

of all. I’m surprised you don’t know it.”
    “Every people and every race has its own myths and stories about its origin.” The obsidian lion sounded a little offended. “You don’t know the old lion legends, either.”
    “I know who Adam was,”
said the Queen.
“But I have never heard of Lilith.”
    “Adam and Lilith were the first humans God created.”
    “I thought the woman was named Eve.”
    “Eve came later. The first time, God created Adam and Lilith, man and woman. They were alone in Paradise and were supposed to have children together, to people the world with their descendants. Anyway, they were the first living creatures at all.”
    Vermithrax growled something, and Merle looked inquiringly at him.
    “That’s typical of you humans again,” he said crossly. “You always believe you are the first and best. The first stone lions had been there for a long time before that.”
    “That’s what
your
legends say,” Merle retorted, grinning.
    “Of course.”
    “Then we aren’t likely to find out which is the truth, are we? Not now, not here, and probably never at all.”
    Vermithrax was forced to agree.
    “All the myths of origins tell the truth,”
said the Queen mysteriously.
“Each in its own special way.”
    Merle continued, “So Lilith and Adam were destined to have children together. But whenever Lilith wanted to approach her husband, he drew back from her, filled with fear and disgust.”
    “Hah!” growled Vermithrax. “That certainly didn’t happen to the first lions at all!”
    “Anyway, Adam was afraid of Lilith, and finally God lost patience and banned Lilith from the Garden of Eden. Filled with anger and disappointment, she wandered through the desert regions outside Paradise, and there she met creatures that had nothing in common with Adam, creatures that were more alien and more gruesome and more terrifying than anything we can imagine.”
    “I can imagine something like that,” said the lion, with a side glance at the claw marks in the rock.
    “Lilith bred with the creatures and was supposed to have borne them children that surpassed even their fathers in monstrosity—the Lilim. In the legends they are the demons and monsters who wander through the forests and deserts and over the bare rocks of the mountains.”
    “And Professor Burbridge knew these stories,”
said the Queen.
    “Of course. When he needed a name for the inhabitants for his papers and his scientific works, he called them the Lilim.”
    “Well, good,” said Vermithrax. “Our Czarist friends also met a few of them. Don’t you think we should avoid that?”
    “Vermithrax is right,”
replied the Queen.
“We had better leave. We are safer in the air.”
But there was something in the way she emphasized that last sentence that alarmed Merle even more deeply. For who actually said that the Lilim had no wings?
    “Just a moment.” She ran over to the chests that the lion had already searched. Out of the corner of her eye she’d seen a few items that were useless to Vermithrax but that she could use. She found a small knife in a leather sheath, no longer than her hand, and put it in the pocket of her dress along with the magic mirror. In addition, she discovered several tin boxes with food rations, stone-hard strips of dried meat, zwieback, a couple of water bottles, and even a few cookies. She packed them all in a small leather knapsack she’d found in one of the tents and strapped it onto her back. While she was doing that, she chewed on a piece of dried meat, which was as hard as tree bark and as tough as shoe soles, but nonetheless, she managed to swallow the shreds. In the past few days she’d had very little to eat; the rations of the Czarist expedition looked more than suitable to her.
    “Hurry up,” Vermithrax called to her as she was fastening the straps of her new knapsack.
    “I’m coming,” she said—and suddenly she had a feeling of being watched.
    Her fingers let go of the leather