Amanda fed the babies and changed them, before putting them in the playpen while she cooked her dinner. While her attention was diverted, Markie and Kimmie escaped their prison and quietly destroyed the order of the family room. When Amanda returned and saw the devastation before her, she exploded in a golden rage that filled the room.

Amanda’s rage swept across the room in a fit of kinesthetic activity. Every object was swept clean of any horizontal supporting surface throughout the house. Amanda’s colognes, jewelry boxes, alarm clock, as well as her wristwatch and several items of feminine importance where all blown away under the gale of the woman’s anger.

So too, were all the baby items on the dresser and changing station swept aside and knocked to fall askew on the floor of the nursery.

As the whirlwinds of Amanda’s anger swirled over their heads, Kimmie and Markie cowered in their cribs in fear as the sky outside their window darkened with lightening-illuminated dark thunderclouds in tribulation over the magickal events that twisted and tore the nature of ordinary reality. The lightning itself was extraordinary in nature, instead of appearing as an ordinary yellow color, the bolts of high energy from the Heavens produced flashes which changed hue with every pion particle-prepathed strike. The sky was lit by brilliant flashes of crimson, verdant green and almost ultravioletly-deep blue discharges of electrical energy from one ominous, silver-edged, dark gray cumulous cloud to another, while a darker and higher cumulous cloud with an equal look of dangerousness swept overhead as the new cold front swept in with the tall, fluffy dark storm columns of thunderheads which threatened heavy rains and large hail.

Those who were expert with the knowledge of psionic forces, who were unfortunate enough to be in the immediate area as the lightening strikes hit, became unacknowledged and unwitting witnesses to the anger of the Heavens. A "Learned Watcher of the Stars" might have warned that a major change in reality was impending or had been externally invoked by the common weal.

As Amanda’s lunch warmed in the microwave, a cyan bolt discharged itself with explosive force on the glass insulators of the power line, destroying her phones, fax machine, and microwave in an incredible shower of golden sparks as the electronics fused and were instantly annihilated by megajoules of electrical force. The wall-shaking boom of thunder, accompanied by the noise from multiple explosions of the electronic devices throughout the house as well as the flash of intensely green light outside the nursery window scared the two babies out of their collective wits. In unison, their primordial panic caused them to reflexively wet and messed their diapers as they began wailing their terror.

Amanda temper imploded, then reversed course and exploded as her unbridled emotions and godlike powers rushed to her defense. The entire room lit up with the golden yellow of her aura as if she was a giant lightening bug whose metabolic processes created "cold light" from within. As her power grew, so did her stature, making her grow until the top of her head almost touched the ceiling.

Her anger was consummate; she reached down to pick up Markie between the elongated, swollen fingers of a giantess and considered snuffing his life out with a single grip of her vast hand. Just as her fingers began to close on the tiny boy’s throat, strange jagged, three-dimensional black cracks appeared in the air of the room that grew wider with every passing moment. Amanda looked at the weird apparition with interest, forgetting her desire for revenge for the moment. As she watched, the cracks widened until they became positive holes in the structure of reality. What lay behind the cracks was formless; it was the dimensionless non-ether of the non-reality that had existed before the Universe was formed. As Amanda stared into the depths of the lightless n-space super-manifold called Hilbert Space that formed the basis of reality itself, she was enchanted by it’s weird "feel" to her psionically enhanced sensorium.

Out in the depths of formless darkness, she could barely perceive the face of a figure who was rapidly advancing towards her through the unformed reality of non-space and non-time. When she looked more closely, she discovered that the female vestige from that was arising from the depths of the abyss had the most beautiful face she had ever seen. As she watched as the features of the face became clearer as viewed from the two-foot wide cracks in reality that opened in the portal between the otherworldly feminine power’s domain and what mortals call phenomenal reality, the expression on the female specter’s face shifted to one of absolute and eternal hatred for the sons and daughters of Adam, her second husband and the father of mankind.

As Amanda watched, the gorgeous face in front of her metamorphosed into a nightmarish horror; the eyes vanished, leaving a blankness beyond the dimensionless void that chilled Amanda’s soul. As the fissures in the Universe widened, all appearances of human flesh melted away from the empty-socketed skull and were replaced with a black-edged, blood-hued aura of true malevolence.

Having read of Lilith, Queen of Air and Darkness, first wife of God and then of Adam, enemy of all mankind in her gaming books, Amanda was afraid for the first time since her transformation. Lilith’s power so belittled her, that she was a mere bed mite as compared with the mighty giantess of power who sought to destroy her in body and soul.

Terror of the unholy power that she had unwittingly released seized Amanda, making her seek refuge to hide from the evil thing that she had loosed. She had not merely conjured up her death, but the ultimate destruction of her soul. Lilith not only devoured bodies entire, she snacked on the souls of her victims, drawing sustenance from the life-force that her victim’s bodies’ and souls’ contained. When Lilith finished her meal, there would be neither bones nor reincarnation. She was the ultimate carnivore; there would be no rebirth from a death caused by her, nor would the world regain the wealth of minerals and chemical compounds of the flesh she had consumed. Lilith excreted nothing because she was the ultimate consumer of life. Lilith was the ultimate Yin, the supreme dark, wet, bottomless Abyss which every man unconsciously fears, but whose unyielding sexuality draws him like a giddy, pheromone-enthralled moth closer and closer to the lightless Stygian deathflame until he is claimed by the black acid fire of nothingness. She would always grin as she put her mouth to the lips of her victims and inhaled, drawing the force of their body’s Ka into her nether reaches to be assimilated by the formless abyss which constituted her attribute as the Supreme Destroyer of Life.

Looking around quickly for a means of escape, Amanda abandoned the babes to the monster and sought refuge in a magical temporal fugue. The babies’ impending death at the hands of the enemy of all mankind was not a concern of hers as she frantically sought to evade the monster who followed her through the twisting tunnels of time. Amanda’s spirit-stricken terror of the semi-divine soul-eater was so great, that she’d have gladly thrown away her life to save her immortal soul from being devoured by the ancient and ageless Beastess of Ur and Babylon.

All at once, she found herself hovering in astral form over the overpass where it all began. If she could stop the change which happened to her, she knew that the entire episode would dissolve in a closed temporal loop. As the ultimate evil cracked through reality and bore down on her with deadly intent, Amanda decided to end her personal existence before she ever gained power that made her bait for the Unconquered Devourer of Souls.

Amanda knew what she had to do to save her very soul. With a flash of power that made her psionic scent much easier to locate, she invoked the Avatar of the Demigod of Death. Amanda was determined that she would die before she allowed the Bitch of Creation to eat her soul. Instantly, a sixteen-wheeler was created that bore down on Amanda’s small suburbanite car with the intent of death. To Amanda’s horror, she realized that she was the author of the event which had caused her transformation that had led to her being hunted by Lilith. As she employed the temporal fugue again to escape the consequences of her deed, she wondered if she would ever be free of the vengeful fury which stalked her spirit.

When she arrived back at her house in the future, the fractures in the continuum of time-space had widened and gotten longer. Five-foot-wide, gray gaping holes in reality met her as she returned to stand before the helpless, wide-eyed, terrified infants. When she looked at the absence of a metrical space, her mind reeled at the horror of something that truly could not be perceived. Seconds later, the ancient terror of mankind returned and began to use her Godlike powers to push open the cracks still further. The eyeless horror of human history almost had room enough to bring herself across to work her will upon the hated children of humanity. If she was loosed upon the world, not only would Amanda have her soul destroyed, but all human life would be endangered. It was even possible that the Unholy One would annihilate all traces of life in the Universe in revenge against her first husband. Terror of what she had unwittingly unleashed gave Amanda the courage to make a last attempt to stop her nemesis by main force. With one final surge of energy, Amanda used all of her power to change the threads of reality and heal the rift in space-time.

The psionic backlash from the two battling Goddesses caused the cracks to implode with multihued lightning flashes like the simultaneous detonation of a dozen nuclear warheads. The cracks reluctantly folded in on themselves, causing everything in the room to become blurred, as if reality itself was in question. As the rift in space-time healed, Amanda was assailed by a last ditch psionic thrust from the hated Goddess. The counterattack against Amanda by the Omnipotent Goddess/Demoness drove her down and threatened to overwhelm her. She was beaten and she knew it. In a few moments, her soul would be forfeit.

Amanda panicked and liberated her soul from her body to seek refuge from the monster who threatened to devour her. She was absolutely terrified by the concept of having her soul devoured by an evil Goddess and her utter panic made her willing to make anyone the bait for the Unholy Feast to follow. The exercise of infinite power had etched away the rational part of Amanda’s personality and deformed her spirit until she was no longer a mother who would die to protect her baby. The woman who had once caressed and lovingly nurtured her daughter had become the worst form of craven coward. Even though she was Kimberly’s mother, her absolute terror of the vindictive, alien, all-powerful Goddess made her willing to sacrifice her first-born child so she could survive. In astral form, Amanda glanced around the nursery quickly, looking for a body in which her soul could hide until the foul one departed. Finding the innocent body of someone who would never be expected to have any powers, she evicted the poor soul of her daughter to face the wrath of the Goddess so when Amanda’s body was eaten, her soul would be spared.

The displaced soul of Kimberly’s body surveyed her surroundings in wonder. After she had been forcibly displaced from her body, she had acquired the three-hundred-and-sixty degree vision of spirits and demons. She was an invisible, infinitesimal mote of consciousness that hung motionless in the middle of a frozen tableau of a temporal fugue that had inexplicably had been cast on her soul at the very instant of departure from her body.

At either side of her were the two baby cribs, occupied by the infant bodies of Mark and herself. The soulless body of her mother stood rigidly behind her, awaiting mindlessly either death or the infusion of another soul, while she faced the horror that had haunted mankind’s worst nightmares since the dawn of time with the glassy-eyed gaze of one who’s soul had been stolen or who had abandoned its body. With the newly acquired perceptions of one who had passed on to the "other" side, Kimberly could "see" the foul tendrils of glowing power that wormed their way through the cracks in reality from evil paps of the ancient Goddess of the Abyss on the other side.

Suddenly, a glowing area of intensely pure white light appeared at ceiling level, beckoning Kimberly to come home. The love that radiated from the light filled her with a sense of "Blessedness", inviting her to take refuge from the battle. For the tiniest fraction of a non-instant, Kimberly’s soul considered the offer of unworldly love, peace and sanctuary. Before she made her decision, she looked at the two infants beside her and stopped. Amanda’s glow of power had vanished the minute she had entered the infant body of her daughter. It was obvious to Kimberly’s heightened awareness that her infant body was too week to support the psychic demands of her mother’s former powers. In fact, the pitiful aural light surrounding the infant girl was less than the tiny but radiant spark of power emanating from Mark’s baby form. The powers in Amanda’s body had fled with the escape of her soul, leaving the new occupant with her former mundane memories and skills.

Kimberly understanding of the two infant’s plight filled her soul. Mark’s golden auric glimmer was fed by his love for her, while the infinitesimally small flicker of her mother’s power-sickened spirit was merely the feeble ember of life itself. Her mother had survived her struggle with all-consuming power and the sacrifice of her daughter, but at the cost of the most valuable virtue in the Universe; empathy and love for others. Like a newborn infant, she was at the center of her Universe. Only in her particular Universe, there was no mommy to be at one with until it was time to become an individual again. Kimberly remembered each of her thirty-seven incarnations in the world and how she had identified with and come to love the mother who had borne her anew into the world each time. A great sadness filled Kimberly as she considered the helpless and isolated ego of her former mother. The powers that she had acquired were not of her choosing and the changes that they had made in her psyche had been as inevitable and subtle as a schizophrenic journey into the darkness of utter insanity.

Kimberly instinctively knew that the Heaven-sent temporal fugue was almost at an end. She had to make a choice between spiritual escape to rest and reincarnate again, or face the ultimate death of her soul by remaining with her helpless mother and boyfriend. She could choose Death to insure eternal life by escaping a soul-eating life, with no sin attached, or she could chose Life and remain to face physical death and the almost certain annihilation of her soul along with her mother and Mark. The white light that glowed love from above told her in a small insistent voice that she must choose between life and death immediately.

Kimberly chose Death. The glow at the ceiling vanished the moment she made her mental choice. Kimberly had made her decision and it had been accepted by the Heavenly Court of Appeals. She was trapped with no escape. Instantly, she entered the body of her mother and walked forward to sacrifice herself to the Queen of Air and Darkness. Her entire body burned with the same pure light of selfless, accepting love that emanated from the ceiling only moments before. As the rays of the self-sacrificial love met the black cracks in reality, the Universe began to heal itself. The nearly invincible Goddess shrieked in agony as the emanations from the aura of her mortal antithesis struck her and wounded her to the very core of her being. For just an instant, Kimberly understood exactly who and what she faced before the knowledge of forbidden things was mercifully whisked away from her for the sake of her sanity.

Lilith had been the first wife of God, the Almighty, and had thus shared many of his powers and qualities in metaphysical terms. God, Her first and only husband, could not be the antithesis of the Goddess, no matter how much they differed in purpose. God’s powers over her were strong, but not complete as long as God did not wish to annihilate all of Reality, so His effective powers over her were somewhat limited in scope.

Kimberly was another matter entirely. Where God was omnipotent, Kimberly was powerless. Where He was/is/will be immortal, she was demonstrably mortal. The opposite of a spiteful, vengeful Goddess is a human who is willing to sacrifice both life and soul for others out of virtuous love. While Kimberly had had sex with many of her boyfriends at school, the bonds of agape that she had formed in the playpen and crawling on the floor in diapers with her soulmate Mark transcended the mere transitory teenaged expressions of eros in the backseats of her boyfriend’s cars.

Her love for him was as pure and sweet as a mother’s first kiss on her newborn’s brow. As for her mother, what greater love could a person express than self-sacrifice of one’s soul to protect and defend the person who deliberately had broken a life-long trust and attempted to substitute that person for ultimate destruction instead of herself? Kimberly was loyal to the memory of what her mother had been to her as a little girl, rather than what she had become.

The air in the nursery became like pellucid acrylic as the cracks of Doom vanished amidst the distant howling of mankind’s greatest enemy. The entire scene seemed to Kimberly like they were all frozen in the hardened matrix of a pellucid acrylic resin-polymer. The glass-like appearance of the room seemed to melt before her eyes as the room returned to normal seconds later. As the normal sights and smells of the nursery reached her nostrils, the golden glow surrounding Amanda’s body dimmed. Kimberly turned around to examine the health of the two infants with the ordinary mortal vision that had returned with the exit of the Goddess.

Suddenly, the nursery was filled with a crashing noise as the heavy adult body of Mark caused the small mattress to force the metal springs of the crib to rip free through its wooden structure and allow it both springs and mattress to fall straight through to the floor, taking Mark with it. He had a dazed look on his face, but otherwise looked alright.

On the other hand, Amanda had the vacant look of a true infant on her face. She looked towards the ceiling for a mercy she would not find. By abandoning Kimberly, she had committed such a grave sin that the doors of Heaven had shut themselves in her face until she had reformed her soul. The bright light that had shown down on Kimberly in her hour of need would not be extended to the betrayer of kith and kin. If Heaven’s light issued from perfectly-formed stained glass windows in the sky, God would have created thunderclouds to dim the Holy light so that it could not fall upon her unclean spirit. She had entered the state of unholy anathema. Amanda tried to reinvoke the powers that she had once wielded, but her infant body meager energies couldn’t support her psychic demands.

Everything Amanda had done over the past two weeks was rapidly becoming vague and without meaning. Amanda looked skyward with a vacant look as she attempted to re-engage herself in the world. She failed miserably. The effort to remake herself had failed, as well as the effort to maintain her adult viewpoint, she was drifting. Like a blue-stained, Bedouin nomad who had lost both his robe and headgear in a vicious battle and who had become confused and thereby lost under the effects of brutal Sun and unceasing desiccating heat of the Great Desert of Arabia, her thoughts became unfocused and wandered without purpose or reason. By willfully killing the love that those around her had for her, she created a solitary personal world of trackless, loveless sea of drifting sand. The desert of Amanda’s self-imposed Karmic retribution could only be made to flower under the love of someone who accepted her as she was, with all her faults and foibles. Until this happened, she was utterly alone in the Universe.