"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The night didn't move.
It lingered — heavy, stagnant — as though time itself refused to touch what we had done.
Lilith sat across from me, half in shadow, the faint lamplight sketching the curve of her jaw.
I could still smell the metallic ghost of what I had washed away.
"You're not repenting," she said. "You're rehearsing remorse."
Her tone wasn't accusation. It was analysis.
As if she were dissecting me with her words — layer by layer, until the raw core was all that remained.
"I killed a man," I said quietly.
"You killed an illusion," she corrected.
"The illusion that you were harmless."
Her gaze pinned me like a specimen under glass.
"You think morality is about good or evil," she continued. "It isn't. It's about consistency. People don't hate murderers — they hate hypocrites."
I laughed, but it sounded wrong.
Like something breaking.
"Every man," I murmured, "is two men — one who wants to be seen as good, and one who simply wants to exist."
Lilith smiled faintly. "And which one are you?"
I didn't answer.
Because at that moment, I didn't know.
She stood, walking toward my bookshelf — the one I built like a shrine to dead philosophers. Her fingers brushed over the spines of Nietzsche, Camus, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard.
"All these men," she said softly, "wrote about sin as if it were an idea. You gave it shape. You lived it."
She turned toward me, eyes gleaming.
"Doesn't that make you... more honest than they ever were?"
Something in me flinched — not out of disagreement, but recognition.
Because for the first time since the murder, guilt began to breathe differently.
It didn't claw anymore. It seduced.
It whispered that maybe, just maybe, she was right.
Lilith walked closer until the distance between us dissolved. Her voice lowered to something between philosophy and temptation.
"You mistake purity for strength, Kael. But the world belongs to those who can hold their filth without flinching."
Her hand brushed my jaw — gentle, almost reverent.
And in her eyes, I saw not condemnation, but a strange devotion — the kind only found between two souls too damaged to fear each other.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The silence was thick, pulsing — not erotic yet, but something worse. Something that promised ruin disguised as revelation.
I could still hear the echo of his last breath in my mind.
But Lilith's whisper drowned it out.
"Confession," she said, "is just another way to feel innocent."
And in that moment, I understood what she truly was — not my conscience.
My corrupter.
My mirror.
My muse.