He had not been the only one to have taken that step.
Lilith's had started long before the fire ever reached the border.
Her body, in the years before the chaotic opening, had stopped being a body in any sense a mortal practitioner would have recognized. It had become a lattice. DNA, law and half-formed principle undergoing fission and fusion in the same breath, recombining faster than any single configuration could settle into permanence. What the process couldn't hold, it shed. She had called the byproduct pollution, a conceptual radiation carrying fragments of her being out into the void to seed whatever it touched. It had been generative. It had also been waste, and waste is still waste no matter how useful it turns out to be. Waste that, at the time and without her knowledge or focus, had ultimately ended up in the abyss, after travelling through different worlds and planes.
