Nexus Awakened (An Isekai LitRPG Gender Bender Story)-Chapter 1117. The Unloved Nilhinid

Clothina was born a Nilhinid.

She had the father of an Anid, and the mother of a Healer. But the golden eyes she possessed were indicative of a second mother.

It was an Angel.

Sammy, the Angel of Lust, was her first and foremost mother. Nilhinds were born precisely how mammals were. Clothina, on the other hand, was produced as an unfertilized egg after the Angel of Lust bred with Atropos, a Celestial Anid who saw Sammy as nothing more than an incubator.

Indeed. Clothina was not born from love, nor a mutual obligation to produce life. She was born from the passing curiosity of an Angel who wished to check off an Anid from her list. Clothina’s life revolved around a loveless existence. The only form of warmth she had ever received came from the dying hand of her surrogate mother when she burst from her womb with her brothers and sisters, and the faint blue light that had always accompanied the nest of an Anid.

Her first memory was that cold hand on her cheek. The second was the scent of blood. And the third was a sound that had choked her. Other mothers, of races with fur, non-human ears, and multiple limbs had their swollen stomachs burst one by one. Her fourth memory was the sea of Mononids and Duonids that wriggled from their mother’s hollow corpses.

Nilhinds were normally born alone.

But her holy mother, a Healer, was overfilled by the seed of a Celestial Anid.

Her belly was engorged well beyond what a human could handle. But she remained alive throughout the entire fourteen days of a Nilhinid’s incubation period. Afterwards, her stomach swelled, and it split into eight perfect petals.

Her fifth memory was floating in a sea of gore, which had belonged to her Nilhinid brothers and sisters. The Mononid and Duonids feasted on their defenseless bodies. Hollow tubes descended from the fog-smothered skies and impaled the heads of her surrounding kindred.

Her sixth memory was the sound of a splitting skull. The seventh was watching a slurry of pink matter travel through the transparent tube. Their brains were squeezed through a pin-sized hole at the tip of the tube, reducing it into a liquid slurry. Left behind were the hollow husks of her siblings, which were then stripped down to bloody skeletons.

Clothina was not harmed.

Nilhinids were often spared from this fate so long as they were embraced by their mother. But her mother only had two hands. One had been bent in an awkward shape because of the sheer weight of one of the strips of her stomach. The other was placed onto her face, protecting her from the violent instincts of her Anid siblings.

There was no love in instinct. Love was neither an instinct, nor the unconditional love of a Healer. Clothina, over witnessing repeated cycles of breeding, birth, and the feasting, came to understand the nature of an Anid.

Her eighth memory was the embrace of her mother throughout her tribulations. The ninth was the realization that Clothina had no arms to hold her mother back. Throughout the six years she had spent cradled in her mother’s arms, and was bathed in the blood of thousands of her siblings, she had questioned her existence.

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“Why was I born this way?”

“Why was I born without hands to hold my mother back?”

“Why am I incapable of running away with her?”

“Why does my father look so hungry and sad all the time?”

“Why does mother still hold onto me?”

She could not understand the logic behind it. Her only form of education came from the tales her mother had sang to her in lullabies. The stage plays she had once enjoyed in the past, back when she had lived in a small town of just five thousand inhabitants.

Every so often, her mother would utter a name as a person was dragged into the nest. No amount of agony from birthing her doomed siblings had ever brought her to tears. But her mother would weep whenever someone she knew was brought in either as a brood mother, or as food.

Half of the Anids of the Nest were comprised of her village. They were still alive, liquified within the arteries of the Anids. Yet, as a Healer, she was incapable of fighting back. She could not change their fates, because her purpose had already been determined.

Clothina’s ninth memory was the death of her mother. She remembered how she did not cry, because she hadn’t known that she was dead until the stench of rot reached her nose.

Her mother’s hands were always cold, and she soon shared the embrace with her mother with maggots and the Mononids which feasted on the corpse of a Healer.

When a Healer died, they were no more than food. At death, they served as nothing but nutrition to the Nest. Though she did not cry, she sensed the sorrow from her father. Instinct override that sorrow shortly afterwards, and her brain was syphoned into a hollow tube.

It was this sight that had caused her first tears in years to fall. Her tenth and final memory before she was entombed into the silk strung by her tears was the expansion of the blue glow above the Nest. It illuminated the forest like a second sun, and from it, she saw the seal of an ‘X’ open, and from it arrived…

* * *

“The mothlinen.”

Clothina stared up at the empty sky. Her body was half submerged in a still lake. Not a ripple formed across its surface even as her chest slowly rose. Most of her face disappeared beneath the dark water.

One side of the lake was plunged into darkness.

The other side was painted by a warm light.

She recalled her past as she lay in the twilight of both realms.

“Lachesis ate away at my strings. It was in her nature to as a Mothlinen. I was only spared because the taste of a Nilhinid’s threat was irresistible to a Mothlinen. Lachesis. Like my father, she was driven by instinct. She wanted my strings. My tears were her nourishment. My father became the only living Anid of the Nest… But we wanted to break away from our predisposed purpose.”

Her body moved towards the side of darkness. There was not a single wave to drift her to that side, yet an inexplicable force moved her until the realm of light remained in her peripheral vision.

Then, she heard it.

A ticking. The subsequent tocks.

She felt its presence, and she welcomed its coldness, for it reminded her of her mother’s touch.

“You chose to break free from your purpose. It did not work. You became tethered to another one.”

“But we changed. Lachesis no longer eats the threads I make. The Scripts cannot be destroyed as long as she adheres to it. There is nothing more she despises than to indulge in her hunger. My father no longer spins thread or consumes the living. The prewritten personas of my benefactor gave him the role of the severer.”

“What about yourself?”

“I… Became strung. No thoughts to make. No conscious effort to weigh me down. No eyes to see. No ears to listen. I was given a shell to do everything I could not.”

“Why did you despise yourself?”

Clothina smiled, like the answer was obvious.

“I did not ask to be made this way. Regardless… I was born a Nilhinid with no limbs of my own. A Healer with no means to salvage myself. A Nephilim with nothing sacred to my name. It was easier to become a marionette… and live within a shell. Healers don’t ask whether they want to become a Healer.”