(Transcribed from water-damaged pages discovered near the ruins of Babylon)

15th July, 1888
The desert heat clings to Cairo like a shroud, but it’s the nights that chill me. Sarah’s fever broke yesterday, thank God, but the midwife’s warning still echoes: “Watch the babe after sunset. The First Wife hungers.” Superstitious nonsense, I told myself. Until tonight.

When I entered the nursery, the air tasted metallic — like old coins. Little Thomas slept soundly in his cradle, but the hairs on my neck stood rigid. Above him, carved into the cedarwood beam, was a symbol: three inverted triangles forming a serpent’s eye. I recognized it from Professor Al-Faradi’s forbidden texts: the Mark of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, cast from Eden for refusing to submit to him. They say she trades in infant souls to spite creation itself.

18th July
The scratches appeared last night. Three thin lines, like talon marks, on Thomas’s left ankle. The wet nurse swore she saw a woman’s shadow—“taller than any mortal, hair like spilled blood”—leaning over his crib. I dismissed her hysteria… until I woke gasping at 3 a.m., paralyzed by a presence in the room. A scent engulfed me: grave soil and myrrh. And then, a voice, silk-wrapped and venomous: “Your son smells of Eden’s dust. A debt is owed.”

Lilith’s true form is a tapestry of nightmares: alabaster skin stretched over predatory grace, eyes like polished amber, fingers elongating into obsidian talons. Her hair shifts from midnight black to the crimson of fresh arterial blood, a crown of defiance against heaven’s order.

22nd July
Father Vincenzo brought relics: iron bells, a vial of holy water, a silver pendant engraved with the names Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof—the angels who once pursued Lilith into the Red Sea wilderness. He chanted Psalms, but the air thickened. The nursery’s temperature plummeted. Frost etched Lilithu—her Sumerian name—onto the windowpane.

Thomas hasn’t cried in two days. He stares at the ceiling, eyes glassy as if dreaming awake. The midwife whispered of the “sucking demon”—Lilith’s ancient title. She drains vitality not just from blood, but from breath itself, leaving hollowed vessels behind.

29th July
Last night, I saw her.

Moonlight bled through the curtains as she materialized beside the cradle. She wore a gown of shadows, revealing glimpses of impossible beauty—high cheekbones, lips stained wine-dark. But her silhouette rippled. Wings of smoke unfurled behind her, and for an instant, her eyes blazed sulfur-yellow, pupils slitting like a serpent’s.

“Adam’s begotten always weep,” she sighed, trailing a claw over Thomas’s brow. “But yours… he tastes of defiance. Like me.”

I lunged with Father’s iron dagger. It passed through her like mist. She laughed, a sound like shattering glass. “Iron? Silver? I drank stars before your God carved Adam from mud.”

Final Entry (Undated)
She came for him at the witching hour.

The protective charms ignited—the pendant glowed white-hot, the bells shrieked—but Lilith merely smiled. “Pazuzu’s sigils? He was my supplicant, little scribe. The King of Wind Demons cowers before the Mother of All.” 

Thomas floated from his crib, suspended in a halo of darkness. Lilith’s mouth distended, unnaturally wide, revealing fangs that shimmered like black diamonds. But she did not bite. Instead, she pressed her lips to his tiny forehead and inhaled. A shimmering thread of light—his soul—pulled from his mouth into hers.

As his body crumpled, Lilith turned to me. Her form flickered, revealing flashes of her primordial horror: a writhing mass of serpents for a lower body, breasts dripping venom, eyes like smoldering craters.

“Tell them,” she whispered, her voice now a chorus of dying children, “Lilith remembers Eden. She remembers her throne. And soon…” She gestured to Thomas’s empty shell. “…my army will reclaim it.”

She vanished, leaving only a single feather—black as void, cold as space—and a sentence etched in Thomas’s spilled blood on the nursery wall:

“THE FIRST WIFE IS COMING HOME.”

(Journal ends here. Local records show the infant Thomas Whitaker died of “sudden infant convulsions” on July 31st, 1888. His father, Dr. Alistair Whitaker, was committed to an asylum in Cairo, where he repeatedly screamed one phrase until his death in 1891: “SHE FARMED HIM FOR THE WAR.”)

And, I mustn’t neglect the obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays is available through the following links: Amazon, Libro.fm, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million.