The confines of the bubblegum chambers of Jezebel felt suffocating, the stale air thick with trepidation, and rosemary as Jezebel's trembling voice finally breached the heavy silence.
"Father..." she began, melancholy lacing her words like barbs. "I've always felt abandoned. Not just by God, but everyone."
She swallowed hard, as if struggling against the weight of her own haunting confession.
Genesis watched her carefully, seeing the raw anguish hiding behind her hollow eye, the eye patch a grotesque reminder of past traumas.
"My life has been a series of betrayals, disappointments...leading me to question everything,"
Jezebel continued, each word poisoned with bitter venom.
A tremor coursed through her hands as she wrung them together. "I've lost faith in humanity. And God's silence..." Her lip curled in a self-deprecating sneer. "It's only amplified my doubts."
Genesis remained a stoic, implacable figure, giving no outward reaction beyond a slow, solemn nod.
He had borne witness to countless lost souls baring their sins in front of him.
He himself was a lost soul, with an unrealistic hard past filled with soul-shattering traumas.
But there was something about Jezebel's pain, her anguish, that cut through even his world-weary empathy.
"I understand, my child," he said at last, his voice heavy with fake sadness yet tinged with reassurance. "We all carry great burdens and face insurmountable trials in this life.
But it is in our darkest, most wretched moments that we must seek the light of salvation."
Jezebel seemed to curl in on herself at his words, as if bracing against their implication.
After drawing a ragged breath, she finally spoke again.
"Father, I've...committed acts I'm not proud of. Harmed people who wronged me." Her eye narrowed to a slit like a predator, her next words edged with a sinister savour. "I derived pleasure from their suffering. Like I was an avenging angel sent to distribute celestial judgment."
The metallic tang of sin clung to her confession, seeming to stain the very air they breathed.
Clearing his suddenly dry throat, the grizzled priest intoned, "The path to redemption is long and herculean."
He seized upon the familiar words from the Book of Psalms like a boarding plank against the rising tides of doubt. "But if you seek salvation, believe in the possibility of forgiveness...then you have already taken the first step towards God's grace."
Jezebel's haunted gaze bored into him, her single eye glittering with untold torment and scarcely-contained mania. "Do you want to hear what I've done, Father?"
The question reverberated endlessly in the confines of her chambers, seeming to exhaust what little fresh air remained.
Genesis held her stare, his own conviction unwavering even as sweat beaded along his hairline.
"Of course, my dear," he replied, inflecting his tone with a calmness he did not feel. "I am here to listen, to help carry your burdens with you. Perhaps even erase them, in time."
And so Jezebel began recounting her dark, twisted childhood, each word like another jagged stone along a bloodied path fraught with insanity.
From her tender, formative years, she revealed, she had struggled with an insidious affliction - psychopathy, whispering to her in tongues of sadistic cruelty.
Tormenting animals was her first, ominous surrender to the darkness festering within.
The spark that stoked the flames of her descent.
Jezebel described in lurid detail the pleasure she derived from their anguished cries, the euphoric highs she could find nowhere else.
She burned, decapitated, dismantled, and stomped them.
Any means of torture her creative twisted mind thought of, she implicated on those creatures.
For years, she battled to suppress these sinister urges, haunted by the vampiric compulsion of their release.
But fate, it seemed, had other plans for her.
"One day, thieves invaded my home," Jezebel rasped, the agonizing memory still fresh enough to lacerate her very voice into a guttural cackle. "They...killed my parents as they fought back."
She unconsciously raised a trembling hand to the eye patch where her eye had once been, a perverse trophy she'd carried away from that night of unspeakable violence. "When I returned from school, it was a bloodbath. Grotesque. It...shattered me into pieces."
A haunted look clouded what little life remained in her remaining eye. "Then the voices spoke, and this time I could not make them go quiet.
So...
I embraced my darkness, and unleashed my wrath on the intruders.
It was a struggle but I managed to kill them both in a frenzy, and..."
A hollow chuckle, devoid of even the specter of cheerfulness, escaped her pulpy lips. "Subjected them to 14 agonizing days of torment before the end, as I recall.
Those were some of the best days of my life."
Genesis was surprised to learn what she had done, the vivid imagery searing itself into his mind's eye like a branding iron.
Flashes of broken, mangled bodies contorted in agony danced at the corners of his mind, phantasmic images conjured by the darkness lurking in Jezebel's soul.
But the grizzled priest did not recoil or show outward judgment.
He could not - for in his sworn role as a shepherd to lost lambs, all were allowed before the Lord's immutable grace.
And, he also seemed deeper answers, related to the Abyssal Gifts.
As in, if Jezebel could trust him, she might reveal that she holds Lucifer's grace too.
So instead, Genesis slowly reached out with his hand, offering the barest semblance of human comfort upon Jezebel's arm. She did not pull away from his touch.
"My child," he spoke at last, his voice hushed yet brimming with melancholic empathy. "I often question God's plan, the suffering we must endure in service of His ineffable wisdom. You did not deserve this crucible of pain."
Jezebel's defiant, brittle exterior seemed to crack ever so slightly at the profound sadness inherent in the priest's words.
A solitary tear traced a glistening path down her hollow cheek, carving a fleeting trail amid the landscape of scars surrounding her eye patch.
The faintest of smiles, fragile as a layer of frost, tugged at the corner of her mouth - the transparent effort of a soul unaccustomed to receiving tenderness.
"You seem a good one, Father Genesis," she murmured, almost inaudibly. "But I'll have to see that truth for myself."
Genesis gave a weary nod of understanding, his own smile not meeting the sorrow dwelling in his eyes - the melancholy of one who has witnessed everyday a lifetime of horrors.
"Let us remember, my child, that the Almighty works in mysterious ways - ways often unfathomable and beyond the scope of human comprehension," he said, inflecting the words with a preacher's cadence born of decades of spiritual meditation.
"In times of grievous suffering, we invariably question why such torment befalls us, why we must traverse trials that seem utterly, irredeemably insurmountable."
His voice took on a deeper timbre, resonance thrumming beneath the familiar recitation of scripture - a talisman against the insidious chains of doubt. "As it is written in the Book of Isaiah - 'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.' You have faced a darkness more unfathomable than I can scarcely comprehend, an abyss that haunts and torments your very soul."
Genesis leaned forward, maintaining Jezebel's haunted stare with a palpable intensity and said. "But heed also the wisdom found in Romans - 'We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to His divine purpose.'
Even amidst the depths of incomprehensible suffering, His divine plan unfolds in movements too grand for our finite minds to grasp, twisting inexorably towards the ultimate path of redemption and sacred salvation."
Jezebel watched him steadily throughout his impassioned biblical speech.
As the final words faded into the heavy silence, she reached out, gripping Genesis's face firmly between her soft pink-nailed hands.
In an instant, her demeanor shifted, a metamorphosis from vulnerability to something infinitely darker, her true self.
An untamed smile stretched across her face. "Time for judgment, Padre." she growled, her whisper a bladed hiss.
Before Genesis could react, Jezebel seized him in a searing, brutal kiss.
Her lips crushed against his, the intimate lines between salvation and sin blurring into obscurity...