If you are reading this journal, then I have failed, and she has killed me or gotten me locked away. I implore you, follow my path, finish what I started. She cannot be allowed to live.

Eve was not the first wife of Adam. There was another, born of the same clay as him. She was not given his rib, and lacked any tie to the First Man beyond form and flesh. She served as steward alongside him, but did not love him, and when the desire to breed came up on Adam, she would not accept him. Six days did Adam ask and six days did Lilith reject him, until he decided to invoke his authority as the first man to force her. Rather than accept, she became the first human to leave the Garden of Eden, having never approached the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Her name is Lilith, though she goes by Elle now. She told me a sanitized version of this origin when I was 14, when I asked her if she’d ever been married. The rest I derived from the works of Jewish and Muslim scholars.

Most of her history is not recorded under her name, but I know her modus operandi well. She plays on humanity’s reliance and fear of animals, either the wild beasts of the forest or the tame beasts of civilization. Her authority as a steward of Eden remains, and it only takes a whisper from her to turn them against their owners. She places herself in a position of subservience where she will not be suspected and waits for the perfect moment. I can definitively place her at the deaths of six kings of antiquity and guess at her presence at dozens more. She considers herself judge, jury and executioner for any man with power, and when she chooses to execute, she has no regrets. Hers is a path walked in blood.

This is the woman who all but raised me when my own mother was busy raising my younger siblings, acting in the role of a slave. She showed me such beauty in the world, the way each plant grows, the way each animal chatters in the night. I loved her as I would my own flesh. Then, she killed my uncle, and taunted me when I tried to take revenge with a knife. She is thoroughly convinced that she is right. She belives that she can freely murder any white man who benefits from slavery in the slightest way. She expects me to accept that she’s right or that she cannot be stopped. I refuse.

I am not the scared boy anymore. I’ve taken my uncle’s inheritance and gained a full background in the classics and theology from Burlington Academy, supplemented with visits to the great universities of the East. I’ve learned how to handle a rifle and wield a blade. I’ve studied every book on Christianity and theology available in this country. She has not left the town of my birth since I was forced to leave by the perception of madness, still supposedly owned by my siblings. I don’t know who she plans to kill next, but I know I’m the only person who can stop her.

I am Lamentations Bean, and in a few days, I shall be back in Henshaw. I will not falter. My hand shall be guided by God.