Momentary Lily ‒ SEASON FINALE (2025)

The girl was alone, and the crumbling towers of the world that came before her loomed larger and darker than ever before. The shimmering edges of the sunrise did little to comfort her. If anything, the cascade of orange and red had the effect of stretching the shadows desiccated skyline far past the borders of the world she knew. Her mother and father had tried to prepare the girl for this day for as long as she could remember, but now that they were both gone, the overwhelming realness of their absence was almost too much to bear. The secret pathways of the ruined city that she had spent so many years etching into the grooves of her memory felt strange and circuitous, now. The rules of how to navigate the daylight trails and the ones left behind in the night, which had once seemed utterly concrete and immutable, now slipped through her mind like water through a woven basket. All the girl could think, now, was how many of them lurked the streets beyond the makeshift hovel that her family once called home. Those awful things that wore the faces of pretty girls, and all of the creatures that stalked the earth in their wake.

It had been three weeks since she buried her mother and father. Today was her fourteenth birthday. The already meager bundle of supplies they had managed to gather in her parents' final days had finally dwindled down to almost nothing. Before long, the girl would have to leave their home to scavenge for whatever might be left to find. She was fourteen now - nearly grown - and so she was old enough to understand just how little must remain out there from the world before the collapse, but she had also come to understand just how decadent and overburdened with stuff that world had been. The city wasn't overflowing with survivors, anymore, but the ones who'd managed to stick around for all of these years could still get by with a little bit of gumption, and a larger bit of luck. The last thing the girl had ever said to her father was to answer a promise he begged her to make. He asked her to swear that she would do everything in her power to survive, when they were gone. He asked her to seek out the clan of survivors that were rumored to be growing stronger amidst the rubble and ruin. She swore to him that she would do both.

To keep that promise, though, meant that she had to go further than her family had ever dared to go before. Deeper into the heart of the city. Where they lived.

The girl was trembling with fear. Growing up, she always looked at how calm and collected her parents could be, even when they found themselves surrounded by The Terrors in the middle of a scavenging run, and she long for the day when she would be grown up enough to have moved beyond such childish things as fear and loneliness and a need for the soft glow of a campfire to fall asleep. Now that she was fourteen and nearly grown, though, the girl was beginning to understand that her parents probably never outgrew those things, either. They simply learned to smother them with a calm smile and a gaze fixed on the horizon. She would have to do the same, if she intended to keep her last promise. The trembling can wait for later, she thought. The sun was almost fully risen, and every passing second after this one meant a second wasted as food for the encroaching night to gobble up. It was time to get moving.

The journey into the city was equal parts monotonous and unbearably fraught. The girl knew well the cost of drawing too much attention to herself, even in the starkest daylight, so she had to move as carefully and quietly as possible. She crept through the overgrown streets like she was playing the old games of keep-away and hide-and-seek that her parents used to play. She had long since figured out that those games were merely her parent's attempt to teach a naive little girl how to survive in a world that would literally eat her alive at any given moment. She hated how much comfort she still found in the framework of those old games, even now — she was fourteen, damn it, and practically an adult — but that didn't stop her from whispering her father's silly nursery rhyme as she slowly crept and twisted along the safest routes she knew.

“One, two, three, and four: The Big Bad Wolf's creeping towards the open door. Five, six, seven, and eight: You can't come in, it's much too late. Count to nine, and then count to ten: It won't be long before he's back again…”

Over and over again, she sang, whittling away at the minutes until they turned into hours; before long, the sun had already begun to creep its way down towards the horizon. There hadn't been so much as a peep from those girls from the shadows, but that didn't mean they weren't waiting for her all the same. They were always waiting, she knew. She suspected they simply enjoyed it more, the longer they drew things out. They certainly laughed enough whenever they were ripping into the flesh of some poor living thing that had the misfortune to wander into their sights.

The Big Bad Wolf's creeping towards the open door…

The girl found herself in a clearing of concrete, broken-down cars, and twisted metal that she only barely recognized. She looked up and saw the bent but still fully legible sign that marked the name this place once held, long before she had been born: BOYLSTON ST. Her parents had brought her here maybe once or twice, in the months before they passed. They knew, she thought, that they wouldn't have much time left with her, and they wanted to give her whatever tools she might be able to use to survive without them. This place, this “BOYLSTON ST,” was the farthest she'd ever been from home. She would have to go farther still, she knew, but her feet felt like they were stuck in three-feet of mud and rocks. Her breath was beginning to draw short. She was fourteen now, she knew, but for the first time she was beginning to think that fourteen wasn't very much grown up at all.

There was a chattering noise from the alleys to her south, and the clack-clack sound of stones and metal being overturned in the dark. The girl grabbed her flashlight - one of the most precious gifts her parents left behind, along with the batteries they found to power it — and aimed it directly towards the darkness, listening with baited breath. Her free hand crept down towards the knife she kept sheathed at her waist. It wouldn't do her any good, she knew, but it was the only defense she had. As she listened, she heard other sounds coming up from the alleyways, too: The clamoring of panicked footsteps slamming against concrete and shallow water, and the sharp cries of a person gripped by terror.

“Help! Please, help me!” The cries of the man could be heard before he himself came tumbling out into the fading dusk-light of Boylston Street. He was a gaunt man dressed in the tattered remnants of whatever clothing he had been able to scrounge up from the wreckage of the old world, just like every other survivor was. He clung desperately to a small satchel that was torn through at the bottom, and old boxes and cans of stale food spilled out all over the ground as he ran. Behind him tried several things-that-wore-the-faces-of-girls. They were dressed in too-bright outfits with too-shimmering ribbons in their undulating hair; their too-wide grins were shadowed by their too-large eyes and the too-large blades they gripped in their too-long fingers.

On instinct, the girl tucked away her light and ducked behind a nearby car. She locked eyes with the man for just an instant as she did, but before he could finish calling out to her again, one of the girl-things shoved its claws into his spine and lifted him into the air. The other girl-things followed suit, plunging the crooked blades on their fingers into the poor man's eyes and stomach and throat.

One of them — the thing with short brown locks and a bright pink skirt — tore the man's skull from his body and raised it up above to look down upon their handiwork. Even though the girl had not been alive in the time where things like cell-phones and the internet existed, she still recognized the gesture as an imitation of the “selfie” pose that her mother had told her about. The girl had seen people playing such strange games with their devices in the posters and billboards that still clung to the walls and the bus-stops of the city.

“YaSoBE!!!!”the girl-thing shrieked. The other girl-things flung their bits of flesh and bone into the air and gleefully imitated their companion: “yaSObE!!!!” “YASobe!!!!” “YaSoBE!!!!

Back in her hiding-place, the girl had clasped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. This was not the first death she had seen at these things' hands, but it never got any easier to watch. Just then, she heard another rustling sound, this time from the streets to the east. Glancing over, she saw another gaggle of girl-things clamoring towards the pile of fresh meat their sisters had just created. They held scraps of meat and random limbs in their own claws, and they were screaming the same insane chant — “YaSoBE!!!!” — over and over. It only took a second for the girl-thing with bright-pink pigtails to crack its neck sideways and crane its gaze in her direction.

The girl did not have time to think. She simply gathered up all of the courage she had left and fled as fast as she could into the deeper heart of the city.

She crashed into the stranger after blindly twisting her way down the streets and through the alleys, seeking any source of light she could find. There had been a dim glow at the end of one of the random backstreets she stumbled onto, and right when she wheeled the corner she ran headfirst into the man with the lantern.

“Well, hello there!” he said, in a voice that was altogether too calm and friendly for a man stuck out in the middle of the open as dark was settling in. “Fancy running into someone else out here on a night like this!” The girl looked up and saw that this man was not a monster like the girl-things from before, but that didn't mean he wasn't just as dangerous. He wore an impossibly clean-looking charcoal suit, with hair that went down to his shoulders, and a beard that looked like it had just been trimmed. The girl had never seen anyone like him outside of the pictures from the magazines she sometimes managed to swipe off of the barren store shelves, and she knew better than to trust anyone that looked like they had been living life just fine at the end of the world. Heeding her mother's instructions on what to do if she ever encountered such a person on her own, the girl drew her knife and plunged it straight into the man's heart.

“Ouch,” the man said, more offended than hurt. It took a second for the girl to realize that not a drop of blood was pouring out of the wound she had just created. The man looked down quizzically at the knife in his chest, and then he pulled it out with all of the nonchalance of someone removing a pesky splinter from their palm.

“You know, kid,” the man said, “Back in my day, we usually began conversations with a regular old greeting. You know? 'Hi! How are you?' I get that times have changed since then, but come now! Surely we haven't become monsters?” He twirled the knife around in his hand and offered it back to the girl. She took it from him, feeling dazed by the shock of what was happening, not knowing quite what to do next. She figured that the smart thing to do was to run, but the man kept his empty hand extended with a friendly sort of smile, and she simply felt like she had to reach out and take it. The man clasped her hand in his and shook it, still smiling.

“There we go!” he said. “That's much better! Now, how about you tell me what exactly you're doing out here, in my neck of the woods?”

“I was running…” the girl said, dreamily. “From those things out there. Those awful girls in the bright skirts…”

The man lifted his lantern and leaned in closer, his toothy grin no longer seeming all that friendly. “Running?” he said. “You mean my friends there?” The girl turned around and saw the girl-things standing there, still smiling, still chewing on the bits of meat they hadn't yet stripped from that poor fellow's bones. There were more of the things emerging from the alley she'd just come out of, too. She was surrounded, and she knew that she would be killed if she didn't do run, didn't fight, didn't do something, but she couldn't move a muscle. All she could do was turn back to the man with the lantern and ask him more questions in that same dull, sleepy voice.

“Are they going to…are they going to kill me?”

“Oh yes,” the man said, “I am most certain that they will.”

“What…what are they?” Tears were streaming down the girl's face. “I've been running from them my whole life, and I don't even know what they are, or where they come from…”

By now, the man's smile had stretched itself into something altogether terrifying. He didn't even really look human, anymore. The girl doubted that he ever was.

“It's so funny you should ask me that, child,” the man said. “In fact, it's quite the interesting story, and I would be so happy to tell it to you. It starts with Momentary Lil—”

Just then, a loud crack shot through the air, and the man's left arm exploded into bits. He didn't scream, or show any signs of pain, but it was enough to cause him to stop short and turn in mild surprise to see the woman standing about thirty feet behind him. The rifle in her hands was still smoking from the shot it had just fired.

“That's enough, James,” the woman said. “Let the girl go. Now.”

“Hello, Sarah!” the man named James said, waving his one remaining arm in casual salutations. “I was just about to tell my new friend all about you, and our mutual friends! I take it you're not interested in sitting down with us for some story time, then?”

The woman named Sarah did not answer James' question. She merely rolled her eyes in annoyance, put two fingers in her mouth, and blew a sharp whistle out into the night. Nothing happened, at first, but soon the girl saw flashes of firelight being dropped from the rooftops and onto the creatures. Then came the crashing sound of glass bottles shattering, and soon all of the girl-things were screaming in agony as their bodies were covered with flames and gasoline. This jolt of fiery violence was enough to snap the girl out of her haze, and she quickly made her way past the bleeding man in the charcoal suit and towards the woman with the gun.

James regarded the woman's blazing handiwork with that same look of mild irritation he had worn when the girl had stabbed him straight through the place where his heart should have been. “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah…” he said, in the mocking concern of a parent who was tired of scolding his child. “How much longer are we going to keep at this? It's just as I told you, way back when: There's only one way this is ever going to end, and there's no point in trying to—”

Sarah shot James three times before he could finish his sentence; twice in the chest, and once in the head. James' body collapsed in a heap just a few feet away from the smoldering remains of all of those other creatures.

“You killed him!” the girl said, grabbing Sarah's coat and shaking her new savior in uncontrollable excitement. “You actually—”

“No, I didn't,” Sarah muttered. “Trust me. I wish it were that easy. Now hush a moment, child.” The girl did as she was told, watching the flames with the same focused intent that Sarah did. There was nothing but the flickering fire, at first, but then another figure emerged. It was another man, older than James was. He wore shabbier looking clothes, though they still looked far too clean for the world they were all living in. This new man was balding, with a shaggy beard, and he had spectacles that glinted in the firelight. He, too, was smiling that same uncanny smile, and he seemingly felt nothing as he walked through the flames.

“Hello, sweetheart!” he called out to Sarah. “It's me, again. Are you ready to finally come home?” Sarah raised her gun again, but this time she was clearly hesitating to pull the trigger. The man in the spectacles reached into the pack that was strapped to his waist, and he pulled out a strange object made out of plastic. He held it up to his ears like it was a phone, except it had not screen of any kind, nor any buttons to speak off. A spiraled plastic cord dangled uselessly from one of its ends. “Hey there, Sarah,” the man said, his voice crackling and distorting into something profane. “It's me, Billy. Do you want to know where the monsters are hiding, now?”

Sarah continued to aim the gun for a few seconds more, but she couldn't fire it. Instead, she just gave an anguished cry, and then called out, “Cleo!” From the same space above where the fire-bottles had been thrown, several booming shots rang out, and the bespectacled-man's legs buckled as they were blown off. He still kept crawling with his one free hand, though; the other hand still held the plastic thing up against his ear. A few more bottles came down and smothered the man in flame, and eventually he stopped moving. Sarah watched the man burn. She was crying.

The girl had no idea what to do or to say, so thankfully another woman came climbing down from the fire-escape ladders that led to the rooftops above them. Like Sarah, this woman was older than even the girl's mother had been. Her hair was dyed the funniest color of purple, though the girl could see plenty of gray streaking through it all, even in this dim light.

“Thank you, Cleo,” Sarah said, finally allowing herself to sling the rifle back over her shoulder.

“No problem, Sarah,” Cleo responded. “I've always got your back. You know that.” Cleo clasped Sarah's shoulder with obvious affection, and Sarah returned her friend's warmth for a moment before finally addressing the girl they had both just rescued.

“Are you hurt” Sarah asked, and the girl shook her head in the negative.

“Where is your family?” Cleo asked. The girl hesitated, before admitting that she had no more family, and that their dying wish was to find the colony of survivors living in the heart of the city.

“Of course,” Sarah said, not hesitating at all to take the girl in. “We'll need to get moving right now, though. Those…those men over there are bound to get up again before too long. And I'm in no mood to speak with them anymore, tonight.”

The survivors lived in the remains of an old school, it turns out, or at least the parts of it they could reasonably keep blocked off from the outside horrors. There were several dozen people living there, men and women and even some children close to the girl's age. Some of the adults stood guard around the school's defenses. Inside, adults and children alike helped cook and clean and prepare materials for the next day's scavenging. The girl had read about things called “villages” and “neighborhoods” in old books, but this was the first time she'd ever witnessed a community of people living together up close. One aspect of this makeshift fortress that fascinated her the most was what looked like a giant memorial in the center of the old plaza. It was covered inch by inch in scraps of paper, drawings, sculptures, and all other manner of creations that the girl couldn't make heads or tails of.

She was quickly led past this strange landmark and brought to a receiving room of sorts. There, a nice old man named Mr. Eddie and his husband Raúl gave her a new set of clothes and some actual soap to use for the shower. Afterwards, the men fed her a dinner of stale mashed potatoes and old Spam; it might have been warmest and most delicious meal she'd ever eaten. Then, they told the girl that she could stay in Sarah's quarters for the time being, until they arranged for a permanent bed of her own. This was admittedly a somewhat intimidating prospect, but Sarah clearly had some knowledge of this strange and terrifying world, and the girl had so much she wanted to know. Later, after taking some time to settle into the cot that was just a few feet away from Sarah's bed and nursing the mug of hot chocolate Sarah made (would these luxuries never end!?), the girl finally worked up the courage to ask Sarah her questions.

“Who were those men that you ki—that you saved me from, out there?”

Sarah laughed, bitterly. “Them. You're lucky, you know. Not many folks survive an encounter with them like you did. At the very least, they don't make it out with their sanity intact.”

“So they're the same as those creatures, then? Like the girls-that-aren't-really-girls, or the wolves made of shadows, or the giants made of light and glass?”

Sarah contemplated her cocoa as she swirled it around and around in her mug.

“They're not the same, no. They were humans, once. Just regular, everyday people. That man you talked to, James? He had a wife, and a career. His whole job was writing reviews about Japanese cartoons, if you can believe it.” The girl honestly wasn't quite sure what ‘reviews’ and ‘Japanese cartoons’ even were, but she didn't press the issue.

“And the other man?” the girl asked. “The one with the, er, the glass on his eyes?”

Sarah smiled, and the girl could tell just how much this question had hurt her new friend.

“That one used to be a father. He was a stubborn old man, and kind of a basket case, but his daughter loved him very much.” That was all Sarah said, and the girl new better than to push any further.

“The man you call ‘James’? He said he spoke to you before. That you knew how everything was supposed to end. What did he mean by that?”

“Let's just say that James and I have very different opinions on the nature of, well, all of this.” Sarah spread her arms out wide to indicate that ‘this’ was indeed the entirety of their world. “That poor creature is still convinced that the only way out is to spread all of this pain and terror and suffering to every last human that can experience it, like a fire that snuffs itself out when there's no more fuel left to burn.”

“And you?”

“I believe in building things up, instead of burning them down.”

The girl paused to sip her cocoa, trying to figure out if things were starting to make more or less sense.

“Okay,” the girl said, “Then what the hell is the Momentary thing he was going to tell me about?” Without warning, Sarah clasped her hands against the girl's mouth, holding a finger up to her own lips as she did.

“No, child!” Sarah hissed, before slowly releasing her grip on the girl's jaw. “We never say that name. Is that understood?” The girl nodded, though she was no less perplexed.

“I don't even know what it is!” the girl said. Sarah examined the girl for a moment, sighed, and then, reluctantly began to explain what she could. Sarah said nothing of what those forbidden words actually meant, but she spoke of The Dreaming and its terrible power, going slowly and making sure to use simple phrases that she was sure the girl might understand. She explained how there were once all sorts of stories that lived beyond just books and words, like moving pictures and living drawings that spoke sounds and sang songs. This all sounded rather impossible to the girl, but impossibility felt like a much smaller hurdle to overcome in a world like this one. The point was, Sarah explained, that there was once a story that was so ugly, so poorly written, and constructed with such a brazen lack of forethought and care that The Dreaming used it as a way into their world. It had been devouring its way through the last vestiges of human civilization ever since.

“And men like James, and the glasses-man…” the girl concluded, “They want to keep this story going? Until everything is over?”

“They're not men,” Sarah corrected. “They haven't been men for many years. But yes, that is what they want. And that is why there are certain words we do not speak, any more.”

“You're afraid of what will happen if you say them?”

“Fear? Ha, no, child, it's never been about fear. It's like I told you. I believe in building things up instead of burning them down. To speak those silly words out loud is simply to give them power. To give them weight. I decided a long time ago that the only way to fight The Dreaming wasn't to live in fear of its worst monsters. It was to make better dreams, so that they might save us.”

The girl was confused again, and Sarah could clearly tell. Smiling patiently, she took the empty cocoa mug from the girl and returned with a candle, a book, and a pen.

“Those things out there only understand endings as conclusions. The place a story stops. They have no faith in their worlds, or in the people that live within them. They've never given any thought to such things beyond the simple, brutish power they wield to serve their own ends. It's a crass and childish way of looking at the world. That's why I have a job for you.”

“A job for me?” the girl asked, bewildered. She couldn't do, well…anything. She was still a child, and one who could barely survive out in the world on her own for a single day. She was especially nothing compared to Sarah, a survivor who held the life of an entire clan of people in her hands. “What could I possibly do to help, here?”

Sarah gently took the girl's legs and scooped her up into the cot, and then she tucked a blanket around her. When the girl was as snug as could be, Sarah placed the book and the pen in her hands and clasped her fingers tight around them.

“I know that life now is hard, and scary, and cruel. I know the prospect of having sweet dreams sounds completely impossible. Believe me, I used to think that it would only be nightmares, from here on out until the end of time. Something I've learned, though, with the help of all my friends here, is that sweet dreams are still very possible. And they can become very real. Those creatures out there, and the men who wield them, they have been so consumed by all of the bad in The Dreaming that they think that bad is all there is, but I refuse to believe that. Do you understand? So, your job is the same job that everybody here got, when they first arrived, and it's the most important job in the world. Do you remember the wall of papers and other things that you saw, when you first arrived?”

The girl nodded, and she snapped her eyes open to try and convince Sarah that she was still fully awake. But, between the belly full of warm cocoa and Sarah's soothing voice, the girl was finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake. Despite everything she had been through, she found herself feeling cozy for the first time in a very long while.

“That wall,” Sarah continued, “Is the Wall of Stories. Everyone here, no matter how old or experienced, is required to come up with a story to share with the world. It doesn't matter what it is about, or what you make it from, or how ‘good’ it is, or whether anybody in the world but you takes any joy from it. What matters is that it is honest, that it is earnest, and that it comes from the good dreams that will come, with time. And I promise, they will come. Can you do that for us? Can you make a new story, to help take away from some those bad stories that have been plaguing us for so long?”

The girl nodded again, and she clung tight to her new treasure, but she couldn't resist the pull of sleep any longer. Sarah patted the girl's head with care, and placed the lit candle on the mantle above her cot. “I'll be right here, if you need anything. I just realized, too, that I don't even know your name.”

“It's Lily…” the girl muttered, turning over on her side and hugging her notebook even tighter. “My mother named me Lily, like her favorite flower…” Sarah couldn't help but smile when she heard that.

“That's perfect,” Sarah said. “Goodnight then, Lily. I'll see you in the morning.”

Lily smiled, and mumbled something about good nights in return, but she was gone to the waking world. The candle kept burning above her long into the night, and for the first time in fourteen years, Lily found herself blessed with pleasant dreams. She would have to remember to write them down when she woke up.

Rating:

Momentary Lily is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.