Year 635 After Creation – Enoch is thirteen years old.
The world has begun to rot from the inside.
The rivers no longer whisper; they scream at night, high, thin sounds like children being flayed. The grass in the high pastures has turned the color of dried blood, and when the wind moves through it the blades clatter like bones. In the Cainite cities, the bronze mirrors now show the watcher their own death instead of their reflection.
And the giants walk openly.
They call themselves the Gibborim, the Mighty Ones. Some are born of Watcher and woman, their height thirty cubits, skin like burnished brass, eyes the red of fresh slaughter. Others are older—much older—things that crawled out of the fissures opened when Cain's hammer first struck Abel's skull. They wear crowns of human teeth and drink from cups made of skulls.
Tonight, one of them is hunting.
His name is Ohya, son of the Watcher Barakiel. Forty cubits tall, shoulders broad enough to block the moon, he moves across the grasslands with the silence of a nightmare. In his right hand he drags a club carved from the trunk of a cedar of Lebanon—cedar that once grew on Enoch's hill and was cut down despite every axe shattering against it. The tree bled for seven days. Ohya laughed while it bled.
He is hunting the boy who made the hill crack with a single word.
He has been hunting for six years.
Tonight the scent is fresh.
Enoch knows.
He has known for weeks, ever since the night he woke screaming with Ohya's face burned across the inside of his eyelids. The elders want to flee, to take the clans south where the nephilim have not yet come. Methuselah, now nine hundred and sixty-nine years old, refuses. He stands at the door of his tent every dawn, staring toward the north, waiting for the giant to appear on the horizon like a moving mountain.
Enoch has a different plan.
Tonight he walks alone again, but not to the hill.
He walks north, toward the giant.
He carries no weapon.
Only the linen tunic, now patched and too short at the wrists, and the burning word still hidden in the palm of his right hand.
The grasslands end at the edge of the Valley of Siddim, where the ground is black glass and the air tastes of sulfur. This is where Cain killed Abel. The earth here has never healed. It is a wound that has learned to breathe.
Enoch steps onto the glass and does not look back.
Behind him, the clans watch from the ridge, silent, terrified, praying in languages that will one day be forgotten.
Ohya is waiting in the center of the valley.
The giant sits on a throne made of piled human bones, idly picking his teeth with a femur. When he sees the boy, he smiles, and the smile splits his face from ear to ear.
"So the little scribe comes to die," Ohya rumbles. His voice is the sound of continents grinding together.
Enoch stops ten paces away.
Close enough to smell the giant's breath—copper and rot and something older, like the grave opening its mouth to speak.
"I'm not here to die," Enoch says. His voice does not shake. It has not shaken since he was seven.
Ohya laughs. The sound makes the glass beneath their feet crack in spiderwebs.
"Then why come, little moth? To watch me crush your skull and drink the light from your eyes?"
Enoch lifts his right hand.
The sleeve falls back.
The word בְּרֵאשִׁית blazes like a star embedded in his flesh.
Ohya's laughter dies.
He has seen that word before.
He saw it the day the Morning Star first turned his face away from the Throne.
He saw it branded across the gates of heaven when the loyal angels cast the rebels down.
He saw it burning in the eyes of Michael when the archangel's sword took the heads of a third of the host.
Ohya stands slowly.
The bone throne collapses beneath his weight.
"You think one word will save you?" he snarls, but there is fear now, thin and sharp as broken glass.
"I think one word made you," Enoch answers.
He takes a step forward.
The glass beneath his bare foot does not crack.
Ohya raises the cedar club.
It is longer than a ship's mast, heavier than a mountain.
He brings it down with all the strength of a creature that once moved stars.
Enoch does not move.
The club stops a finger's breadth from his head.
It does not stop because Ohya wills it.
It stops because the air itself has become iron.
Ohya strains, veins like rivers of fire bulging beneath his brass skin, but the club will not descend another inch.
Enoch looks up at him, golden eyes steady.
"You want to know what Abel's blood is still saying?" he asks quietly.
He places his left hand—the one without the word—flat against the glass.
The valley answers.
From the exact spot where Abel's blood first soaked the earth, a sound rises.
It is not loud.
It is the sound of a lamb bleating once, softly, before the knife.
But it is enough.
The black glass ripples like water.
Cracks spread outward in perfect circles, faster than thought.
Where the cracks pass, the glass turns red—blood-red—and begins to sing.
Not words.
A single note, pure and piercing, the note that was struck when the first innocent died and the universe learned what grief is.
Ohya screams.
The note is inside him.
It is inside every nephilim within a thousand miles.
They fall to their knees wherever they are, clutching their heads as the note climbs higher and higher, splitting bone and memory and pride.
Enoch does not cover his ears.
He listens.
He has always listened.
When the note reaches its unbearable peak, the valley explodes upward in a column of crimson light that punches through the clouds and keeps going, up and up, until it strikes the underside of heaven like a spear.
For one heartbeat the entire world goes silent.
Then the echo comes back.
Not Abel's blood this time.
Something greater.
A Voice, deeper than the foundations of the earth, older than the stars, tender as a mother and terrible as an army with banners.
It speaks one sentence that is not a sentence, because sentences have beginnings and ends, and this has neither.
The Voice simply is.
And what it is, is mercy wrapped in judgment.
Ohya hears it.
He drops the club.
The cedar trunk shatters into a thousand pieces, each piece sprouting green leaves before it hits the ground.
The giant falls to his knees.
Not in defeat.
In recognition.
He is weeping.
Not the tears of a monster.
The tears of a child who has just remembered he was once an angel.
Enoch walks forward until he stands directly in front of the weeping giant.
He reaches up—has to stand on tiptoe—and places his burning right hand against Ohya's forehead.
The word בְּרֵאשִׁית sinks into the brass skin like a seal into wax.
Ohya's scream this time is not pain.
It is birth.
The giant's body begins to shrink, fold in on itself, brass skin flaking away to reveal something underneath—something small and trembling and winged.
When it is over, a child no older than Enoch kneels on the glass, naked, glowing, six wings folded tight against his back in terror.
He is beautiful.
He is terrified.
He is forgiven.
Enoch kneels too, so their eyes are level.
"What is your name?" he asks gently.
The child-angel whispers a name that burns the air.
Enoch smiles.
"That is a good name. Go home."
He points upward, where the column of crimson light still climbs.
The child-angel looks, and for the first time since the rebellion, he sees the gates of heaven standing open.
He begins to cry again, but now they are tears of joy so fierce they ignite the air around him.
He spreads his six wings—small now, trembling—and rises.
Higher and higher, faster than thought, until he is only a spark of light disappearing into the wound the Voice opened.
The column of light collapses.
The valley is quiet again.
The black glass is clear now, reflecting the stars like a mirror.
Enoch stands alone.
Behind him, the clans are running toward him, shouting, weeping, falling to their knees.
Methuselah reaches him first.
The old man—nine hundred and sixty-nine years old—drops to the ground and tries to kiss his grandson's feet.
Enoch stops him.
"Stand up, Grandfather. The night is not over."
He turns and looks north, toward Mount Hermon, where two hundred Watchers have just watched one of their own sons redeemed by a thirteen-year-old boy.
Semjaza is no longer smiling.
Enoch raises his right hand.
The word בְּרֵאשִׁית flares once, bright as a second sun.
And across the entire earth, every nephilim, every giant, every child of the Watchers, feels the echo of Abel's blood and the greater echo of the Voice that answered it.
Some weep.
Some rage.
Some begin the long, terrible journey toward repentance.
Most do not.
But all of them now know one thing with absolute certainty:
The boy is coming.
And when he does, the world will never be the same.
Far above, in the Seventh Heaven, the redeemed angel—once Ohya—stands trembling before the Throne.
The Lamb reaches out and touches the place where the word still burns on his forehead.
"Welcome home," the Lamb says.
And the angel weeps again, because he finally remembers what home feels like.
Back in the Valley of Siddim, Enoch closes his hand.
The word fades, but the scar remains.
He turns and begins the long walk home.
Behind him, the clear glass begins to sprout lilies where no lilies have ever grown before.
By morning the entire valley will be a garden.
By nightfall the nephilim will come to burn it.
They will fail.
But that is still years away.
Tonight there is only a thirteen-year-old boy walking south beneath a sky that has learned, for the second time, what it means to hope.
And in his right palm, hidden beneath the sleeve of his patched linen tunic, the scar of the first word ever written still glows softly, like a promise kept warm against the coming winter.
To be continued…