"From blood was born the first stone, and from grief, the first walls."
Cain wandered the wild earth, a fugitive bearing the curse of his crime.
The world he walked was untamed — thick forests cloaked in mist, mountains like jagged knives tearing the sky, rivers blackened by sorrow.
Every step echoed with the memory of his brother's blood.
Every tree whispered his guilt.
Every shadow seemed to reach for him.
But Cain was not slain by beasts nor devoured by the night.
The mark on his flesh burned, a shield and a chain.
Time, as it does, moved like a slow river.
And Cain found a barren valley — desolate, cracked, and empty.
There, he stopped.
There, he built.
With bloodied hands, Cain drove stone into the earth.
He fashioned walls to keep out the wilderness.
He hewed towers to claw at the heavens.
He paved streets from the bones of the land.
He named it Enoch, after his son — the firstborn of exile.
And so the first city was born — not from joy, not from hope, but from fear and guilt.
Others came.
The cursed and the desperate.
The lost and the angry.
Those who had heard whispers in the night — of a place where Heaven's gaze was dim, where the mark of the Creator faded into myth.
They knelt to Cain as a king of broken things.
And Cain taught them.
He taught them to forge iron and bronze.
He taught them to build altars to gods they crafted with their own hands — gods of stone, of hunger, of power.
The city grew.
It stank of smoke, blood, and ambition.
The streets twisted like veins.
The towers loomed like rotten teeth.
The people laughed and killed and wept under a sun that seemed to grow dimmer with every passing year.
In Hell, the Princes watched.
Beelzebub, lord of corruption, whispered into the dreams of rulers, urging them to hoard and dominate.
And Lucifer — once Morning Star — set upon his black throne, smiling without joy.
"See," he said to the younger twin beside him.
"See what clay does when left to its own devices."
The younger twin's voice rumbled like a dying star:
"They are but mirrors of us... broken in different ways."
Back in Enoch, Cain aged but did not die.
His life stretched unnaturally long, the curse woven into his veins like molten iron.
He watched as his descendants grew crueler, hungrier.
They built new cities.
They chained the wild.
They bent the earth to their will.
But for all their building, for all their forging, a hollow core gnawed at them.
An emptiness no tower could fill.
Murder became a ritual.
Greed a virtue.
Despair a mother's lullaby.
One night, Cain stood atop the height tower of Enoch.
He gazed at the broken star, at the heavens that no longer sang to him.
"Was this my punishment?" he whispered to the void.
"Or was this my destiny?"
The winds howled.
The city below roared with the sound of a thousand sins being born.
Cain closed his eyes, and for a moment, he thought he heard his brother's voice on the wind.
Why, Cain...?
But when he opened his eyes, there was only the city — vast, bloated, and hungry — stretching out into the horizon like a living thing.
Thus was committed the Seventh Sin — Prideful Dominion, the conquest of earth by the cursed hand of man.