Year 653 After Creation – one year after the binding of Semjaza. The world is quieter, but not healed.
The chains beneath the earth sing a low, ceaseless note that only the guilty can hear. Some nights the nephilim wake screaming, clawing at their own faces because the song is inside their bones. Others grow bolder, drunk on the silence of their fathers, believing the war is over and they have won.
They are wrong.
Tonight the sky opens again.
Not with the crimson wound of Enoch's birth, nor with the white fire of judgment, but with a slow, deliberate parting, like silk torn by loving hands.
Two hundred points of light descend from the highest heaven, brighter than any star, moving in perfect formation.
They are not the rebels.
These are the holy Watchers, the ones who never turned, the ones who stood beside Michael when the dragon was cast down.
They wear armor of living dawn, wings of molten gold, faces hidden behind veils of lightning.
At their head flies Uriel, the Flame of God, fourth of the seven who stand before the Throne.
They do not come to fight.
They come to witness.
Because tonight, on the northern slope of Mount Hermon, the final rebellion begins.
A circle of nephilim kings, seven hundred and seventy-seven of the mightiest, has gathered around a black altar made from the fused skulls of ten thousand children.
They have waited a full year for their fathers' chains to rust.
They have waited in vain.
Now they will force the issue.
At the center of the circle stands a woman.
She is mortal, daughter of Cain in the seventh generation, skin pale as moonlight on bone, hair the red of fresh arterial blood. Her name is Naamah, sister of Tubal-Cain, the one who taught men to beat ploughshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears.
She is beautiful the way a drawn blade is beautiful.
And she is singing.
Not in any tongue of earth.
She sings in the language the angels spoke before they learned shame.
The song is an invitation.
The song is a dare.
Come back, fathers. We are ready. Take us. Teach us. Make us gods.
The nephilim kings beat their chests with iron gauntlets, roaring the refrain until the mountain trembles.
High above, Uriel raises one hand.
The holy Watchers halt, wings flaring, forming a perfect ring of light around the peak.
They will not interfere.
Not yet.
They are here to see what mercy will do when it is refused a second time.
On the plain below, Enoch feels the song in his teeth.
He is thirty-one years old, standing on the same hill where he spoke to the stars at seven.
The cedar tree that grew from the cracking of his yes is now taller than any tower ever built by men.
Its branches are full of ravens made of starlight.
They watch with him.
Enoch closes his eyes.
He sees everything.
He sees Naamah lift the knife of star-iron above her own breast.
He sees her cut a perfect circle over her heart and press the wound to the black altar.
He sees the blood run backward, upward, forming a second wound in the sky directly above Hermon.
And he sees the chains beneath the earth begin to bleed.
The song has found a key.
Far beneath the mountain, Semjaza hears his daughter's voice.
His chains loosen, not because they are broken, but because the Father allows it.
Mercy is giving the rebels one final chance to choose.
Semjaza's scream of rage and longing shakes the roots of the world.
Then silence.
Then footsteps.
Two hundred sets of them.
The bound Watchers rise through stone and fire and memory, dragging their chains like wedding garments.
They burst from the peak of Hermon in a pillar of black fire that blots out the stars.
Their wings are ragged now, feathers half-burned, but their beauty is still terrible.
Semjaza lands first, directly in front of Naamah.
She does not kneel.
She smiles.
"Welcome home, Father."
He touches her bleeding heart with one chained hand.
The chains shatter like glass.
All across the earth, two hundred sets of chains shatter at the same moment.
The holy Watchers above do not move.
Uriel's face is stone.
Semjaza spreads his wings, fully restored, white fire turning crimson at the edges.
"My children," he says, and the words are both promise and curse.
The nephilim kings roar in triumph.
They think they have won.
They have only begun to lose.
Because Enoch is already moving.
He walks down the hill, barefoot, linen tunic whipping in the wind of the Watchers' wings.
The starlight ravens fly before him like a vanguard.
Behind him the cedar tree begins to sing the Sanctus in a voice that makes the mountains bow.
Enoch does not run.
He simply walks, and the earth shortens the distance for him.
One moment he is on the hill.
The next he stands at the foot of Hermon, directly beneath the pillar of black fire.
The nephilim see him and laugh.
Naamah sees him and smiles wider.
Semjaza sees him and, for the first time since the rebellion, feels something like fear.
Enoch raises his right hand.
The scar-word is no longer a scar.
It is a sword.
A sword of white fire, longer than a man is tall, made of the same light that clothed Adam before the fall.
He speaks one sentence.
It is not loud.
It is the quietest thing anyone has ever heard.
"Enough."
The word strikes the mountain like the fist of God.
Hermon splits from crown to root.
The black altar explodes into ash.
Naamah's smile freezes.
Semjaza's wings flare in fury.
And the holy Watchers above finally move.
Uriel descends first, sword drawn, a blade of living sunrise.
Behind him the two hundred loyal ones follow, forming a second ring of light that begins to close like a noose.
The rebels realize too late.
This was never about letting them rise again.
This was about letting them choose, freely, openly, before all of heaven and earth, whether to return or to fall forever.
Semjaza looks at Enoch.
Enoch looks back, and there is no hatred in his eyes.
Only sorrow so vast it could drown the world.
Semjaza's wings tremble.
For one heartbeat, one terrible, glorious heartbeat, he almost kneels.
Almost.
Then pride, older than the stars, older than mercy, closes like a fist around his heart.
He turns to his children.
"Fight," he commands.
And the war begins.
Not the war of swords and fire.
The war of choices.
Some Watchers, fewer than twenty, fall to their knees weeping, chains re-forming around them willingly, begging to be taken back.
The rest, Semjaza at their head, spread wings of black fire and charge the closing ring of light.
The holy Watchers meet them without joy.
Swords clash that were never meant to clash.
Light against light.
Brother against brother.
The mountain burns.
The sky burns.
The earth itself burns with grief.
Enoch stands in the center of it all, untouched.
He does not fight.
He weeps.
Every tear that falls becomes a white lily that takes root in the burning stone.
Naamah sees him weeping and laughs.
She lifts the star-iron knife to finish what she began.
Before the blade can fall, a raven made of starlight lands on her wrist.
It looks at her with Enoch's golden eyes.
She screams.
The knife falls from suddenly numb fingers.
Because in that instant she sees what Enoch sees:
Her own death, centuries from now, drowning in the flood she is helping to call down.
Her children's children choking on water that was once mercy.
And farther still, a Woman clothed with the sun standing on the shore of a new world, reaching out a hand she will refuse until it is too late.
Naamah falls to her knees, not in worship, but in terror.
The battle above ends as suddenly as it began.
The loyal Watchers have won, but there is no triumph in their faces.
Only sorrow.
The rebels are bound again, this time in chains that will not break until the great and terrible day of the Lord.
Semjaza is the last to fall.
Uriel's sword is at his throat.
Semjaza looks down at Enoch one final time.
"You could have joined us," he whispers.
Enoch's answer is gentle.
"I never left you."
Semjaza closes his eyes.
The chains take him.
The holy Watchers ascend, carrying their bound brothers with them, some weeping, some cursing, all silent now.
The mountain is quiet.
Only Enoch and Naamah remain.
She is still on her knees, staring at the place where her fathers vanished.
Enoch walks to her.
He kneels so their eyes are level.
She flinches.
He touches her forehead with the same hand that once touched Ohya, once touched Semjaza.
The sword of fire becomes a quill.
He writes one word on her brow in light that does not burn.
The word is her true name, the name she had before the rebellion, the name the Lamb still speaks when He prays for her.
Naamah screams.
Not in pain.
In recognition.
She falls forward, weeping, clawing at the ground.
Enoch stands.
He does not comfort her.
Some wounds only mercy can heal, and mercy has already done its part.
He turns and begins the long walk home.
Behind him, Mount Hermon collapses into itself, burying the black altar forever.
Where it stood, a single cedar tree begins to grow, taller than the first, needles of starlight, roots drinking from the new chains beneath the earth.
By morning the tree will be visible from every corner of the world.
By nightfall the nephilim will come to cut it down.
They will fail.
But that is still years away.
Tonight there is only a thirty-one-year-old man walking south beneath a sky that has learned, for the third time, what it means to mourn.
And in his right hand the sword has become a quill again, already writing the words that will one day be read aloud in every language under heaven:
And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: "Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children…"
The quill does not stop.
It will not stop for another three hundred and thirty-four years.
To be continued…