Year 629 After Creation – Enoch is seven years old.
The world has grown stranger in seven short years.
The Cainite cities now rise like black glass knives into the sky, their walls etched with moving murals of war and lust that change when no one is looking. Bronze foundries burn day and night, vomiting green smoke that coils into the shapes of screaming faces before dissolving. Giants—true nephilim, thirty cubits tall—walk the trade roads with chains of gold around their necks and human slaves carrying their wine cups.
But out on the high grasslands of the Sethite clans, the air is still clean enough that the stars come down at night to listen.
Tonight is the night of the second moon's eclipse.
The bruised moon is sliding across the face of its silver sister, turning the grasslands the color of old blood. Every fire in the camp has been banked low; the elders say the Watchers are hunting again, and light draws them like moths to a corpse-candle.
Enoch does not care.
He is seven years old, barefoot, white-haired, and wearing nothing but a linen tunic the color of sunrise. He has slipped past the watch-fires and the snoring dogs and the anxious mothers who still think they can keep heaven's chosen inside a circle of stones.
He stands alone on the tallest hill for fifty miles, arms spread wide, face tilted to the bleeding sky.
And he is talking.
Not praying—talking—like two old friends who have been apart too long and have a thousand years of gossip to catch up on.
"—and then Grandfather Jared said the rivers used to sing before Cain spilled Abel's blood on them, but I think they still sing, they just learned to whisper so the giants wouldn't hear. Do You remember when the morning stars sang together? I think I remember. I think I was there."
The wind answers him, warm and scented with cedar and distant lightning.
Enoch laughs, the sound bright and sharp as breaking crystal.
"You're teasing me again. You always do that when I get close to something I'm not supposed to know yet."
High above, the eclipse reaches totality.
For one heartbeat the entire world goes darker than the inside of a tomb.
Then the stars ignite.
Not the ordinary stars—these are the real ones, the ones that stood in ranks around the Throne when the foundations of the earth were laid. They burn white-hot, searing after-images into mortal retinas, and every single one of them leans down at once until their light pools on the hilltop like liquid diamond.
Enoch stands in the center of that pool, arms still outstretched, unafraid.
Because the stars are answering him.
Their voices are not words, not as men understand words. They are chords of pure meaning, cascading through his bones like harp strings plucked by invisible hands.
He understands every note.
You were there, little scribe. You stood at the right hand of the Lamb before He was slain. You watched the Father breathe over the face of the waters. You sang the loudest when the cornerstone was laid.
Enoch's knees buckle, but he does not fall. The light holds him up the way water holds a thrown stone for one impossible second before gravity remembers its job.
"I—I don't remember," he whispers, and for the first time in seven years there is fear in his voice. Not fear of pain. Fear of forgetting something too beautiful to lose.
The stars answer with sorrow so vast it has weight.
You will remember when it is time. For now, look.
The pool of starlight rises, folding itself into a single figure taller than the hill, brighter than the eclipsed moons.
It has no face that a child could draw, only a suggestion of eyes like galaxies wheeling inside galaxies, and wings—millions upon millions of wings—each feather a living flame that sings a different note of the eternal Sanctus.
Enoch knows this is not God.
God is higher, deeper, brighter, more terrible and more tender than anything that can stand in front of a seven-year-old boy without annihilating him.
This is only a messenger.
But even a messenger of the seventh rank is enough.
The seraph kneels—actually kneels—so its burning eyes are level with the child's golden ones.
"Enoch bar Methuselah," it says, and its voice is the sound of every bell that will ever ring in every cathedral for the next ten thousand years, all tolling at once. "The Watchers have set their hearts to descend. The daughters of men have become fair in their sight, and they will take them, and the earth will be filled with violence. You are chosen to walk a path no son of Adam has walked before. Will you accept the weight?"
Enoch looks past the seraph, past the eclipsed moons, past the thin skin of the world, and for one terrifying instant he sees what is coming:
Cities burning with cold green fire. Women screaming as nephilim tear their children in half to drink the marrow. His own great-great-grandson building a wooden box while the sky itself weeps blood. And farther still—farther than any child should ever have to see—a Hill, a Tree, Three Nails, and a Mother standing beneath them with seven swords in her heart.
He is seven years old, and he already knows the price of everything.
The seraph waits.
Enoch closes his eyes.
When he opens them again, they are no longer the eyes of a child.
"Yes," he says.
The single word cracks the hill beneath his feet from crown to root.
The eclipse ends.
The ordinary stars return, dim and distant and ashamed of their own smallness.
The seraph is gone, but its after-image burns behind Enoch's eyelids like a brand.
He does not cry.
Instead he sits cross-legged on the cracked hilltop and begins to speak—not to the sky this time, but to the earth itself.
He speaks in a language that will not be invented for another two thousand years.
He speaks the first line of the first book he will ever write.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…"
Far away, on the peak of Mount Hermon, Semjaza feels the hill crack beneath a seven-year-old's yes.
He smiles, and the smile is beautiful and horrible.
"It has begun," he tells the two hundred.
They unfurl their wings—six each, twelve thousand wings total—and the wind of their beating snuffs out every star between Hermon and the grasslands.
Black feathers begin to fall like the first snow of a winter that will last ten generations.
Back on the hill, Enoch finishes the first sentence he will ever write in the book that will one day be called the Book of the Watchers.
He does not know how to write yet.
That does not matter.
The words burn themselves into the air in front of him, letters of white fire hanging like lanterns.
He reaches out and touches the first word—בְּרֵאשִׁית—and it sinks into his palm like a coal.
He does not flinch.
Instead he stands, turns, and begins the long walk home.
Behind him, the cracked hill is already sprouting a single cedar tree where no cedar has ever grown before.
Its needles are made of starlight.
Its roots drink from the crack that runs all the way to the foundations of the world.
By morning the tree will be taller than any tower in the Cainite cities.
By nightfall the nephilim will come to cut it down.
They will fail.
But that is still years away.
Tonight there is only a seven-year-old boy walking home beneath a sky that has learned, for the first time since Eden, what it means to be afraid of a child.
And in his right palm, hidden beneath the sleeve of his linen tunic, a single word burns like a secret sun:
בְּרֵאשִׁית
In the beginning.
To be continued…