Year 652 After Creation – Enoch is thirty years old.
The world has a new capital, and its name is a blasphemy.
Hanok, City of the Unchained.
Founded by Jared, Enoch's own grandfather, in the year Enoch was born, it was meant to be a refuge for the Sethite clans who refused to bow to the nephilim. Instead it has become the throne of the Watchers' rebellion on earth.
Seven concentric walls of black glass, each taller than the last, rise like the petals of a poisonous flower. At the center stands the Tower of Descent, a spiral of star-iron and human bone that pierces the sky so high its peak is lost in permanent storm-clouds. Every dawn the Watchers descend its steps in full armor, wings blazing, to walk among men as gods.
Tonight the city celebrates the Feast of the First Descent.
The streets are rivers of wine and blood. Music that makes the soul sick pours from bronze horns thirty cubits long. Nephilim giants, drunk on fermented starlight, wrestle in arenas where the losers are eaten alive. Women crowned with living serpents dance naked on altars that scream when touched.
And in the highest palace of the inner ring, Semjaza sits on a throne carved from a single piece of fallen star.
He is beautiful the way a drawn sword is beautiful.
Six wings of white fire folded behind him, face perfect, eyes ancient and cold. Around him the two hundred Watchers stand in ranks, masks of gold and obsidian hiding everything but their hunger.
They are waiting for a guest.
Enoch is coming.
He has been walking for seven days without food or water, barefoot, wearing the same patched linen tunic he wore at thirteen. The scar-word in his right palm has never stopped burning.
Every mile closer to Hanok the ground has tried to stop him: Rivers rose in walls of black water. Forests grew thorns that bled when cut. A legion of nephilim barred the final road, only to fall weeping when Enoch looked at them and spoke the name of the Lamb.
Now the outer gate looms before him.
A hundred cubits high, forged from the bones of leviathans dragged from the primordial sea, it is carved with every forbidden sigil the Watchers taught mankind. The guards, half-breed sons of angels, level spears of star-iron at his chest.
Enoch does not slow.
He raises his right hand.
The scar-word flares.
The gates scream as every sigil burns away in white fire.
The guards drop their weapons and fall to their knees, covering their eyes.
Enoch walks through the smoking ruin without breaking stride.
The city sees him coming.
The music falters.
The dancing stops.
Even the nephilim giants pause mid-bite.
Because the man walking down the main avenue is glowing.
Not metaphorically.
His skin is translucent, veins of living gold pulsing beneath. His eyes are twin furnaces. His white hair floats as though underwater. And every step he takes leaves behind a footprint of white lilies that burst into flame the instant his heel lifts.
The crowd parts like water before a prow.
Some fall to worship.
Some flee screaming.
Some simply stand and weep, because they have just remembered they were made for something better than this.
Enoch does not look left or right.
He walks straight to the Tower of Descent.
The great doors, tall enough for a nephilim to enter without stooping, swing open of their own accord.
Inside, the spiral stair ascends forever.
Enoch begins to climb.
Each step is a memory.
Step one: the day he was born and the moons bled. Step seven: the night the stars spoke. Step thirteen: the valley where Abel's blood still sang. Step thirty: the moment he understood that mercy and judgment are the same wound seen from different angles.
He climbs for seven hours.
No one tries to stop him.
They cannot.
The Watchers themselves stand aside as he passes, wings folded tight, unable to meet his eyes.
At the summit is a single circular chamber open to the storm.
Semjaza waits alone on his throne.
The other Watchers have been dismissed.
This is between the first rebel and the first scribe.
Lightning forks across the sky, illuminating them both.
Semjaza rises.
He is taller than the chamber, wings fully spread now, filling the air with the scent of ozone and distant snow.
"Welcome, little brother," he says, and his voice is honey over broken glass. "I have waited thirty years for this conversation."
Enoch stops ten paces away.
"I know," he answers. "I wrote it before you spoke it."
Semjaza smiles.
"Then you know how it ends."
"I know how it begins."
The Watcher king spreads his arms.
"Look around you, Enoch. This is freedom. We cast off the tyranny of the Eternal One. We took flesh, we took wives, we taught men to be gods. And you, you would chain us again with your words and your weeping blood-guilt?"
Enoch lifts his right hand.
The scar-word blazes so brightly the storm clouds above ignite.
"I am not here to chain you," he says quietly. "I am here to offer you the same choice Ohya was offered."
Semjaza's smile falters.
"Ohya was weak," he hisses. "A child playing at rebellion. I am the morning's first-born son. I stood at the right hand of—"
"You stood," Enoch interrupts, voice suddenly sharp as a sword drawn across stone, "and then you fell. Like lightning. Like a star that forgot its orbit. But even fallen stars can be gathered back into the Father's hand if they will only repent."
Semjaza's wings flare, white fire turning black at the edges.
"I will never repent."
The words tear reality.
The chamber floor cracks.
The storm above becomes a maelstrom.
Enoch does not flinch.
"Then you will be bound," he says, and there is sorrow in it so deep it has weight. "Not by me. By the word you rejected before the world was made."
He opens his hand fully.
The scar-word rises out of his palm, growing, expanding, becoming a book of living fire that hovers between them.
Its pages turn though there is no wind.
On every page is written the true name of every Watcher who fell, written in the blood of the Lamb before the Lamb was slain.
Semjaza sees his own name.
It burns.
He screams, a sound that shatters every window in Hanok below.
Chains of white fire erupt from the book, not forged by any angel, but spoken into being by the Word Himself.
They wrap around Semjaza's wings, his arms, his throat.
He fights.
He is stronger than mountains, older than continents.
But the chains were singing before he was.
He cannot break what was never made.
One by one, across the earth, the other two hundred Watchers feel the chains snap shut around their own hearts.
Some weep.
Some curse.
All of them fall to their knees, wherever they are, bound by a word they cannot unsay.
In the chamber, Semjaza is on his knees now, wings pinned, face contorted in rage and unspeakable grief.
Enoch walks forward until he stands over the bound angel.
He kneels so their eyes are level.
"I am sorry," he whispers, and means it with every atom of his being.
Semjaza spits star-fire that turns to ash before it touches Enoch's face.
"You will watch your world drown for this," he snarls. "The floodgates will open, and every child you love will choke on the wrath of the One you serve."
Enoch's eyes fill with tears that do not fall.
They hang in the air like diamonds.
"I know," he says. "I have already seen it. I have already wept for it. But even the flood will not be the end."
He reaches out and touches Semjaza's forehead, exactly where the Lamb touched Ohya.
The chains tighten, not in cruelty, but in love too fierce to be gentle.
Semjaza screams one last time, and the scream becomes a child's sob.
Then the floor opens beneath him, a pit of darkness lined with eyes that weep fire.
The chains drag him down.
The other Watchers follow, pulled by invisible cords into prisons beneath the earth, beneath the rivers, beneath the mountains that will one day be called Ardis, Hermon, and Dudael.
The pit closes.
The storm ends as suddenly as it began.
Silence falls over Hanok, City of the Unchained.
Enoch stands alone in the empty chamber.
The book of fire returns to his hand, shrinking back into the scar.
He is crying now, openly, the tears falling upward into the clearing sky.
Below, the city is already beginning to burn, not with natural fire, but with the white flame of purification that consumes only what is not real.
The Tower of Descent cracks from crown to root.
Enoch turns and begins the long walk down.
He does not look back.
Behind him, Hanok burns for seven days and seven nights.
When the fire dies, nothing remains but a single cedar tree growing where the throne once stood.
Its needles are made of starlight.
Its roots drink from the chains that bind the Watchers beneath the earth.
And carved into its trunk, in letters that will never fade, is the first line of the book Enoch will one day dictate to his son:
The words of the blessing of Enoch, wherewith he blessed the elect and righteous, who will be living in the day of tribulation, when all the wicked and godless are to be removed.
Far above, in the Seventh Heaven, the Lamb looks at the Father and nods once.
The Father smiles, the smile that was before the mountains were brought forth.
And somewhere, in the darkness beneath the earth, Semjaza hears the echo of that smile and weeps for the first time since the rebellion.
Because even in chains, he remembers what mercy feels like.
And that is the worst punishment of all.
To be continued…