Year 622 after the making of Adam.
The night itself is bleeding.
Two moons, one silver, one the color of a fresh bruise, hang low enough that the tallest obsidian spires of the Cainite capital Hanok scrape their undersides and come away wet with starlight. Between those moons, a wound has opened in the fabric of the heavens: a thin, vertical slash leaking crimson light that drips upward instead of down, as though gravity has forgotten its purpose.
On the plains east of the city, where the descendants of Seth still herd long-haired oxen beneath trees whose fruit glows soft aquamarine, a woman is giving birth in a hut made of river reeds and woven starlight vines.
Her name is Edna. Her husband, Methuselah, ninth from Adam, stands outside the door with his face turned to the wound in the sky. He is nine hundred years old and looks thirty-five, except for his eyes, which have seen too many funerals.
Inside, three midwives have already fled.
They ran screaming that the unborn child was singing in a language that made their wombs ache with sudden, impossible barrenness. They swore the baby's heartbeat sounded like bronze war-drums beneath the earth.
Only one woman remains: an ancient crone named Zillah, last living daughter of Lamech the Murderer, who once boasted he would be avenged seventy-sevenfold. She alone is unafraid, because she has nothing left to lose.
Edna's scream finally comes, not pain, but triumph.
The reed roof of the hut bursts into white fire that does not consume. The oxen outside fall to their knees. Every glowing fruit on every tree detonates into silent golden fireworks that spell, for one heartbeat, a single word across the sky in the tongue the angels spoke before they learned silence:
QADOSH
Then the word collapses into ordinary starlight again, and a newborn's cry splits the night like the first trumpet of the Last Day.
Zillah lifts the child.
He is impossibly heavy, as though carved from the heart of a mountain. His skin is the warm brown of desert stone at dawn, but beneath it moves living light, gold veins pulsing in time with a heart that already knows its own ending. His hair is white, not the white of age, but the white of lightning frozen mid-flash. And his eyes…
His eyes are open.
Not the milky, unfocused gaze of a newborn. These eyes are ancient, terrible, tender. They are looking straight past Zillah, past the reed walls, past the bruised moons, past the wound in heaven itself, into a place that has not yet been given a name.
The baby reaches up with one tiny fist and touches Zillah's weathered cheek.
Every murder she ever committed, every child she drowned in the days when Cain's seed still ruled the world, every lie she told to save her own skin, flashes across her mind in perfect detail.
She falls to her knees weeping, not from guilt, but from mercy.
Edna, exhausted, radiant, laughs through tears.
"What is his name?" Zillah whispers.
"Enoch," Edna answers, voice raw but steady. "Dedicated. Consecrated. Set apart."
The child turns his head, slowly, deliberately, toward the open door where Methuselah still stands silhouetted against the bleeding sky.
Father and son lock eyes.
Methuselah feels the weight of nine centuries fall away like burnt paper. He sees, in that single glance, the entire future: cities of crystal and cities of salt, giants taller than mountains, a flood that will unmake the world, a child who will walk into heaven without tasting death, and, far beyond even that, a Tree on a hill outside Jerusalem dripping blood that sings the same note this infant is singing now.
Methuselah staggers forward, drops to his knees in the dust, and for the first time in nine hundred years, he prays out loud.
"Lord God of my father Adam, of Seth who walked with You in the cool of the garden, of Enosh who first called on Your Name when men began to multiply, behold Your servant has seen the consolation of the world."
The baby smiles.
It is not a newborn's smile.
It is the smile of someone who has already read the last page of history and found it good.
Outside, the wound in the sky closes with a sound like a thousand harps snapping at once.
The two moons fade to ordinary silver.
And somewhere, impossibly far above, on the crystal battlements of the Seventh Heaven, the Archangel Michael lowers his flaming sword a fraction and whispers to the seraphim around the Throne:
"The Scribe is born."
But that is still three hundred and sixty-five years away.
Tonight, there is only a hut smelling of blood and frankincense, a mother laughing, a father weeping, an old murderer redeemed by a touch, and a child whose first lullaby is the heartbeat of the cosmos learning how to hope again.
Far to the west, on the frozen peak of Mount Hermon where no human foot has ever trod, two hundred Watcher angels in armor forged from the bones of dead stars feel the echo of that heartbeat inside their immortal ribs.
Their captain, Semjaza, tallest and brightest of them all, six wings of white fire folded tight against the wind, closes his eyes and tastes something entirely new.
Longing.
He opens his eyes again, and they are no longer the pure gold of heaven.
There is a shadow in them now, thin as a blade.
"Soon," he says, and the mountain beneath him cracks from crown to root.
The other Watchers echo the word, two hundred voices braided into one.
"Soon."
None of them yet understand that the child born tonight beneath the bleeding sky will be the one who writes their names in a book that cannot be erased, the one who will stand beside the Throne when the floodgates open, the one who will watch them chained beneath rivers of fire for ten thousand generations.
Tonight, they only know that something has begun.
And in the reed hut, Enoch, seven minutes old, closes his golden eyes for the first time and dreams of wheels within wheels, of eyes on every rim, of a Man upon a throne whose face is too bright to look upon directly, and of a Lamb standing as though slain.
When he wakes, the first word he will ever speak, at the tender age of three days, will be a Name.
But that is still three days away.
For now, the blood of Adam, thinned by centuries of violence and regret, thickens again in the veins of this child.
And somewhere, deep beneath the roots of the world, the serpent who once bruised a heel feels a sudden, impossible pressure on the crown of his head.
He hisses, coils tighter, and waits.
He has waited a long time.
He can wait a little longer.
The night settles.
The stars return to their ordinary courses.
And Enoch, dedicated, consecrated, set apart, sleeps in his mother's arms while the angels who have not yet fallen sing a lullaby in a language that will one day be called Hebrew, and Latin, and every tongue that will ever rise to praise.
The song has only one line, repeated until dawn:
Holy, holy, holy.
To be continued…