Year 687 After Creation – Enoch is sixty-five years old.
The world is learning how to kill itself beautifully.
In the valleys beneath the two cedar trees that now pierce the clouds like green lances, the children of Cain have built a city of bronze and star-iron called Shulon. Its walls are mirrors that reflect not the viewer but the viewer's death. Its streets are paved with the polished skulls of the innocent. Its forges never sleep.
At the heart of Shulon stands the Forbidden Forge, a pit of white fire sunk deep into the earth, fed by rivers of molten star-metal torn from the bones of fallen meteors. Above it hangs a hammer the length of a ship's mast, suspended on chains of adamant.
The hammer is named Mahalath, which means "sickness unto death." It has never been swung by human hands.
Until tonight.
Azazel, once the brightest teacher of the heavenly host, now the chief artificer of the rebellion, stands at the edge of the pit. His wings are gone, burned away in the second binding, but his beauty is undiminished, only sharpened into something predatory. His eyes are black from rim to rim, pupils dilated with the joy of ruin.
Around him stand seven master-smiths of the line of Tubal-Cain, their faces hidden behind masks of beaten gold shaped like screaming suns.
They have spent thirty-four years preparing this night.
They have melted the crowns of murdered kings. They have mixed the blood of virgins with filings of star-iron. They have sung the forbidden songs that unmake the music of creation.
Tonight they will forge the first true weapons of the final war.
Azazel lifts his hand.
The hammer Mahalath begins to descend, slow as doom.
Far away, on the highest branch of the second cedar, Enoch sits cross-legged, quill blazing in his right hand, the book of fire open on his lap.
He has been sitting here for seven days without food, water, or sleep.
The ravens of starlight perch around him in perfect silence.
He is writing the moment before it happens.
He is writing the refusal of mercy.
He is writing the names of the seven smiths, and the names of their children, and the names of the cities that will drown because of what is about to be born in the forge.
His tears fall upward, becoming new stars that immediately go dark.
When the hammer strikes the anvil for the first time, the sound is not sound.
It is the death-cry of innocence itself.
The white fire in the pit turns black.
From its heart rises the first sword.
It is perfect.
Longer than a man, thin as a thought, black as the space between stars, yet it drinks light the way a sponge drinks blood.
Runes crawl across its surface, runes that were never meant to be read by mortal eyes.
Azazel takes it in his bare hand.
The sword sings, a note so high and sharp it shatters every mirror in Shulon.
The seven smiths fall to their knees, weeping with pride.
Azazel names the blade Qayin, after the first murderer.
Then he teaches the smiths the second secret.
Armor.
They forge breastplates that turn the wearer invisible to angels.
They forge helms that let the wearer see the true names of men and unmake them with a word.
They forge gauntlets that can crush a mountain.
All night the hammer falls.
All night Enoch writes.
By dawn, seven hundred and seventy-seven weapons of the end have been born.
Azazel lifts Qayin above his head.
"Let the age of iron begin," he proclaims.
And across the earth, every child wakes screaming.
In the cedar tree, Enoch closes the book of fire.
The quill becomes a sword again.
He stands.
The ravens rise with him like a storm of living light.
He looks toward Shulon and speaks one sentence that carries on the wind to every corner of the world:
"It is enough."
Then he descends.
Not walking this time.
Falling.
Like living lightning.
The cedar tree blazes behind him as he falls, a pillar of white fire that can be seen from the ends of the earth.
He lands in the heart of Shulon, directly in front of the Forbidden Forge.
The mirrors that line the streets shatter at his coming.
The skull-paved streets crack and bleed.
The seven smiths see him and try to flee.
They do not make it three steps.
Enoch raises the sword-that-was-a-quill.
He does not strike.
He simply speaks their true names, the names written in the Lamb's book before the foundation of the world.
One by one the smiths fall, not dead, but asleep.
A sleep that will last until the day the sea gives up its dead.
Azazel alone remains.
He holds Qayin in both hands now, blade pointed at Enoch's heart.
"You are too late, scribe," he says, and his voice is almost gentle. "The weapons are forged. The war is coming. Your precious mercy has failed."
Enoch looks at the black sword.
He looks at Azazel's empty eyes.
He looks at the sleeping smiths who will never wake to see the consequences of their pride.
"No," he says softly. "Mercy has not failed. It has been refused."
He steps forward.
Azazel swings Qayin in a perfect arc that should unmake reality itself.
The black blade meets the white sword.
There is no clash.
The black blade simply ceases.
It does not break.
It is unmade, as though it never was.
Qayin becomes smoke that screams as it disperses.
Azazel staggers back, hands empty, eyes wide with something that might be the beginning of fear.
Enoch does not pursue.
He walks past the fallen angel to the edge of the Forbidden Forge.
The black fire still burns, hungry.
Enoch raises his left hand, the one without the scar, and dips it into the fire.
The fire does not burn him.
He pulls out a single coal, no larger than a child's heart.
It is warm, not hot.
He closes his fist around it.
When he opens his hand again, the coal has become a seed.
A seed of living light.
He kneels and presses the seed into the skull-paved street.
The ground trembles.
From the seed grows a third cedar tree, faster than thought, taller than the forge, taller than the city, taller than the sky.
Its roots tear the Forbidden Forge apart from beneath.
Its branches pierce the clouds and keep going.
The black fire dies with a sound like a dying god.
Azazel watches, motionless.
When the tree stops growing, its highest needle brushes the gates of heaven.
Enoch turns to the fallen angel.
"You taught men to make swords," he says. "I will teach them to make ploughshares."
He touches Azazel's forehead with the same hand that held the seed.
Light pours in.
Azazel screams.
Not in pain.
In memory.
He remembers the day he stood before the Throne and taught the seraphim new songs.
He remembers the Lamb smiling at him.
He remembers choosing to forget.
The scream goes on and on until it becomes a sob.
Azazel falls to his knees.
The third cedar tree begins to sing.
Not the Sanctus this time.
Something older.
The song the morning stars sang when the cornerstone of the world was laid.
Azazel weeps like a child.
Enoch kneels beside him.
He does not speak.
He simply waits.
After a long time, Azazel lifts his ruined face.
"Take me back," he whispers.
Enoch shakes his head, not in refusal, but in sorrow.
"It is not mine to give."
He stands.
The ravens of starlight descend and form a circle around the weeping angel.
They will guard him until the day the Father sends for him.
Whether that day brings chains or healing, even Enoch does not know.
He turns and begins to walk out of Shulon.
Behind him the city begins to fall, not in fire, but in flowers.
Every skull in the streets becomes a lily.
Every mirror becomes a pool of still water reflecting the true sky.
Every weapon forged in the pit rusts to dust that becomes soil.
By the time Enoch reaches the gates, Shulon is no longer a city.
It is a garden.
And in its center stands the third cedar, roots drinking from the place where the Forbidden Forge once burned.
Azazel remains on his knees beneath its branches, weeping, guarded by ravens of starlight, waiting for a mercy he no longer believes he deserves.
Enoch does not look back.
He walks south, toward the clans of Seth, toward the long years that remain.
In his right hand the sword has become a quill again.
He is already writing the next chapter:
And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them…
But he does not write the end of the story.
That is still being decided, one broken heart at a time.
High above, in the Seventh Heaven, the Lamb looks at the Father.
The Father nods.
And somewhere, beneath the third cedar, Azazel hears the echo of that nod and weeps harder.
Because mercy is still speaking.
And for the first time in ten thousand years, he is listening.
To be continued…