Down Through Seven Earths to the Coiled Leviathan

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The Hand That Pressed the Waters Down

The waters had already filled everything when they were told to go down. There was no room left for them anywhere. They lay over the face of the deep, one water pressed against another, with nowhere left to rise.

Then the hand of God opened above them, the same hand that will one day open over the graves and call the dead up out of the dust, and the waters fled. They fell away from the light. They went down past the ground men would one day walk, and down past the ground beneath that, and kept falling, because a boundary had been set and the water had to find its floor.

Down Past the Chasm of Tohu and Bohu

They passed the earth where men would walk. Its name is Heled, and it does not know it is only the top of a stack. Below it gapes a chasm, and the chasm carries a name older than any ground: Tohu and Bohu, the emptiness and the waste, the unformed dark that was there before anything was shaped. On the far side of that void lies another earth, Tebel, with its own creatures and its own rules, and past Tebel stretch seas no eye has ever measured.

Seven earths in all, one riding above the next, each with its own character and its own work, and over the whole tower vault seven heavens, the highest of them fastened to the very arm of God. The waters fell through the tiers of this hidden house, past shelf after shelf of world, until they reached the last floor, the deepest and darkest, where the light of the seventh heaven never comes. There they pooled. There they were bound. And there something was already waiting for them.

The Beast Coiled in the Lowest Deep

At the bottom of everything coils Leviathan.

It is not a fish and not a serpent, though it wears the shape of both. It is a primordial beast so vast that the lowest sea is only its bed, and when it shifts, the waters shudder up through all seven earths. Its scales lie across its back like overlapping shields, and no metal ever forged will bite them. It has waited in the dark since the fifth day, when the deep was still young, and it has never once seen the sun.

The One Flaw the Deep Was Built to Hold

A creature that size, in a world that neatly ordered, should be the whole of the story. But Leviathan carries one flaw, and that flaw is why the deep was dug so deep.

It stinks. The smell that lifts off the beast is so foul that were it ever to reach the gardens of the righteous, were a single breath of it to drift into Paradise, the whole place would turn unlivable and the blessed would have to flee their own reward. All the sweetness of the world to come could be spoiled by the reek of one monster. So the beast is held where its stench can ruin nothing, sealed under the seven earths, walled behind the waters, chained in the one place far enough down that its breath never rises to foul the living or the saved.

The same hand that shut the waters in the deep opens again over the world above, and when it does the rain comes down. The sages weighed that falling rain and found it as heavy as the raising of the dead, for the rain is poured out for man and beast together, for Israel and for the nations, and even the wild animals of the field lift their heads when they hear it and go searching for what it brings. Water that buries a monster in the dark also feeds the living, and the hand that does both is the hand that will one day open the graves.

Salted and Waiting for the End of Days

Because there is an end coming, and the beast has a part in it.

The female Leviathan is already dead. She was killed long ago and salted at once, brined and packed away, kept fresh in the deep for a feast that has not yet been served. The male still lives, coiled and waiting. When the last days arrive, God will call the angels down to kill him. They will come armed, and the moment the beast turns its eyes on them they will scatter. They will try again with swords, and the swords will turn to straw against its hide. They will throw darts and stones, and every one will bounce away. In the end the angels will give up and climb back out of the dark.

So God will set two monsters against each other. Behemot, the great land-beast, will be brought down to face Leviathan, and the two will tear into one another until both lie still. Behemot will fall to a single blow of the sea-beast's fin. Leviathan will die from one lash of Behemot's tail. And then the reek that harmed nothing while the beast was chained will matter no longer, because now the flesh is wanted.

The righteous will sit down to eat it. God will stretch the monster's skin into tents to shelter them while they feast, and each will receive a portion measured to his merit, and no one will envy his neighbor, because no one will be handed less than he earned. Whatever skin is left will be pulled taut over Jerusalem like a canopy, and it will shine, and its light will reach the ends of the earth. Whatever flesh remains will be given out among the rest of the world and sold in its markets. The monster hidden at the bottom of creation, salted in the dark so its stench would spoil nothing, becomes at the last the meal that feeds everyone.