Enoch's Ascent to the Crystal Palace and the Chained Stars

Click for full size

The Angel Comes for a Living Man

Enoch was still breathing when heaven opened under his feet. He had not died. He had walked with God until the ground simply let him go.

An angel caught his wrist. Michael, chief of the heavenly host, does not usually escort men made of dust, and here he was, hauling one upward past the first sky, then the second, climbing heaven after heaven while the air turned colder and thinner. Enoch counted the levels until counting stopped meaning anything. At the top of everything waited Aravot, the seventh and highest heaven, the roof above every other roof.

"Do not be afraid," Michael told him. A living man had never stood this high. Below them the lower heavens closed like doors, one after another, until only the highest was left open.

The Palace Built Entirely of Crystal

At the summit stood a palace, and the whole of it was crystal. Not stone dressed to look like crystal. Crystal to the foundations, walls clear as still water, so pure they seemed to hum.

Between the crystals ran fire. Living fire, Enoch would have called it, the kind that gives light without eating what it touches. Tongues of it moved along the seams of the walls. Rivers of the same fire circled the palace like a moat, so that the whole structure sat inside a ring of flame that burned and burned and consumed nothing.

Inside, angels crossed the floor on their errands. Gabriel was there, and Raphael, and Michael at Enoch's shoulder. Past them, on a throne of glory, sat a presence Enoch could not look at directly. The robe was brighter than the sun and whiter than snow. The hair of the head was white and pure, like clean wool. This was the Ancient of Days, and Enoch, a man, stood in a crystal room and watched God take counsel with his angels.

Past the Frayed Edge of the World

Then the angels took him out again, and they did not go back down the way they had come. They carried him to the place where creation stops.

There is an edge. Enoch reached it. The order of things frayed there like the hem of a torn garment, and past the fray there was no floor of earth and no dome of sky, only an abyss that dropped in every direction at once. The smell reached him first, sulfur, thick and sickening. Columns of fire stood in the dark and gave no warmth. Nothing lived. No bird crossed it, no water ran through it. It was a wasteland with no bottom, and it had been made on purpose, as a prison.

The Stars That Missed Their Hour

Enoch saw the prisoners. Seven of them burned in the abyss like mountains on fire, rolling, never resting, tumbling through the dark on and on. He asked what they were. Stars, his guides told him. Seven stars that had not risen when they were commanded to rise, that failed to appear at the hour set for them at the beginning. For that lateness they were bound in the abyss for ten thousand years, and their sentence was not finished.

Others were chained there too. These had once been Watchers, angels posted to watch over the earth. Instead they taught men to slaughter offerings to demons and to bow to them as gods, and they went down after the daughters of men and defiled themselves. Now they lay in the outer dark with the truant stars, angels and lights together, all of them held in the one place where the light of the crystal palace does not reach.

Enoch, still a man, still breathing, looked into the pit that swallows the disobedient of heaven and did not fall in.

The Day That Has No Evening

One thing remained to be shown him, and it was the largest of all.

His guides told him of a day still coming. On that day the whole of creation, everything seen and everything unseen, comes to its end at once. Every creature that ever lived is gathered to be judged, the truant stars and the Watchers and the sons of men alike. When the judgment is finished, time itself is dismissed. The years stop. The months stop. Even the counting of the hours ceases, and zman, time as men live inside it, is over.

What comes after has a name. The great age. A single age with no evening and no morning to divide it, one unbroken expanse with no end. The righteous are gathered into it. They are given the great light of Paradise, a light that cannot be put out, and they live inside it as inside a shelter that will stand when everything else has fallen away. Their own faces shine. Enoch looked at the righteous of the last day, and each of them burned like the sun.

Then Michael brought the living man back down through the heavens to the world that still had years left in it, and Enoch went to tell his sons what waits at the top and at the edge and at the end.