Mahaway Flew Beyond the Firmament to Beg Enoch for Mercy

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The Giants Ate the World Down to Its Bones

Ohya and Hahya were born hungry, and nothing on earth was large enough to fill them. Their father was the Watcher Shemihazah, who had crossed down out of heaven and taken a human wife, and the sons of that crossing grew taller than the cedars and hungrier than the grave. They stripped the grain from the fields and the fruit from the trees. They pulled the great fish out of the sea and the birds out of the air. They ate the sheep and the cattle and the small livestock, and when the herds were gone they ate the creeping things of the ground, and when even those were gone they turned on the people who had watched them do it.

Nothing was ever enough. Not for the giants, not for the giants' own sons. When the last field lay bare the brothers began to fight one another, giant against giant, in blood and by the hand of death. They devoured the knowledge and the wisdom and the mercy out of the world the way they had devoured the grain, until the whole earth was a killing floor with no corner left clean.

Two Brothers Woke Screaming From the Same Dream

Then the dreams came.

Ohya dreamed it first. A tablet was descending out of heaven, vast, covered edge to edge in writing. Hands he could not see were reading the writing aloud, and the words were a roll call of everything that lived, and beside every name stood a mark for its erasure. Water rose in the vision. It climbed over the stripped fields and the cities and the mountains, until there was nothing left to strip and no one left alive to remember that the giants had ever walked the ground.

He woke with the words still burning behind his eyes. Hahya had dreamed the same thing in the same night. So had others. The giants gathered, enormous and shaking, and they quarreled the way frightened things quarrel, each one blaming the next, not one of them able to say what the tablet meant. But every giant among them knew the same thing without being told. The writing was about them. The judgment set down in heaven was aimed at the giants and at their fathers, the Watchers, who had torn open the wall between heaven and earth to make them.

Mahaway Rose on Wings Past the Edge of the Sky

There was one man who could read a dream sent from heaven. His name was Enoch. He had walked with God and been carried up beyond the reach of the world, and he kept the records of heaven open before him. The giants knew of him. If any hand could interpret the tablet, and if there was any mercy left in the height that had written it, it was his.

So they chose a messenger. Mahaway, son of the Watcher Baraq'el, was lighter and swifter than his monstrous kin and could travel where they could not. They sent him up to find the scribe, to lay the dream before him, and to beg him to go before the ones who had written the verdict and plead for it to be torn up.

Mahaway rose on wings. He crossed the whole inhabited world beneath him, the drained fields and the emptied seas, and he flew on past the edge of the sky where the ordinary world runs out. He came at last to the place where Enoch sat among the tablets of heaven, and he set the giants' plea down at his feet. Read the dream. Tell us it does not mean what we fear. Carry our pleading up to the throne that sealed it.

Enoch Broke the Seal and Read the Verdict

Enoch had already been shown the vision, and he did not soften a word of it. He told Mahaway what heaven had revealed to him concerning the giants' petition, and it was a sealed decree with no crack anywhere in it. "It will not be done for you for all the days of eternity," he said, "and this will be the decree."

The verdict fell first on the fathers. A decree had gone out against the Watchers: from that hour they would never return to heaven, never ascend again for all the ages to come. They were bound in the bonds of the earth, chained to the ground they had ruined, until the very last of all the days. And they were not to be spared the sight of what came after. "Before them you will see that all your beloved ones will be destroyed," the decree ran. The sons they had fathered, and everything dear to them, would fall by the sword of destruction while the Watchers looked on, unable to save a single one of them, unable even to speak one word in their defense. They would ask and plead through all the ages, and heaven would not answer.

The Rain That Was Already Falling in Heaven

That was the answer Mahaway had to carry home. No torn tablet. No reprieve. No mercy waiting anywhere above the firmament for the giants or for the fathers who had made them. The Watchers would beg forever from the bonds of the earth, and forever heaven would refuse to hear so much as a word from their mouths.

Their giant sons were already dead men. They stood in the fields they had stripped bare, quarreling over the last of the food, waiting for a rain that had been decided before the first cloud ever formed. Somewhere above them the water was already climbing toward the mark beside each of their names.