The Giants Dreamed of the Flood and Enoch Refused Them

The giants had eaten the world down to its bones, and still they were hungry. Ohya and Hahya, the towering sons of the Watcher Shemihazah, had stripped the fields of every grain and the orchards of every fruit. They swallowed the cattle and the sheep and the small livestock, the birds out of the sky and the great fish out of the deep, the creeping things off the ground and the herds off the hills. When the herds ran out, they turned on each other.

Brother against brother, the giant offspring of heaven and earth waded in blood. Their fists came down like rockslides. The ground drank what spilled. And the Nephilim opened their mouths over what was left of creation and found that even an emptied world was not enough to fill them.

The Tablet Came Down From Heaven

Then the dreams began.

Ohya, the strongest of them, the one whose shoulders blocked the sun, lay down in the dark and was not allowed to rest. A tablet descended out of heaven, vast and written over with letters. Hands he could not see unrolled it. A voice he could not place began to read aloud what was carved there.

The reading was a death sentence. All flesh would be wiped from the face of the earth. The cattle and the wild creatures, the birds and the seed-bearing plants, the grain and the trees, every man and every woman, all of it scrubbed away by water. And among the names of the condemned were the names of the giants themselves, and behind them the names of their fathers, the Watchers who had left their stations in heaven and crossed into the beds of mortal women.

Ohya woke shaking. He told the dream to Hahya, and Hahya could not make it small. They carried it to the gathering of the giants, and the giants who had never feared anything stood in a circle and were afraid. This was not a rival to crush or a herd to devour. This was a verdict, already written, already descending. No arm among them was long enough to reach the hand that held the tablet.

They Sent Mahaway Across the World

There was one mortal who spoke with the angels and read the meaning behind dreams. His name was Enoch, and he had walked out of human company long ago to live among messengers of God at the ends of the earth.

The giants chose a runner. Mahaway, son of the Watcher Baraq'el, lighter than his monstrous cousins and built for distance, lifted into the air. He crossed the inhabited world the way a bird crosses a field, over mountains and over the waters, until the land of the living thinned out behind him and the dwelling of Enoch rose ahead.

He came down before the old man and gave him the message of the giants. Read our dream. Tell us what the tablet says. Carry our petition up to heaven, because you alone walk in both directions, and beg that the decree be lifted from our fathers and from us. The giants had never asked for anything. They had only ever taken. Now they were reduced to asking, and they had nothing to offer in trade but the size of their fear.

Enoch Read the Decree Aloud

Enoch took the dream and turned it over, and what he gave back was not mercy. It was the same sentence the tablet had carried, spoken now in a human mouth.

"In the vision it was shown to me concerning your petition," he said. "It will not be done for you for all the days of eternity. This is the decree."

He did not soften it. He sharpened it.

"A decree has gone out against you. From now on you shall not return to heaven, and you shall not ascend for all ages. In the bonds of the earth this has been decreed." The Watchers who had come down would never go back up. The sky was closed behind them. The chains were the very ground they had defiled.

And then the part meant for the fathers, the part Mahaway would have to carry home. "It has been decreed to bind you until all the days of eternity. And before that, you will see all your beloved ones destroyed. You will not enjoy your sons. Before your eyes they will fall by the sword of destruction." The Watchers would be bound and forced to watch the giants die. Their punishment was to outlast their own children and remember it forever.

The Last Word They Were Allowed

There was a final cruelty folded into the decree, and Enoch read that too.

"You will be asking and pleading," he said, "but you will not speak any word."

They could open their mouths. They could form the shape of begging. But no word of theirs would cross into heaven and no answer would come back down. The petition was not denied the way a judge denies a plea. It was denied the way a sealed door denies a fist. There would be no further hearing, no appeal, no second messenger who might fly higher or argue better.

Mahaway lifted off the ground and turned back toward the giants with nothing in his hands but the verdict he had been sent to overturn. Behind him the orchards were bare and the fields were stubble and the brothers were still bleeding each other on ground that would soon be under water.

Somewhere above the emptied world, the rain had not yet started. But the tablet had already been read, and the reading does not unwrite.