The Women Who Painted Their Eyes and Drew Heaven Down

In the days before the rivers rose, the daughters of men learned to be looked at. They lined their eyes with kohl until the dark of them widened and deepened. They curled their hair and oiled it until it caught the light. They wore their garments loose at the shoulder and loose at the thigh, so that flesh showed where flesh had not shown before, and they walked through the streets of the cities with their chins lifted and their minds already turned, secretly, toward wickedness. They did not walk to go anywhere. They walked to be seen walking.

The Watchers Leaned Over the Edge of Heaven

High above them, at the rim of the firmament, the great ones of heaven looked down. Among them were Schamchazai and Uzziel, mighty in the upper world, accustomed to standing in the brightness near the throne and not yet accustomed to longing. They saw the women below moving through the dust, painted and curled and half bare, and something turned over in them that had no name in heaven.

They had watched the earth for a long age without falling. They had seen famine and they had seen feasting and neither had pulled them out of their stations. But desire is not like the other temptations. The patience that holds against violence and theft and pride breaks first at this one place. The Watchers leaned further over the edge than any of them had leaned before, and then they were no longer leaning. They were descending.

The Great Ones Took Whatever Pleased Them

On the earth there were already men who behaved like swallowed gods. They were the sons of the great, the judges and the powerful, and they had made a custom of their power. When a bride was adorned for her wedding, washed and perfumed and brought to the threshold of her husband's house, a great one would enter the chamber first and take her before the bridegroom ever touched her. The fair ones, the virgins prepared for other men, were taken this way as a matter of course. Then the powerful reached past the unmarried and took wives who already had husbands, of all whom they chose, because choosing was the only law they recognized.

Into this the Watchers came down, and the line between the great men and the great angels blurred until no one could say where the one corruption ended and the other began. Both took. Both pleased themselves. The women had painted their eyes to draw down the powerful, and the powerful had come, from the high cities and from heaven itself, and the wanting flowed in both directions at once until the whole earth was a single act of taking.

The Marriage Contracts Grew Monstrous

It did not stop at men and women. Once choosing was the only law, choice spread past every boundary that had held the world in its shape. They chose males for males. They chose beasts. And they did not do these things in the dark and call them shameful afterward. They wrote contracts. They drew up marriage documents, formal and witnessed, between a man and a man, between a man and an animal, and they hung them where everyone could read them, proud of what they had made lawful.

That was the threshold. A generation can sin in secret for a long time and the world will bear it, because shame is a kind of fence and even the wicked lean on it. But when the deeds were written down and celebrated, when the documents made the monstrous ordinary, the fence was gone. There was nothing left to climb back over.

The Giants Filled the Earth With Their Footprints

From the unions of the descended ones and the painted women came children who were too large for the world. They grew faster than children should grow and they grew without sorrow and without the suffering that teaches restraint, and so they learned nothing. They filled the valleys with their bodies and the roads with their footprints. Where they walked, the smaller people scattered. They took food, they took flocks, they took whatever their fathers had taught them was theirs by the right of being strong, and they killed without weighing it, because nothing in their making had ever told them no.

The earth that had been planted as a garden was now packed with violence from the mountains to the sea. And the violence did not sort the good from the wicked. Where harlotry takes hold of a place, disorder comes in after it like floodwater through a broken wall, and it drowns the upright in the same wave as the guilty. The few who still walked straight were jostled and trampled and taken along with the rest.

Heaven Set a Door at One Hundred and Twenty Years

And the Holy One, who had borne the theft and the violence and the pride with a long patience, would not bear this. There was one breach above all the others that closed the gate of mercy, and it was not bloodshed. It was this. Heaven is slow to anger over every crime except the corruption of desire, and over that it does not wait.

But even now a door was left open, a narrow one. By His Word the decree went out that the breath of these creatures would not strive in flesh forever. A span was set, one hundred and twenty years, not as a countdown to drowning but as a held breath, a length of time given so that the painted generation might wash off the paint, tear up the contracts, and turn back. The waters were not yet gathered. The clouds had not yet bruised. For a hundred and twenty years the sky stayed dry above a world that had stopped being able to feel ashamed, waiting to see whether anyone at all would look up from the streets and lift their eyes to something other than each other.