The second heaven was darkness.
Not ordinary darkness — not the darkness of a moonless night or a sealed room. This was a darkness thicker and heavier than anything on earth. A darkness with weight. A darkness that pressed against the skin.
And in that darkness, Enoch saw prisoners.
Angels — hanging in chains, suspended in the gloom, watched by unseen guards. They wept without ceasing, hour after hour, their faces darker than the blackness around them. These were not the bright beings who had carried Enoch upward. These were broken things. Ruined. Waiting.
"Who are they?" Enoch asked his guides. "Why are they tortured without end?"
The answer was grim. These were God's rebels — angels who had disobeyed the divine command, who had followed their own counsel instead of the will of heaven. They had turned away alongside their prince, who was himself imprisoned even higher, on the fifth heaven. They awaited the great and boundless judgment — a reckoning with no appeal and no end.
Then something extraordinary happened. The prisoners saw Enoch — a mortal man, standing in the abyss of their punishment — and they called out to him.
"Man of God," they said. "Pray for us to the Lord."
Fallen angels, begging a human being for intercession. Celestial creatures who had once stood in the light of heaven, now reduced to pleading with a man made of dust and breath.
Enoch felt a great pity rise in his chest. But he was honest with them: "Who am I — a mortal man — that I should pray for angels? I do not even know where I am going, or what will become of me. Who will pray for me?"
The darkness of the second heaven lingered in Enoch's memory long after the angels carried him upward, away from the weeping and the chains, toward the impossible beauty of the third heaven — where paradise waited.