Disclaimer: [Slow Burn], [Prose Heavy]

Before God spoke the first word, something else was already there.

Before the angels were made, before the Heavenly Host drew their first breath, before the seventy-two were bound and the wars were fought and the prayers were written -- there was something sleeping in the bedrock of the world.

Something that had culled the primordial chaos down to silence, that had cleared the void so completely that when God arrived, He built His entire creation in the space it left behind.

It did not know this. It was asleep.
It has been asleep for longer than history has words for.

Until an archaeologist with a family secret she'd rather not think about falls through the wrong floor in the Negev desert -- and something that predates the concept of morning opens its eyes.

His name is Vothanael, Elkaius in some translations, and in some, He is the Primordial Extinction.

He has no language, no framework, no model of what he is. He does not know that the stone wall beside his resting place holds layers of pre-language scripture, the deepest of which contains a message from God Himself -- a confession, a grief, and an instruction nobody has carried out yet.

He does not know that the Heavenly Host and the Seventy-Two Demons have been at war for centuries in the world above him.

He does not know that both sides are about to find out he exists.

What he knows is this: there is a woman with stone dust on her hands who gave him the word for sun on the first morning, and a house that is becoming something he does not have a word for yet, and a wall full of things written for him before writing existed.
He is learning the words. One by one. Carefully.

*The war above him is about to become very inconsequential in the grand scheme of things*

"You felt it," she said -- both hands pressed together at her chest, the gesture she'd been making since the founding of the Host, the gesture that had never once been performed in the centuries she'd been making it.


"The name, three days ago, I was amidst the fourth choir's rehearsal and I simply..."


"...sat down. Brother Caelian thought I was unwell... I could not explain that I was the opposite of unwell."


"The opposite of unwell?" Michael repeated.


"There ought to be a word for it. There isn't, which I find genuinely irritating."


Her brow drew together -- that particular expression, the one she wore when a gap in language offended her precision. Then, without transition: "I want to go."


"I want to go to the garden. I want to meet him." The hands pressed tighter, knuckles whitening.


Chapter 45 - Ch-45: Of Longing and Politics