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*

It was the sound of a great weight being set down. An arch releasing the load it had been bearing for an uncounted span.


The garden breathed with it -- the full exhale of something that had been a vessel for a very long time and had delivered what it was carrying at last.


Rania's pen was on the table. Her hands were not near it.


She was looking at the Wall with the expression of a woman whose fourteen years of professional expertise had just been correctly classified -- not overturned, not disproven, correctly classified.


The way a cup was correctly classified when you finally stood beside the ocean. Accurate for its purposes. Not built for this one.


Still in the grass. Eyes fully open now. The interior stillness of something processing from the inside out, with no face available for the size of the interior.


Chapter 54 - Ch-54: Butterflies and Blooms