Noah by Mark Morris

happening right in front of him, Noah saw the Watchers as they had once been. He saw them descend from the skies in their heavenly forms, creatures of pure, effulgent light that filled the heart with gladness and awe. Their descent was controlled at first—they drifted down through blackness, and then through the clouds that hung above the earth. And then, as they drew closer to the realm of Man, they picked up speed. They began to plummet, faster and faster, until they resembled fireballs hurtling toward the ground.
    “It was not our place to interfere,” Og said, “yet we chose to try and help mankind. And when we disobeyed the Creator, He punished us.”
    Noah saw the Watchers hit the ground, the impact so powerful, so devastating, that he cried out and jumped back. The Watchers smashed into the ground with such force that each of them created a vast crater, causing tons of earth to explode high into the air in all directions and a series of rippling shocks to expand outward, as if the very world was trembling in fear.
    “We were encrusted by your world,” Og told them. “Rock and mud shackled our fiery glow. Still, we taught mankind all we knew of Creation.”
    Noah saw the earth split open, and the Watchers emerge, born anew. But as Og had said, they were no longer creatures of light, with the ability to transcend the heavens. Now they were formed of rock and mud and lava—still powerful, but heavy, cumbersome, misshapen, weighed down by the earthly realm in which they had chosen to reside. Their glorious wings, outspread as they had descended magnificently from the heavens, had shriveled, compacted into limbs of rock. Their serene and beautiful faces had become crude, lumpy masks.
    The images faded in Noah’s mind, and suddenly he was standing on the black, barren soil of the blasted plain once again, listening to Og’s words.
    “But the Creator was right to exile mankind,” the Watcher was saying sadly. “We gave men magic and science. Knowledge of plants and stars, metals and fire. With our help they rose from the dust, became great and mighty. But then they turned our gifts to violence. We were hunted for the tzohar inside us.Many of us were killed.” Og looked at Noah. “Only your grandfather helped protect us.”
    In his mind’s eye Noah saw Methuselah, his grandfather, as a young man. A huge warrior, his armor glowing as if with unearthly fire, his red cloak flying in the wind. He saw Methuselah step forward, into the path of a charging horde of Watchers behind which, like a sea of insects pouring across the land, were thousands of screaming, pursuing men waving swords and clubs. He saw Methuselah stand his ground as the charging hordes of Watchers and their pursuers bore down on him. Then he saw the line of Watchers part down the middle and stream past Methuselah on both sides, as if he was an immovable object, like a vast tree with roots that stretched all the way down to the center of the earth.
    And when the Watchers were behind him, when Methuselah was the only living creature that stood between them and their murderous pursuers, he unsheathed his sword. As he drew it from its scabbard, the blade first glowed with a pure white fire that dazzled the eyes, and then burst soundlessly into flame.
    Methuselah raised the sword, as though to give the army a chance to stop, to turn, to give up their pursuit. But the army kept coming, and so, with no further hesitation. Methuselah gripped the hilt of the sword in both hands and drove it deep into the ground.
    Immediately, as if he had used the blade to slash through the chain that secured the gates of Hell, a giant wall of fire leaped from the earth in front of him and swept across the ground like a tidal wave, devouring all that lay before it. The sand turned instantly to liquid black glass and the thousands upon thousands of men who had meant the Watchersharm were incinerated in a split second, their flesh and bones crumbling to black ash, which fell