The creator of all's Arc

Chapter 7 of 13

The creator watched Eve after Cain walked away. She sat in the doorway of the low house for many days. She would not eat. Adam brought her water and she set it down beside her without drinking. One son was in the ground. The other was gone down the road with a mark on his head. The creator felt her grief the way he had felt Abel's blood go into the soil. He decided to answer it. He opened her womb again. A third son grew in her. When the boy came, Eve held him against her chest and spoke for the first time in a season. "Seth," she said. "Given." Adam knelt beside her. He touched the baby's foot. "He is small," Adam said. "He will grow." The creator watched them and thought the wound might close. It did not. While Eve nursed her third son, the creator turned his eye to the wider country and saw what had come down while he was busy with one family. His fallen ones were on the ground. Azazel stood at a fire pit with a group of men, showing them how to fold hot metal against a stone. A blade came out of the fold. "Keep the edge thin," Azazel said. "Thick edges bruise. Thin edges cut. That is all there is to it." Further on, Penemue sat with a woman and pressed a cut reed into wet clay. He drew a mark. He drew another. "This one is your name," Penemue said. "This one is a lie about your neighbor. Both will outlive you." Asmodeus stood at the door of a house the creator had not built. A woman was inside. Her husband lay on the floor and did not move. "Six," Asmodeus said. "One more." The creator saw worse. The fallen had lain with the daughters of men. The women had carried, and the children had come out wrong-sized. One walked past a cedar and stood taller than its lowest branch. Its shoulders were the width of a cart. It carried one of Azazel's blades at its hip. It stepped into a field of grain and ate what should have fed a village. A man ran at it with a stick. The giant put a hand on the man's chest and the man went down and stayed down. The creator counted them. There were more than one. There were more than ten. They walked the low country and the hill country and the river country, and the ground shook a little where they stopped. He had given Eve a third son to hold. He had meant it as mercy. While his back was turned to mend one house, his fallen ones had opened every other door. The test had grown past the children of Adam. It now included what had been made outside his design, eating his world faster than his world could feed it.