Ash in the Veins of the Mountain

TW: Grief, familial estrangement, spiritual isolation, existential despair.

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1. Dust of the First River

Enoch walks with God.

That's what they say, anyway. The scribes whisper it like it's some kinda gift, not the wound it really is.

But they don't know how his heels blister on those holy stones, or how the silence between each footstep weighs heavier than any law ever written. They can't hear how the quiet between heaven's footfalls drums like abandonment against his skull. They don't understand the loneliness of being understood only by the One who invented language itself and left everyone else stammering in the dirt.

Sometimes Enoch wonders if the others can see it on him—the way divinity has hollowed him out, scraped him clean of ordinary concerns. The way his children look at him sideways now, uncertain, as if he's become something other than their father. His wife touches his face in the darkness and asks where he goes when his eyes turn distant. He has no answer she would comprehend.

He is the seventh son of dust, born of Seth, great-great-great-great-grandson of the first man who bled into the soil. His lineage stretches like a half-forgotten song, hummed by wind and earth and the soft rustle of time passing. He remembers every generation before him—their faces visit him in dreams, eyes hollowed by time, their names burnt into his bones like covenant runes. Each ancestor a syllable scorched beneath his ribs.

At night, when the stars hang low enough to touch, he sits alone outside the settlement. Traces constellations with calloused fingers and wonders if God watches him even now, even here. The thought should comfort. Instead, it scrapes against his skin like sand.

He walks with God, yeah—but what the stories don't mention:

He walks barefoot.

He walks bleeding.

He also walks with the ache of never truly belonging to the world he leaves behind with every step.

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2. The Broken Birthright

Esau dreams of wolves in the womb.

Even before light, before breath, he knows the pull of tooth and twin. He knows what it is to be hunted—by brother, by fate, by the gods that sleep behind stars. He is born red and raw, howling not because of pain—but because he came second. Jacob emerged grasping his heel, and from that moment, Esau learned that hunger can be born before you ever taste milk.

The midwife held him up, this ruddy child with hair like fire, and whispered something to his mother that made her eyes cloud with worry. "This one has wilderness in his bones." As if wildness was a curse and not a birthright of its own.

He emerges into the world red as fury, hair like wildfire, hands clawing toward a sky that will never love him back. He learns hunger before he learns language. His first memories are of watching—always watching—as his father's eyes softened when they fell on Jacob. The smooth one. The clever one. The one who stayed close to the tents while Esau ran with the wind.

He becomes a man made of marrow and salt: a hunter with hands like famine and a heart like drought. The wilderness sings to him in broken chords, teaching him the liturgy of solitude. He speaks to earth. To marrow. To silence. The language of things uncivilized and unclaimed. But there's no peace in exile, and even the animals fear the fire in his blood.

His father, Isaac, blind in his later years, runs gnarled fingers through Esau's hair and sighs. "You remind me of something," he says, but never finishes the thought. Esau wonders if he reminds his father of regret.

He hunts not for sport, but for memory. Each deer, each boar, each bone cracked between his teeth is a hymn to a father's love withheld.

His birthright is sold not for hunger, but for spite. Jacob steals his blessing beneath a lambskin lie. His father's hand is cold when it rests on Jacob's head. The blessing tastes like ashes in Esau's mouth, and the memory of betrayal blooms like thorned vines behind his ribs. And Esau swears then—beneath the gaze of an absent God—that love, like birthrights, is a thing one must take, not receive.

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3. Where Their Shadows Cross

They meet where the world forgets its name.

Mount Azazel rises like a broken tooth from the desert, where ash coats the air like history. The slope of it, where neither belongs. The mountain itself seems to breathe in the twilight, ancient and indifferent to the small dramas of men and gods.

The journey here nearly broke Enoch. Seven days of walking, each step heavier than the last. The visions came stronger as he climbed—flashes of wings and fire, whispers in languages no human throat should form. His writing tools bounced against his thigh with each step: charcoal, stone tablets, scrolls of papyrus.

Enoch arrives tracing sigils in the dust, come to write the names of the Nephilim on black stone—to record the sins of angels fallen and keep account of a grief older than man. He's inscribing divine wrath in a language only God and grief can read.

Esau comes from the east, where the sun rises harsh over lands he's claimed as his own. Edom, they call it now. Red land for the red man. He's grown older, harder. His beard is streaked with gray, his skin weathered like leather left too long in the sun.

Esau arrives wailing into the sky, voice ragged from cursing the stars that favored his brother. He's come to scream into the ravine, to curse a brother he cannot kill and a God who refuses to answer.

They don't speak at first.

But exile recognizes exile.

Enoch sees the curse wrapped around Esau's soul like iron vines—doesn't flinch. He sees it in the slump of Esau's shoulders, in the way his breath shudders like flame before wind. Esau sees the starlight in Enoch's eyes—lightless and deep, as if he has seen paradise and chosen instead to weep. He recognizes another exile, someone who has walked too long between heaven and earth.

"I thought you were a myth," Esau spits finally, breaking the silence like a stone through ice.

"I thought I was alone," Enoch replies, his voice soft from disuse.

"You're not meant to be here," Esau says after a while, something almost like concern in his voice.

Enoch answers, his voice soft as dust, "Neither are you."

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4. A Meal Between Exiles

They share fire and bread. Simple things.

The fire without warmth, the bread without salt, the silence without judgment. Night has fallen completely now, wrapping the mountain in velvet darkness. Stars pierce the sky like wounds, too many to count, too distant to touch.

Enoch gathers dried scrub brush, arranges it with practiced hands. When he strikes flint to stone, the sparks seem to hang in the air longer than they should, as if reluctant to become flame. The fire that catches is small, barely enough to push back the darkness that pools around them.

Enoch burns a scroll to keep them warm—one of the lesser names, a genealogy of bloodlines already forgotten—because memory is heavy, and he's tired of carrying the dead. The parchment curls and blackens, words becoming smoke, becoming nothing.

"Aren't those supposed to be sacred?" Esau asks, nodding toward the burning scroll.

Enoch's smile is thin. "Everything is sacred. Nothing is sacred. The words are already written elsewhere."

Esau brings meat from a slain deer, its flesh still humming faintly with forest and sorrow, seasoned with nothing but fury. He'd killed it that morning, before climbing the mountain, driven by some instinct he couldn't name. Now he understands why.

They eat like men not meant to survive.

They speak like men who have.

They talk of what they've lost: sons and brothers, God and home, the shape of silence between prayers unanswered.

"Do you still walk with Him?" Esau asks, chewing bitterness like bone.

Enoch watches the flames for a long time. Exhales. "I walk. He speaks sometimes. Sometimes beside. Sometimes behind. Sometimes not at all. Mostly, I listen."

"To what?"

"To the ache."

"To what end?" Esau presses.

"To remind me I am not Him."

Esau laughs—low, bitter, like something cracking. "He made me wild, and then punished me for it."

Enoch studies him, the firelight catching in the hollows of his face. "Maybe He made you free."

"Freedom without blessing is just another kind of curse," Esau mutters.

They fall asleep under the same sky that watches both saints and sinners with equal indifference.

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5. God Between Their Teeth

Morning is a wound that will not clot.

Dawn breaks over Mount Azazel like a fever—hot and sudden. The sky bleeds from black to purple to a searing blue. Enoch wakes first, as he always does, the habit of a man accustomed to meeting God in the early hours when the veil between worlds is thinnest.

Morning brings omens. Crows circle above, seven of them, their wings cutting dark shapes against the brightening sky. The wind carries the scent of something unspoken, something ancient. It tastes of metal and ozone, like the air before lightning strikes.

Esau stirs, groaning as he stretches stiff limbs. He slept on stone, and his body reminds him that he's no longer the young man who could bed down anywhere without consequence. He sits up, rubs a hand over his face, through his beard. Watches Enoch, who stands at the edge of their small camp, looking eastward.

Enoch speaks of a coming flood—not in fire, but in water; not in anger, but in mourning. He says the stars have begun to flicker out, one by one, like lanterns abandoned in the sky.

"A judgment," he says, voice rough with knowing, "for the mixing of gods and daughters. For forgetting the breath in our clay."

Esau listens, half-turned toward the mountain's edge. He bares his teeth. "Judgment is just God throwing stones from afar. I've bled for my sins. Let Him do the same."

"I was cursed with a twin and no voice," he says after a while. "I have only ever been second. Second born. Second loved. Second blessed." His laugh is harsh, scraping. "Even my name means 'rough.' While Jacob—Jacob means 'supplanter.' As if God knew from the beginning what would happen."

"And I," Enoch replies, "have only ever been watched. Every step. Every breath. Every thought laid bare before eyes that never blink."

Esau turns sharply. "You sound like you envy me."

"I do."

Silence again.

It stretches between them, fragile as a spider's web, between two men neither god nor mortal—both bruised by divine attention.

Enoch does not argue. He only places a hand on Esau's shoulder, where the burden has made the skin hard.

"You were not made for fire," he whispers.

"I was not made for forgiveness," Esau replies.

Then: "Would you trade it?" Esau asks. "Your walking with Him?"

Enoch doesn't answer. But for a moment, his eyes look almost human again—filled with a longing so profound it borders on despair.

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6. When the Mountain Weeps

That night, the stars vanish like teeth swallowed in sleep.

The darkness that falls is absolute, impenetrable. No moon rises. No celestial light pierces the strange, thick blackness that settles over Mount Azazel like a shroud. Esau builds the fire higher, feeding it with everything that will burn—scrub brush, the remains of his hunting pack, even the leather straps of his sandals. The flames leap and dance, but they cannot push back this unnatural night.

"Something's coming," he says, voice tight with an animal fear he hasn't felt since childhood.

Enoch stands perfectly still at the edge of the firelight. He hasn't spoken for hours, not since the sun began its descent—a descent too swift, too final to be natural. Now he raises his face to the starless sky, and Esau sees that Enoch's eyes reflect light that isn't there.

Lightning splits the sky. Not to strike—but to open. A single, jagged line of brilliance that tears the fabric of the night. And from the rift, something like God's breath slips through. No thunder follows. No wings appear. Just silence—a silence so profound it seems to swallow even the crackling of their fire.

"Enoch?" Esau's voice sounds small, lost in the vastness of what is happening.

Enoch turns to him, and his face is both terribly present and already gone. "It's time," he says simply.

Enoch is taken—not in chariots of flame, but in that silence. No witnesses except one. No hymns except the ragged breathing of a man who once sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. Just a breath, and then gone. He walks into the rift as if crossing a threshold.

Esau watches it happen. Stands alone in the shadow of a vanishing man. A part of him wants to climb the mountain and pull Enoch back by his heel, like his brother once did to him.

But he doesn't.

When the wind stills and Enoch is gone—utterly gone, like a name erased from stone—Esau kneels. Not in worship. In disbelief.

Instead, he digs a hole into the mountain's breast with his bare hands. Finds a stone. Scratches words into it with a deer's antler:

Here walked a man who heard God's footsteps, and still he wept.

He leaves it unblessed. Leaves it unguarded. The stone there, and the wind does not move it.

The mountain remembers.

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7. What Remains

Years pass like bruises—slow to fade, tender when pressed.

Esau's life dwindles in the hush of valleys no one names. He returns to his people, to Edom, to the red lands that match his name and nature. He rules with a firm hand but a fair one. Takes wives, fathers children who look at him with something like awe and something like fear. He teaches them to hunt, to track, to read the language of wind and earth. He does not teach them to hate their cousins across the border, though the temptation burns in him sometimes like an old wound that never quite healed.

He makes peace with Jacob, eventually. A strained, fragile thing built on blood and memory rather than trust. They embrace as brothers, weep as strangers, part as men who share history but not future. It is enough. It has to be.

Years later, he dies alone where no one remembers his name. Not in battle, as he always expected, but quietly, on a hunting trip in a valley he'd known since youth. His heart simply stops—a swift mercy for a man who never learned to rest. His flesh becomes memory, his memory becomes legend, and his legend—eventually—is forgotten.

His bones are picked clean by jackals. His blood soaks into the dirt where no prophets will tread. But when the rains come—and they do—something strange happens.

When the sky cries itself clean—

The earth sings.

Low and guttural, like a grief unforgotten. It echoes through time, through bloodlines. Through exiles and patriarchs, through psalms and gospels. The place where Esau fell hums with something sacred. Not the sacredness of temples or altars or priestly benedictions. Something older. Something that remembers when divinity walked barefoot and bleeding through the dust of creation.

The soil carries no blessing, no prophecy, no crown.

But it carries his blood.

And somewhere, far from earth, Enoch hears it. From somewhere beyond the veil, beyond the stars, where ink dries on the edge of heaven's last scroll, he listens. He who was taken but never died, who walks now in realms where time folds like paper and unfolds like flowers. He pauses in his endless recording, his cataloging of divine thought, and remembers a mountain, a fire, a man with wilderness in his bones.

He writes it in the margins of heaven:

Even those without blessings can become altars.

Even those unchosen can become sanctified by sorrow.

He writes it down.

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By: Miss Maria Lancelot