causing its grip to release from Samyaza’s leg. She lunged to her feet whilst the two towering figures clashed, hacking at the hostile giant’s back it squealed in pain before bolting down Hermon’s slope into the darkness.
In her struggle the sounds of her crew’s pleas had become nothing more than a blur to her ears. “Are you okay, commander?” She recognised Zavebe’s voice as the malakhim came to her side to check upon her. She nodded to him in a daze before the chaos of the moment returned.
“Turn the signal light on!” Screaming into her headset she scrambled back up the mountainside with a limp, through her battling crew and burning fuel, past the stampeding nephilim.
“What do they want?” Limping across Hermon’s rocky facing voices from unknown sources filled Samyaza’s ears. The chorus of wild grunts and hollers abruptly ceased at sight of the sky around her illuminating. Their signal lit up the landscape around the wreckage with a luminous burst causing all within its boundaries to freeze.
Samyaza looked across the horde of monstrous beasts that stood in and around her crew, many of them shading their eyes from the light whilst others slunk away into the wilderness. Amongst them all one huge specimen stood out. It was less deformed than the others, its body appearing more humanoid than monster, its sheer size was startling. Before her gaze could linger upon the giant any longer the light returned to darkness and a terrible roar filled the air. Struggling to see clearly in the sudden black night Samyaza heard the ground around her thudding, screams and whimpers followed panting before the stampede trailed away into the distance, beyond Hermon’s terrain, down towards the tree line below.
“Commander?”
“I am here,” Samyaza winced at a pain spiking through her left ankle.
“What happened on this world?”
“We happened, watcher. Turn the signal light off before it reactivates. We cannot stay here.” She turned to look at the remains of her crew, the fires surrounding the wreckage were beginning to die out, she knew they would all be soon lost in the dark. “Who has the cube?”
“I do, commander.” Ertael spoke up breathing some relief into Samyaza, but the moment did not last.
“Commander, they’ve taken the dead. All of them. The humanoid too.” The thought sent a shiver through her, Samyaza sighed deeply with frustration and confusion, hearing her crew’s whispers becoming increasingly anxious only raised her state of paranoia.
“Remain calm,” despite her words, she herself felt wildly disturbed. Master... the word occupied her mind. “We need to learn more of Azazel’s logs. Remove the fuel hub from zero, we will transfer it to Rafaela’s vessel within Hermon.”
“What of the fuel from my vessel, Samyaza?”
“We stay together for now, captain, I will not risk losing another of my crew.” Her team nodded at their commander’s words before they headed towards Samyaza’s ophanim. “I want to know more of what Azazel and the watchers did to the humanoids. There must be an answer, but first we must take cover.” With haste they encroached upon the wrecked vessel, and working together, a number of watchers and malakhim clambered into the ship, removing the craft’s fuel hub before together the crew moved on into the night, back towards the graveyard in which lay the garden’s subjects. He cannot have given his life in vain, there must be something more. The troubles of the present swamped Samyaza, the thought of what bleak events must have taken place upon this once pristine haven simply evaded her. “Keep your stillots extinguished and stay close.”
As one the crew retraced its route back towards Rafaela’s ophanim, all the while Samyaza’s thoughts continued to turn over Azazel’s last report to the ark, but stranger still the nephilim’s outburst. Still shaken from the moments struggling to free herself, she longed to know more of their creation. Do these beings speak the same language as the humanoids?
“The cave is up ahead, commander, shall I stand guard?” Zavebe spoke, leading the thirteen crew members.
“Take up a strategic position near the entrance, malakhim, I will have another stationed beneath the breach in the cave’s roof to communicate any outside disturbances. Ertael, hold on tight to the cube.” The malakhim nodded to their commander before the remaining twelve ventured back down the corridor within the mountainside. With haste Samyaza guided her crew through the etched doorway, through the bone filled hall where Rafaela’s corpse rest and down to the open space in which the functional ophanim stood. “Replace the fuel hubs, and have the cube ready for activation.”
Whatever you learn upon Eden, keep it amongst the watchers. Samyaza remembered her seraphim’s words. The malakhim were under Yahweh’s higher command. How do you know you can trust them, Samyaza?
“What will you do upon returning to Heaven, commander?”
Samyaza stood for a moment, it was something she had put no thought to amidst the crew’s present turmoil. “I will access Azazel’s logs on our return, perhaps we can learn more of what went wrong here.”
“We know what went wrong here, commander,” Ertael spoke up amongst the crew, still holding the ark’s data. “If Rafaela’s words were true...”
“Samyaza?” Tamiel looked to her friend. “Who is Rafaela?” Standing in silence and disbelief, the reality of her crew’s ill fated journey came crashing down upon her.
“The seraphim sabotaged the experiments -”
“She specified Yahweh.” Their commander interrupted the malakhim.
Someone is watching me, Yaza. She shuddered within her bronze suit. “We must return to Heaven.”
“We will be apprehended upon entry, commander. Heaven may no longer be in orbit. We’ve been abandoned.” The malakhim’s doubt only resonated Heylel’s warning.
“Ertael, forgive me, but did you have prior knowledge of these events?”
“No, commander, we were all sent to our deaths, why would any of us volunteer to die? Rafaela spoke the truth, we have been deceived.” Samyaza sighed, she felt troubled and scared.
“What’s happening, commander?” Others in her crew began to mutter amongst themselves.
“Tamiel, remain here, I will take your crew, it is complete. I will attempt to make contact with Zebub in flight, there is no time to waste. This cannot be the end for our kind.”
“You will return for us, Yaza?” She approached Tamiel and rest a hand upon her shoulder.
“The future of our species rests upon this world, Tamiel, you are a part of that future, and I breathe to see it secured.” The slender watcher nodded to her commander.
“It is too the reason I am part of this.” Returning the gesture she turned to the rest of her crew.
“You are all my kin, no matter your set, I promise you we will return with answers, and a solution to this problem.” Without further words said Samyaza clambered up into the ophanim with Tamiel’s crew, Ertael followed, handing the black box up to his commander.
“Be careful, Samyaza.” She stared at the large male for a brief moment before hauling herself up into the craft. The vessel was sealed from within and the grounds upon which it stood cleared. With a vast eruption of fuel and quaking debris the ophanim became air born, steadily passing through the hole in the cave’s ceiling before a volatile roar sent it up towards the planet’s upper atmosphere.
Once their projection through the ionosphere had been set Samyaza synced a secluded broadcast from the cube to her headset for her paranoia was growing. Though she had never understood Yahweh’s purpose upon Heaven, she simply could not believe he would be capable of sabotaging the very purpose of her people’s mission to Eden, he was a leader, born to the cast of the seraphim, to think he was attempting to destroy his own kind baffled her beyond words.
As the ophanim climbed she listened to Azazel’s logs, much of his reports covered the project’s progression, some details stood out to her vastly more than others.
The powers of my probe dwindle, I grow weak, though the humanoids we have spawned who contain the greatest dosages of our genes show no signs of aging, as thoug
h our DNA has sparked into their species an everlasting life. Those who are the weakest of bloodline have passed before my eyes in just thirty Eden years, in a lesser span than those bipedal beasts we first saved from extinction. She swept through the records with frustration, listening over brief moments with a lust to learn what had become of this world. It brought pleasure however to hear the seraphim’s voice.
I pity the nephilim, the humanoids speak as though they come from differing sources, yet all were created from the same DNA, yet I do admit, these nephilim are certainly the cruder of the forms our experiments have produced, yet it was not always so. They were born from an escaped bipedal, her genes altered by my very own cells. Lilith, so bright and strong minded she was, yet she fled from the garden and began to interbreed with her own kind, the resulting offspring became what the watchers now call the nephilim.
A rebellion at last, the nephilim were lead by a thing I call Behemoth, he is bigger than his kin, stronger, he shows signs of intelligence unlike the rest of them, so primitive they have become, yet it seems he has a conscience, a vague strand of something, something that has resuscitated his mind back to an earlier time.
The humanoids disperse, they flee their dwellings, all that they forced the nephilim to construct for them, they leave it all behind, slaughtered and skinned alive as they evacuate. I fear now not
Descent of The Watchers Page 11