Khavilakki – The pre-Flood biblical land of Havilah from Genesis 2. It was known for its gold, lapis lazuli and onyx. Not to be confused with the post-Flood Havilah or Haweilan in what is now Saudi Arabia.
Kherub, Kherubim, and Kherubar – A representation of biblical Cherubim; originally visualized by the ancient Assyrians as winged lions with man-like heads, and later by the Hebrews as messengers of Yahweh.
Kush – The land mentioned in Genesis 2 through and around which the river Gihon flowed. Not to be confused with the post-Flood Cush, who became the father of the Ethiopians, Nubians, and others.
L’Mekku – The Lemech of Cain’s line in Genesis 4—not to be confused with Lemech the father of Noah.
Leviathan – The constellation Cetus, and one of the Basilisk’s chief vassals; also any large flesh-eating marine reptile of the Plesiosaur or Mosasaur variety. Some had long necks; others (like the Mosasaur) were more fish-like or crocodilian in shape.
Lay of the Brothers Lost – The epic of Qayin’s murder of Heh’Bul (in the story), a version of which survives in a Mosaic redaction as the part of Genesis 4 that tells the story of Cain and Abel.
Lilitua, the Lost Daughter – The planet we call Mercury, named for the wife of Qayin, who founded the great eastern and northern civilizations of the pre-Deluge world. She is remembered in Hebrew tradition, albeit with much distortion, as Lilith, the wife who rejected Adam and was doomed to wander. I have instead made her the eldest daughter of Adam and Eve, the wife of Cain in this story, which makes more sense. Lilitua also relates to the Lilu demons of Sumero-Akkadian myth.
Lumekki – The biblical Lemech of Seth’s line. The father of A’Nu-Ahki.
Muhet’Usalaq – The biblical Methuselah.
nae-fillim – Common plural of Nae-fil, fictional root word of the real Hebrew nephil and nephilim. It means fallen one, and is closely associated with the Greek gigantes, which means earth-born or giant.
nemes headdress – The wedge-shaped cloth headdress worn by Egyptian priests and noblemen, or in this case, a distant forerunner of that style.
Nhod – The desolate region where Qayin was doomed to wander. A falling star blasted the area and poisoned the soil there (see the apocryphal Book of Jasher). The pre-Flood biblical land of Nod (see Genesis 4).
Orchard of Aeden – The biblical Garden of Eden.
orichalcum – An expensive red-tinted gold alloy, though not as red as copper. In Plato’s Criteus and Timaeus, the smiths of Atlantis forged orichalcum.
Pisunu – The pre-Flood River Pishon of Genesis 2.
Prime Zaqen – The chief patriarchal elder of a city-state in Seti.
Promised Seed or Woman’s Seed, the – The messianic deliverer promised at the dawn of time. Often viewed in A’Nu-Ahki’s culture (and later) as the greatest of monster slayers, who would suffer a poisoned wound but vanquish his serpentine or dragon foe in the end. The pure version of that promise is preserved in Genesis 3:15. Many ancient civilizations had corrupted versions of it, which reflected in their mythologies and views of the constellations. The deeper spiritual dimension of this figure was often lost upon the people of A’Nu-Ahki’s generation. The ultimate fulfillment of this prophetic archetype comes in the death, resurrection, and Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Q’Enukki – The Great Seer and ancestor of A’Nu-Ahki. A representation of the biblical Enoch of Seth’s line, who was “translated” and taken alive to be with God. (See Genesis 5 and Hebrews 11.)
Q’Unukku – The biblical Enoch son of Cain, builder of an early city. Not to be confused with the Enoch of Seth’s line or the Great Seer of this story.
Qayin – The biblical Cain, who murdered Abel.
quickening – A transformation of mortal human flesh to immortality with a body that operates under different physical laws than those that bind the cursed creation as it now exists.
quickfire – What we today would call electricity.
Ram, the – What is today called the constellation of Aries.
Rest Day – A traditional 7th day of rest, reflecting what God did after the creation. Unlike the later Sabbath of Moses, Rest Day was voluntary.
Seraf and Serafim – A lower order of heavenly being associated with the winged fire-serpent and the fallen Watcher Samyaza. Biblically, a seraph or seraphim, which is a form of angelic being with a fiery aspect.
Seti – The biblical Seth, son of Adam.
Shining One – The title held by the Basilisk before his fall; the biblical Lucifer who became the Serpent or Satan.
skel – A weight measure etymologically related to the later Hebrew shekel.
sons of God, the – An Old Testament term for angels; bene elohim. In The Windows of Heaven it is another term for the fallen Watchers of the Second Insurrection led by Samyaza and Uzaaz’El—The Shamhazai and Azazel of ancient extra-biblical Hebrew legend. This term also shows up in a modified form as sons of the gods, though this version of the name speaks more of the hybrid offspring of the bene elohim of Genesis. Lumekki, who uses the “sons of the gods” version in speaking of the Watchers, was probably doing so because he had picked up the habit from a non-Setiim source during the foreign wars he fought. Because elohim (God) is in the plural form it can be translated either way. Strictly speaking however, the sons of God are not the same as the giants or nephilim they spawned.
Southern Sea Leviathan, the – The constellation we call Cetus.
Star Signs, the – The constellations of the zodiac and in this novel series, their original divinely inspired interpretations. The interpretations were later so grossly corrupted and confused that the zodiac became a form of idolatry.
Straticon – A military rank at which strategic level decisions are made. Loosely similar to a modern general or field marshal.
swamp drake – A wild marshland dragon, fossil remains of which are identified as Hadrosaurs.
Sword of the Breaker – The comet of A’Nu-Ahki, observed to approach from out of the Dragon Breaker constellation, which we call Perseus.
Tacticon – An army officer in charge of tactical level decisions, loosely analogous to a colonel.
Work, the – The formal name of the commission Q’Enukki gave to his sons to print their father’s scrolls, and to warn the world of the coming World-end judgments, and of the hope of the Comforter of A’Nu and the Promised Seed.
Tiamatu – Root of the Sumero-Babylonian water monster Tiamat, out of whose divided carcass Marduk supposedly created the present world after slaying the beast. In this story, Tiamatu is also the former fifth planet, the remains of which make up many of the asteroid fields and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. While this theory is not popular any longer among many astronomers who hold to the various accretion theories of planetary development, accretion theories themselves have serious difficulties with the laws of physics, and have not yielded good scientific predictions about the nature of planetary bodies. The 5th Planet is only one of many Catastrophist theories, and not a necessary agent for Dr. John Baumgardner’s Runaway Subduction model of the Flood, which looks at other causal possibilities.
titan – A term for the hybrid offspring of the Watchers and human women before the cataclysm. The term arises out of Greek mythology, where it was a class of god or giant that preceded the pantheon led by Zeus and Hera. Of course, even within Greek mythology there are contradictory versions of who Zeus is, and who the titans are. The Greeks also had a deluge in their legends in which Deucalion and his wife Pyrhha escaped in a large wooden box. The titans lived before that deluge. The word satan (which the Hebrews originally saw as a group of spiritual enemies rather than one single entity) is linguistically related to titan: titan – thaitan – shaitan – satan.
Tubaal-qayin – The biblical Tubal-Cain, father of the metallurgy of bronze and iron; first of five kings by that name.
‘tween-ager – A pre-flood adolescent. Because of the difference in life-spans the story has youngsters hit puberty at around ages 25 to 35 and a
biological adolescence that lasts to age 55 or 60.
Udaha and Tzuillaeha – The biblical Adah and Zillah, wives of the Cain line’s Lemech of Genesis 4.
Ufratsi – The pre-Flood River Euphrates of Genesis 2, which probably had no geographic correlation with the post-Flood river of that name.
Na’Amiha – A’Nu-Ahki’s second wife. The biblical Naamah, sister of Tubal-Cain from Genesis 4.
Under-world – The place of the dead. Analogous to the Hebrew sheol or the Greek hades and tartarus.
unicorn and tricorn – Considered quasi-dragons, and thus able to be domesticated, these creatures were used as heavy pack beasts and armored cavalry mounts; though many also remained in the wild. Their fossils are classified as ceratopsian dinosaurs, the unicorn being Monoclonius, and the tricorn being Triceratops. The word unicorn is really of much more recent Roman origin (as is the word dragon, which is from the Saxon draugl). I used it in the story as a bit of poetic license.
Virgin, the – The constellation Virgo, which represents the woman who would bring forth the Promised Seed to deliver humanity from the Curse.
vultch gryphon – A large carnivorous gryphon whose fossil remains are identified as Quetzalcoatlus.
Watchers – An order of what Jews and Christians would call angels. In terms of fallen angels, a synonym for the sons of God that rebelled before the Noahic Flood and married human women to produce corrupt offspring called giants or titans. These creatures are distinct from the original angelic rebels, though only in that they fell a little bit later (according to the Enoch Manuscripts) and were guilty of taking human women as their wives in some sense. The Bible gives us no chronology of exactly when the angels fell or if they all fell at the same time or not. I do not claim that the Enoch accounts (which are not considered canonical Scripture by either Jews or Christians) are necessarily accurate records. They seem to suggest that the pre-Flood world was a time of flux for those we would call angels. Some distortions in the texts seem pretty serious, though there is also some interesting history and legend there. Because of the apparent silence of the Bible on the exact chronology of angelic rebellion, I have gone with some of the more detailed “Enoch” version of these events inasmuch as they don’t contradict what the Scriptures do say on the subject.
world-end – A term for two world-destroying cataclysms predicted, according to Josephus (95 AD), by Adam. It is the anglicized fictional root word for the Hebrew mabbul, which is a unique term used only for the global Noahic Flood in Scripture. Other normal floods of the Jordan and Nile that are mentioned in the Old Testament are a different Hebrew word. According to Josephus, Adam predicted that the world would be destroyed twice, once by water and another time through fire.
wurm – Used in this story as a broad term for carnivorous dragons whose fossils are today categorized as the various therapod dinosaurs from gigantic Tyrannosaurus Rex to relatively small Velociraptor. The word itself is ancient Anglo-Saxon in origin. I chose to name pre-Flood fauna using Saxon terms because they are so descriptive yet simple.
wyverna – A form of horned or crested wurm, the larger of which are classified today as Gorgosaurus and the smaller as Dilophosaurus. Also derived from an early Saxon taxonomic term for a type of dragon, though fictionally, the reverse is, of necessity, presented in the story.
Y’Raddu – The biblical Irad of Cain’s line in Genesis 4, also the nation founded by this individual.
Younger-speech – The dialects spoken by the younger generations less than 300 years old or so.
Zaqen and Zaqenar – The root term for the Hebrew zaken, which means elder. In this story, a zaqen is an elder with governmental authority in a clan. If one is of princely lineage, like A’Nu-Ahki, one becomes a “first tier” zaqen at the age of 350. At 400 one becomes a “second tier” zaqen and gains an additional tier of rank after that for every century they live. A 900-year-old man graduates to the seventh tier, though by that time whatever rank or achievement they have attained in their work has more meaning in terms of real authority. Nevertheless, seventh tier Zaqenar are given much symbolic respect—so much that the masculine plural of the three uppermost tiers use a majestic ar rather than common im ending. The majestic plural became extinct (in the story) after the Deluge, when languages needed to be greatly simplified after events that will be covered in book 5 of this series.
Also by K.G. Powderly Jr.
The Paladin’s Odyssey – Book 2 of The Windows of Heaven
A Broken Paradise – Book 3 of The Windows of Heaven
The Tides of Nemesis – Book 4 of The Windows of Heaven
Gate of the Gods – Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven (Coming soon)
One Faith – Many Transitions: World-views in Church History (Non-fiction)
Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1) Page 32