{This is an unedited raw taste of the in-the-works FAJ book, possible release spring of 2027. This book will be around 20 chapters and 120,000 words. It is the prequel to the Becoming History trilogy that will be released in the coming years}
Chapter One: The Sorrowing Mountain
“Adam stood upon the frozen void, the world’s spine thrust skyward in the hard blue shadows of sunrise. He gazed down on broken valleys sheathed in silver, where ice crept through dead forests and ancient rivers slept beneath crushing silence. Over seven centuries of wandering had carved lines like tributaries beneath his eyes; sorrowing. The truest inheritance, weighted each breath with the gravity of loss.
They had walked since the garden’s gate clanged shut, since flaming swords tore the sky and exile became their companion. Now wondering alone in this forgotten land trudging four decades through a frozen wilderness, searching for what was taken. Each morning filled with cold and memory, his flesh battered by wind, his soul gnawed by regret. Somewhere below, far beyond the glaciers’ reach, his children scattered across valleys warmed by stolen fire, building pale imitations of Eden in clay and ruin.”
I rise each day from earth’s cold embrace, breath steaming as it had on that first dawn, before the Tree, before the exile. Before I saw my own reflection in the ice and mistook it for another man. I can still hear the echo of my name as it wrang from the creators mouth, Adom. Now it simply echoes in the silence, no one left here to speak it back to me. The beauty once here has fled south, the world shrunk by cold and regret. Even the mountains huddle beneath their icy tops. A shelf of ice stretching beyond what can be seen.
Sometimes, I wonder if the old world remembers warmth. My feet crack the crystalline crust as I descend the slope. Down from the Ice shelfs and mountain ridges that separate Jotunheim from the livable world. I descend toward the stream, ever growing as it pulls moister from these high rocks fed by its frozen kin. I recall a time before the star fell, when fruit was sweet and the air full of Yahweh’s voice. The memories torment me, circling like wolves, reminding me of my sins.
Though most of my children are lost in this new existence, I am not as alone as I thought when I ascended this mountain centuries ago, fleeing from where she fell. Searching for the heavens once more. Searching for light, searching for warmth. Searching for my Valentine, my heart.
Not as alone as I might wish. Shadows gather out of sight, some shaped like men, some half formed, monstrous, neither of heaven nor earth. Some of these are the forgotten watchers. They linger at the unlit edges, their eyes like broken stars, hungering for another taste of rebellion, hungering for what was once safe. The worst of the aftermath, yet to be seen in the sun.
Last night, beneath the Arora lights, I lay trying to sleep. Nights so cold with only half a form. Nightmares and daydreams haunt me like whispers in the wind. Though when the storms come I long for what others were given.
I try to move without sight, yet eyes pierce through the darkness. A great shape loomed between sky and frozen rivers. Long arms, studded with frost, eyes like molten emeralds. Jotun, one of the ice giants from the unlivable lands. Their stories not yet birthed in men’s minds. They serve as the lost fallen. Born from the chaos that rose in heaven after the serpents’ tricks. They landed in this disregarded land. To afraid to be seen in the light of what men lay in the valleys.
I know their intention, they grab my children in the nigh. Taking them up into the mountains, creating corrupted offspring. There ideology turn my children against Yahweh. Like their kin they try to seduce humanity with power, knowledge, safety from hunger and the cold. Every promise is poison. My own hands, meant to cultivate, are now fists against the storm.
Dusk sets upon me as I make my way down from the frozen heavens. Out of the land of Ice, I walk back to see what has become of my children. I find a cliff to rest my head till the light returns. Hoping that I am far enough away now to not see eyes piercing at me through the darkness.
Yet I know, once I lay my head down I will see all that which I pray to forget. Sons of sons curse the name of the creator, they have forgotten what it was like to live and walk beside him in the garden. I knowing my sins wish only to redeem this lost world.
“Genealogy is more than memory, more than dreams. It becomes the foundation of humanity and diversity, of chosen and unchosen, of blessing and judgment. The ancient journey traces all heroes and monsters back to Adam. But lineage is a double-edged sword. As it is used for inclusion, so to is it used for exclusion, for marking ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Yet in truth, all are bound in the same frail skein. Here Adam sleeps haunted by his memory. His lineage overtaken this new world began to fall. Pushing Adom and his loved one to seek shelter away from it all.”
Lost in memories and dreams. My son Seth, bore his son Enosh, and so forth. A line lost to disarray and population growth. Memories of Cane and Able plague me as a sleep. Being pushed from the garden, cut off from gods embrace. My kin started to seed favor, offerings and shouts sent skyward. When no voice echoed back, they turned on each other. Blaming others for God leaving. Eve and I for our betrayal. It was not only her and I that gained all knowledge on that blasphemous day. My sons and daughters felt pain in that moment with us. The feeling over overwhelming sadness never left, only made worse when seeing what one son could do to another. We knew not death or aging in Gods embrace. Now it is all my children see. Blood and gore, death and betrayal. Memories plagued with knowledge. Unable to be taken from me.
I awake, sweating sharp pains in my mind. Though the light glows across the mountain tops behind me, I am remised to try and sleep again, alone always. These memories never leave me. This pain never ends. “Cursed is the ground for your sake”, a line that echoes through my mind as my eyes adjust to the new day.
Seven hundred and forty winters have carved deep furrows into my flesh and deeper still in my memories. Centuries since I last stood beneath sun warmed leaves, years upon years since I felt the breath of Eden’s rivers surge against my ankles. The cold these days is not just outside but within bone, within soul. My hands, gnarled and numb with frost, recall the weight of forbidden fruit, the brittle softness of my last son’s brow. My back still aches from nights spent curled in the shelter of fallen stone, and my eyes blink against a brightness that no longer yields promise. Hope has grown cautious in me, like a wolf sick animals sniffing the wind for scent of home.
I remember the mountain’s unclimbable hunger, its slopes stripped by storm and the gnawing teeth of ice. I remember the taste of snow in my mouth, the trickle of blood over my lip where wind had split me. Even here, at the roof of the world, where the winds peel clouds from the vaults and sunstroke burns the snow to waterless crystal, I cannot outrun the knowledge that pursues me. For when the memories come hard and sudden, like stones tumbling in the dark, they bring with them Eve’s last breath and Abel’s stillness, Cain’s absence and the echo of God’s silence.
Once, I believed myself to be the memory of mankind, the father of all living. Now I am but a shadow of longing, a solitary presence in an empty age. I have chased God through frost and dark, through dreams thick with warning, through years that grind grief finer than dust. Still, I am driven, searching for the Garden that once held us all. Searching, perhaps, for forgiveness, or for the courage to remember what was lost.
Mabey God is not on the other side of this long icy stretch. Maybe he live still, with my descendant. Mabe my children are the fruits of the great trees of life that once stood nourishing the first of us. Though I was born of red earth and clay, they are born of flesh. Linage of mine, maybe they hold the key.
“The descent begins just as the sun, pale and broken, splits the horizon in the east. The world below is blue and desperate frost choking the fjords and smoldering emanates from the valley, ancient trees bent beneath the weight of season upon season of snow and famine. Adom pauses, gazing as he travels over the empty world. Mountains stretch in silhouette, cathedral boned, and remote, huge fangs frozen in the act of devouring earth and sky. The ice shelves fade behind him. Yet, the wind carves bitterness into skin and mind. Below he will find his kin in giant wooden structure based in stone. Nestled tight against the mountain’s roots. A kingdom of walls and rage”
There is a rhythm to footsteps on stones. Gravel sliding, bones aching. The careful balance of muscle and will. My staff, the last remnants of the tree of life. Grown from a sapling once plucked at the edge of the river Chaim flowing from the great tree. This is a steading comfort in my palm. Each step seems to echo down into a world I once fled. Unwaning of its pain, and my lost ambitions.
Even now, as I descend, I can feel Eden’s presence a shadow. The cherubim’s silent, endless vigil, the sword’s luminous fire spinning in memory. No path leads back, nor ever could. Glory razed the Garden as quickly as flame consumes dry reeds. Its gates, I am told by dream or madness, are sealed until the world itself is reborn from fire and ash.
A sound, a memory’s echo, halts me mid‑stride.
I shift my grip on the staff and feel the weight of the white animal skin wrapped around my waist, tugging downward at my vary soul. I reach up and touch the small wooden clasp that holds the torn white mantle over my shoulder.
At first it is only the keening of wind through the broken stones, but then comes the whisper of Eve’s laughter. Evalentine, my love. The smell of honey and coconut paired with the scent of horses fills the air.
I’m drawn back to the earliest days. I walked with God for eons, watching Him create, yet I never felt whole. Even in paradise with my Creator, I sensed He had more planned for me. In a moment of calm I turned to Him and said, “Yahweh, my Father… might I have now what You have planned for me to obtain?”
He understood. Even paradise is incomplete when you have no one to share it with.
That evening He laid me to rest beneath Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life; the same place He molded me from clay. When I awoke, I felt diminished, as though half my stature had been taken in the night. My ribs ached, and there was a strange absence in me; as if I were missing legs, fingers, toes, even ears, as though a whole other self had been peeled away. My balance was wrong. I felt as if I had been two, and now was one.
And then I saw her. God had taken a side of me, and there she stood; my better half. I felt unfinished, broken, dismayed… until she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around my waist. In that moment I was whole again. So long as I had her, I would remain whole.
My body hums once more. Everything shifts, and the feeling turns to sorrow. A scream in the distance as rocks fall, flashes of blood, and a silent child fill my mind. Pain strikes my chest as I lower to my knees.
This is how the memories come; unbidden, brutal. Never lingering in the safe warmth of nostalgia. Always returning as wounds, as visions night after night, each layered over the other. Flashes of red, the bloom of pain, the surprise of betrayal. Once these dreams brought fear, sometimes even madness, but now they bring only hard clarity. My memory is not a single wound but a field of scars. One I have yet to map.
As night falls on me again I close my distance to my first Kin and their homeland. When I wake I will start my new journey, leaving the wilderness and facing the turmoil of civilization.
“Adam dreams of days past, pain, sorrow, longing happiness. All but distant memories unable to be reached.”
I stagger and fall, face against the hard grit of snow flecked shale. My eyelids flutter. Darkness rushes in, and with it, a vision.
We are standing at Eden’s threshold. I turn and see Eve, younger than I remember her, light pooling at her feet as though she walks always in dawn. Her eyes are wide a hazel fluttering of green and brown, yet filled with questions and sorrow. Behind her, the way to the Garden is blazing. A column of fire twists, angelic and restless. The sword guarding the gate echoes unspoken, burning words as bright as the sun.
But as I reach for Eve’s hand, the world shudders, and memory shifts to a new tableau. Eve doubled over in pain against the roots of a dying fig, night tearing open above us, blood and amniotic water slicking the earth. The Face of a newborn splits the viod. The fragile, desperate life of our last son. For a moment, hope. Then, just as quickly, the silence fills the chilling air. In the dream, the child’s face blurs. Was it Seth, or another? We lost so many to their own kin. I mourn each, even those whose faces I cannot recall.
Next, the vision sharpens. Abel, radiant, tender and lifting a lamb. Its wool white against the red of his sacrifice, the scent of blood fresh and holy. Cain at his side, fists clenching the soil, face streaked with sweat and longing. God’s favor devine, a brightness toward Abel, a shadow toward Cain. I watch, paralyzed as Cain’s anger sharpens into resolve. In the field, I witness it all. The stone rising, Abel’s surprise, the shattering of innocence. Blood soaks into the earth and all joy dies in a single heartbeat. The first, yet not the last. The start of unending blood shed. The sign of a fallen world, far from Gods loving embrace.
Dreams chase each other, layer on layer. Exile; nights spent listening for the footfall of God walking through cold constellations; Eve beside me, holding her sorrow silently. “What have we done?” she whispers, and her voice is both question and indictment.
I wake with tears freezing against my cheek. My jaw hurts from clenching. I hold back tears, uncertain who might notice or respond. The slope is getting steeper; moving forward feels more like persistence than faith. Beneath me ice and stones shift. Once, I prayed for forgiveness. Now I pray only to remember my Loves face as it was before exile, before grief sculpted it into something holy and afraid.
“As his eye adjust to the light of a new day, all that haunted him through the nigh slowly fade, yet always there,
Abel’s laughter, tangled in the wool of a lamb.
Cain’s silence, the way he watched Abel as if he could answer all.
The mark placed upon Cain’s brow, a sign both curse and mercy, more visible to his family than to the rest of the world.
Eve bent over the grave of her seventh son, the dirt clinging to her nails, her palms raw.
The birth and death of sons whose names have not been spoken in a century, so intimate is his shame and regret.”
Each flash is a reminder that I am not only father but witness. Shaper and destroyer, the first memory that all my children will carry, even when they cannot bear to remember. The first sin, rings across time.
The world here is heavy with silence, but not empty. Far below, smoke rises, a charred smudge against the snow. Promising, perhaps, the presence of others. I watch it, hesitant, shamefulness at my feet. For many years, my focus has solely been on the pursuits of Yahweh. However, the regret regarding the children affected by my actions and omissions has become more pronounced than any other concern.
For a long span I have not stirred. Each memory weighs on me, as guilt shifts into resolve, a grief I can not escape or erase. In the moments of light and day I recall God’s final words to me,
“You are dust, and to dust you will return. ~ But from that dust, hope will one day rise again~.”
The promise is bitter, perhaps even cruel. Yet I have seen in dream the shadow of catastrophe growing. A winters long night, a darkness swallowing all. As the first, I have lived tragedies both primal and repeated. The loss of a paradise, the sundering of true love, and the fracturing of a family. Still, there is the smallest seed of possibility twisted amidst the roots of sorrow. It is what compels me now to leave the forgotten wastelands behind and seek out those who bear my blood, my hopes and my failings.
By midday, I stumbled into a valley shaped by a river frozen more blue than steel. Here, I kneel as I scoop a crust of snow. I hold it to my lips, a sacrament of silence. I reflect on the first time the land rebelled against me. Thorns in the heel, bitter roots, fields refusing to yield. Grief is everywhere in the world now, weathered into rock, pressed into ice, written in the bloodlines of every living thing. Yet beneath snow I sense the hidden persistence of green, waiting, wanting…
A new dream crashes over me, not so much a memory as a vision. I see a city down in the mist. A place torn wide open by violence and Rage. Its gates are carved not with songs of praise, but with the snarling faces of wolves, of idols crowned in ice and stone. Lights flicker within, alien and bright. Banners fly from the battlements, each displaying a symbol of a sword crossed with a raven’s wing. A feeling of guilt floods through me. As if the banners themselves laid my sins out Infront of me for all the world to see.
This is the place Eve once saw in vision. A, she wept as she told me of a place filled with wisdom turned in upon itself. Where gods not of my making hold court and the children of my children kneel to new masters. They have built a kingdom atop a graveyard. Norse in name, but ancient in its longing for strength, for memory, for meaning. Odin watches from his high hall, an eye lost to knowledge. Thor hammers against the prison of fate, Loki laughs from the edges of shadow, sowing division and doubt. All have fallen from grace, left to there own making.
A whisper crests on the frozen breeze, a memory, a vision. A feeling I have not yet uncovered.
“You must go. You must speak, and witness, and remember. The flood is coming. The world will bleed again. Yet not all is lost.”
An echo from a dream held in the night. I shudder, knowing prophecy and warning. As wisdom and sorrow, have always been a burden atop my shoulders. I gathered my staff. I rise from the cold earth.
The sky thickens, night falls black as memory. The flames along the gates of the city spark suddenly. Each step down into the valley is a letting go of pride, of innocence, of the hope that anyone else will remember as I do. Yet as my feet strike earth, I feel again the stubborn ache of love. That feeling I was once named father, and may yet be so, if only I can humble myself to ask forgiveness from children and from God.
I move forward, into exile yet again, holding fast to a promise thin as winters sunlight,
“That even in mourning, even in wandering, even in a world on the edge of forgetting, the seed of hope is never lost.” The whispers of my Isha wring true, Eve and her eternal wisdom.
If she were here, she would remind me that no punishment, not even exile, is forever. Like the phoenix, the wound carved into the heart of the world may still be a pathway to redemption. I do not believe as easily as she did, but as the night lengthens, I hang my hope upon her memory. Her hand in mine, her faith lighting the long road into the unknown.
I am Adam. Father, exile, wanderer. I descend, now, not to escape the past, but to meet what remains of it, to remake, if I can, the broken circles of love and promise lost. The snow deepens around my feet. The lights of the fallen city draw closer.
And somewhere, beneath the hush of wind and time, I hear the heartbeat of the world. Ancient, sorrowful, enduring and urging me forward. Toward the shape of faith yet unwritten.
(More on the horizon…)
{All material posted is copyrighted to Jared Shaw}
Leave a Comment: