.the sons of God saw the daughters of men

Azael walked over the hills, looking for some of the other Angels. They’d been gathering wives down here for a while, maybe they knew what it was that he wanted to do with them.

As he crested another rise, he found a few camels spread across a field of brush. One was more than twice as big as the rest. A young woman leaned against a rock near where it was stripping leaves off the branches.

Azael waved as he approached the giant beast. “Hail, Vual,” he said.

“Hail, Azael,” the other angel replied around a mouth full of leaves. New to the whole ‘taste’ thing, Azael found a bush some distance from Vual’s and ripped off a branch. The leaves didn’t have much flavor. All they brought to mind were days and days of sunshine.

He stood quietly beside the other angel, trying to see what it was that drew Vual here. The woman seemed content enough to sit on or next to the rock, toying with the fringe of her waist wrap. Azale imagined grabbing that fringe and yanking. 

After three days, he asked Vual: “What are we doing here?”

“Waiting,” he answered, turning to select a new brush. 

“Waiting for what?”

“Oh, no,” Vual said with a laugh. “If we were waiting for something, then the waiting would end.” Azael stared at the back of the angel. He turned to the woman, who smiled up at him and shrugged.

Azael found that he liked the way her skin moved when she did that. Obviously, more questions needed to be asked so she’d lift her shoulders and breasts again.

“What,” he asked Vual, “is the point of waiting for nothing?” 

The giant camel stopped chewing and turned to face Azael, drawing that angel’s attention away from the woman’s chest. “We’re not waiting for NOTHING,” he explained slowly. “We’re waiting.” Azael scratched his skull beneath the horn, trying to make sense of this.

“Waiting isn‘t incidental,” Vual explained. “It’s the goal. Forbearance. Endurance. The willing suspension of any and all agendas in order to fully appreciate the passage of time.”

“Ah,” Azael said, feeling that something was desired of him. He tapped his foot on the ground, raising a small cloud. “But why did you come down to Earth for that? Isn’t that what we did in the Waters?”

“No. Nothing ever changes in the Waters.” Vual went back to eating leaves. “Here, the days pass, the body ages, seeds become plants become leaves become…”

“Camel poop,” the woman said. It was the first sound she’d made since Azael lay eyes upon her. He looked at her in surprise. Across from him, her husband nodded.

“Change builds up like piling time,” he said. “Up there, anyone can sit in one spot for eighty thousand years. Here, it’s hard to sit still for an hour. Unless you’re strong.”

“Interesting,” Azael said after a while. He gestured downwards. “And how does having a wife help you with that?”

Vual shrugged, an interesting sight in itself, but not in the way the woman’s shrugs were. “I just bought her from Mammon. He seemed excited to sell her to me.”

“Oh? What’s ‘sell’ mean?”