Total blackness around me. I did not know where I was. Through my eyes I could see below, my men rushing into the shocked, clumsy, presumably wine-heavy enemy. I saw hands wrestling with rope, the enemy beginning to react. Through my other eyes, I saw an endless plain of blackness and that sound, not of the clash of swords, but that sound that I had never heard before except in the crash of the angel’s voice so many years ago. The sea. I opened my eyes, and there it was, a raging green plain surging against itself, lit by fiery spears of red lightning.

I felt detached from everything.

Both the gods I knew and the god I found began with the sea. Creation, not from nothing, but over the broad expanse of the sea. And under a light that was not day or night the silent sea hurled itself on an empty creation for a time that can not be measured.

My father told me from that deep came the united mountain of heaven and earth. It was called Anki. Then came the creation of the air god, Enlil, and the sky was An, and the Earth was Ki. The mountain broke.

My god told me that for an eon He hovered over the face of the deep like an exhalation of breath, bodiless and empty. He combed his fingers over it, looking. What was down there?
An stole heaven, and Enlil stole earth. When there was nothing over the deep but gods stealing each other and fighting each other, Enlil and his wife Nanlil gave birth to the sun. Then Enlil, for reasons unknown, disguised himself to seduce his own wife and gave birth to the moon.

God too did not create mankind until the seventh day. And when He created light, and He too created light first, it was the sun, then later that lesser light which all shepherds know, the moon. He spoke into the blackness over the waving ocean, and he said let there be light, and there was light.

Why? Why that order, both in the new, and the old?

Because in the sea lived the monster.

The darkness flashed as lightning tore it.

I saw, rooted, I could not feel my body, I did not know that I was there. Darkness swelled and roiled, swarming across itself in my vision, deep and impenetrable darkness. I could see a figure striding through it. God. I could not see his face but I saw radiance streaming around him like wild hair. He held in his hands a glowing orb which pulsed with light.

He stopped, and the darkness howled at him. With one hand he held the maw of the darkness open and with the other he shoved the orb down its throat.

For a moment nothing happened. The orb hung suspended, shining with a dull radiance like an egg or a pearl. Then, suddenly, it began to flicker and grow. Veins of light shot through the darkness, like the Earth quaking. Through the rolling shadows, I heard a voice that was not a voice say

Let there be light.

As I watched in awestruck fear, the darkness swirled around the light, trying to contain it, trying to snuff it. But the more it struggled, the brighter the light grew.

The scene changed. Now, a massive sea lashed angrily on an invisible shore, bubbling green with the tendrils of the suddenly roaring light. Over its surface God strode, enormous, surrounded by the exploding fingers of light which he had set in the darkness. I became aware of another figure, a titan, a monster, moving with murderous intent across the peaks of the frothing waves. God turned and the monster closed on him, and the two locked in a terrible battle.
Elsewhere I saw my men beginning to withdraw, each with another rider behind them on the saddle, a prisoner rescued, a person, who would have to be cared for or returned to their home. I saw the enemy’s swords and my people’s shields, locked in a deadly embrace.

In the blackness the pounding of the titans' feet whipped the waves into broth, and then, as I watched, transfixed, into solidity. It was the pounding of their struggle that stamped out from the water, a surface. And as I looked I became aware that, now, they stood on Earth, which had been born from the battle on the wave. They strove and clung and clawed at one another.

At last, with a tremendous heave, God cast the monster down and raised His spear. Then, with the monster panting before Him, in a gesture of indescribable weariness, He lowered his titanic head.

Let the darkness be.

The still-living monster crawled into the sea, leaving a trail of blood while God rested on the tip of his spear. God closed his eyes and from the blood grew flowering trees and fruit trees, and root plants, and seed plants. The orb of light grew in the darkness above and turned the darkness to day, and in the now pale, quiet sea, there was no sign of the monster.
I saw my men withdraw, bloodied but alive, and that scene vanished and there was only the blackness around me and the roaring wind.

And when the darkness came it flowered with stars, pinpricks of the pulsating light. And God climbed the starry path to his throne in the darkness, alone, to watch the monster. To see that it never returned. And that it never disappeared.

Between God and the monster stood the new expanse of heaven, plucked from the face of the sea, the depth of that sea, and the fruitful Earth. And between them lay the life of the world, balanced on each pole, equal as a globe. For God made sky as the water was, the Earth has no direction, perfect in all its aspects.

For why would God let the monster live?

Why would there be monsters at all, if God did not so will it?

The moon he hung in the sky like a lantern on a pole, to watch forever over the monsters of the uncreated deep. And the moon rose in the sky as my men and I rode back, tired, sore, and delirious with joy, to our little city in the wilderness.