I only remember my mother in much detail. She was absolutely radiant, with shimmering gold-blonde hair and warm, love filled pools of deepest blue for eyes. She would always laugh and her words were always soft and kind. I sometimes imagine her with wings, thus completing her angelic appearance. My father…I never knew much about him. He left when I was young. But I always will remember that dark aura he always carried…as evident as my mother’s radiance, just the opposite. I wondered why my mother would be with such a man. It wasn’t until millennia later that I learned the truth. My father never was a man…nor was my mother a woman. They weren’t human, see. They were really angel and half-demon, so that technically made me a nephilim.
However, my mom had disappeared as well just about a year before construction began. For a long while I assumed she died. I still do not know what had happened to her. Perhaps, in the next reality I will find out.
Here’s a strange thing about nephilim powers. They don’t appear until about a hundred years, and I was only about maybe twelve when the Tower of Babel was about to be constructed. So I was an ordinary boy, in essence. And that didn’t make my life any easier. The days were hot, rations were small, and the days were incredibly long. However, we all spoke the Common Language. That’s what I refer to it as: the language we all spoke at one point. Even though I spoke it, I don’t know what language it was. One theory is that it’s the same language the Creator spoke to Adam and Eve, and they spoke back in the Garden of Eden. Either way, it was the Common Language that kept us going. We sang songs and shared stories in that language, and it all kept us afloat. I still remember one song I used to sing. It can’t be translated now, of course, into any recognizable language, but I still know it all the same. Powerful, the song is now, almost magical.
But then, it happened.
The splitting of languages happened without warning. One moment, we were all speaking to one another, facing a hard, yet predictable hard day’s work. The next, construction had halted. I could only understand a few of my fellow workers; they were just as confused as I was. Soon everyone evacuated the site. Construction stopped. And the dream of the Tower of Babel died.
Work had distracted me from the disappearance of my mom. Now that the work was gone, my sorrow and grief and anger flooded me again. I remember that I ran off to a secluded part of town, a secret spot I would slip away to when they days were particularly hot. Though buildings surrounded me, there was one slim palm tree that grew there. And it faced the desert, and not the hussle and bussle of the streets. I sank down to the ground, my back against the trunk of a palm tree. And I cried.
As hot tears shed down my face, my mind kept repeating the same happenings over and over again; I had woken up from a good night’s rest in my bed…if you could call it a bed. It was really the most comfy spot on the floor I could find. But I couldn’t find my mom. I didn’t know where she was. Our house wasn’t that big, so it didn’t take me long to search everywhere to find her. I was really panicking then. I didn’t know what to do. I cried out her name over and over again. But there was no answer. I was an orphan.
It was well into the night before something ceased my wallowing. It was a noise, a noise out of place in that spot. My head jerked up and scanned the surroundings.
“Who’s there?” I cried out in the darkness. And then, he came out.