The Lord--Adonai, Elohim, the Almighty, I am that I am, YHWH, Lord of Hosts, God--stood mighty and tall, mounted atop His great fire-maned lion, sunlight arrowing off the facets of His diamond armor.
Beneath Him amid the lilies of the field stood a quiet man wearing simple brown robes and sporting a monk's tonsure. He looked down, unable to stand the glare of the Lord's radiance--or perhaps merely acknowledging his inadequacy.
A short distance away, close enough to listen, far enough to not be a part of any discussion, Metatron knelt with his bronze stylus and clay tablet at the ready. He stifled a yawn.
"So!" said the Lord, and His voice boomed and echoed in the stillness of the day. "Thou hast come!"
"As you see," said the quiet man.
"Whence comest thou?"
"Ah, well. Here and there and to and fro about the earth, and now I am here." He sketched a half-bow, then, as if recalling a forgotten resolve, he straightened and raised his eyes.
The Lord neither smiled nor frowned at this effrontery, merely maintained His gaze until the man blinked and coughed.
Metatron ignored the byplay, inscribing the words spoken onto his tablet. Sometimes he wondered what the point of this was. The perfect memory and perfect access to the past of an omniscient being surely superseded such fragile mortal instruments as clay tablets. The Lord had never to his knowledge actually
looked at any of the libraries worth of notes and dictation he'd provided over the millennia. Though now he thought of it, that was just as well, given how many of them were half full with doodles and scribblings.
He looked up from where he'd been idly playing with the stem of a golden lily. He'd apparently missed something, because the quiet man was talking again.
"But can one say that Job is truly faithful, truly holds nothing over God, within his heart? Can one truly know the depth of his faith, when it has never been tested? Surely any man, blessed with seven sons and three daughters, with a wife of surpassing beauty--to say nothing of his livestock in their milling thousands--surely any such man would give thanks to the Lord for his blessings? Surely you cannot say this is a wonder."
The opening words of a poem came to Metatron as he sat and listened, as a butterfly zipped past his ear.
Light upon the field of lilies.
But no, that didn't encompass the whole. It was proper to put the Lord first, but it needed the quiet man as well.
Light and darkness meet upon a field of lilies.
Deity and opposite
It was a shame to simply call them light and darkness, though. The Lord shed light, in brilliant scintillating radiance, but it wasn't precisely light, not in the sense the mortals saw it. The Lord cast a light that was something like the essence of life itself, of the universe and all that existed within it--though even that didn't quite capture the whole of it.
And darkness hardly described the quiet man, either. He did shed something that might be called darkness, but it wasn't, not really. He didn't cast shadows, and he was quite visible. It took some effort to discern the similar but opposite radiance emanating from him, a haze or shimmer in the air, like heat rising from desert sands. No, opposite was the wrong word--his darkness was not the converse of the Lord's radiance, but the inverse.
A few more descriptors, then, and an enjambment to better show the counterpoint of strength and weakness.
Light and darkness meet upon a field
of lilies
Deity and opposite
Life and death; vassal and Lord.
He shrugged. Some things couldn't be captured easily in words.
"What dost thou mean, a hedge?" came the righteous booming voice of the Lord.
Metatron looked up with a furtive head movement and started transcribing again. The Lord didn't
need his transcriptions, but it was still his role. He had been brought to transcribe, not to scribble poetry.
"A hedge, a wall, whatever you wish to call it. You've walled off his prosperity and made him untouchable. Without that, a simple run of bad luck and he'd be cursing your name."
There was something... interesting happening in the space between the Lord and the quiet man. Where the Lord's radiance met the quiet man's irradiance, the two effects bent and twisted round one another, then vanished. One might've expected a sort of mist or grayness at the intersection of the fields, but instead they simply canceled out. The space where they met was ordinary, empty air.
Well, no. Not exactly
empty. The dimensions were thinner there, stretched and bent along with the intersecting fields of radiance, and Metatron found he could see through it as through a pane of glass. And he knew he peered through time and not through space.
And he saw the fate of the field on which they met.
Dust and ashes, swept aside
Making way for crops and homes
Village life supplanting fields
and lilies
A few more lines escaped him, fell from his thoughts through the stylus and onto the clay tablet, before he recollected himself and looked at the Lord again.
The odd windowed effect was gone; the quiet man had taken a step back from the Lord and was looking at the ground again. He was smiling, now. "I will not touch your servant," he said. "As you have directed, but his fields and flocks and family, those I may do with as I will?"
The Lord did not nod--the movement was too similar to a bow to be possible to Him--but he waved His hand in an assent. "All that he hath is in thy power."
The quiet man gave his odd half-bow again, again straightened his spine, and then vanished in a swirl of smoke and whiff of brimstone.
Metatron couldn't help but feel that he'd missed something momentous.
"Come, scribe," said the Lord. He waved His hand again, this time in command. "Our purpose here is achieved."
Metatron scribbled a few more lines as he stood, before they fled his mind forever.
Bloodshed through the streets
Murder rouses in men's hearts
Forgotten are the light and dark
Life and death who met upon the field
Forgotten is what came before
Forgotten are
the lilies
"What doest thou?" said the Lord, and he sounded curious, though Metatron knew an omniscient being had no need of curiosity.
Metatron scanned the poem. Imperfect meter, questionable word choices, some needless repetition. Not his best work, even given the constraints of time. Not really of the quality one would wish to offer up to the Lord.
"Nothing," he said quietly. "It's nothing."
