The PowWow

The photographs were spread across my desk in the order Voss had walked us through them — left to right, column by column, the careful documentation of a university imaging department that had done its job well. High resolution. Clean margins. The tablets themselves reduced to paper, which somehow made the argument they contained easier to look at and harder to dismiss.

Jacob was at his desk with the Parker open to Genesis 6. His coffee was most likely cold again. The dog bed had his feet in it.

I worked through the argument the way I worked through most things — slowly, without rushing toward a conclusion, letting each piece sit in its own space before moving to the next. The Nephilim existed. That wasn't the text's claim alone — that was Scripture, that was archeology, that was Jacob sitting twelve feet away from me. The Sons of God took wives. The flood came. The lineage survived. We were here, so the survival of the lineage was a moot point.

Every verifiable claim in those tablets was accurate.

That was the problem.

"Carbon dating will come back clean," I said.

Jacob didn't look up. "People lied in their speech then too."

"You think someone fabricated ancient tablets?"

"I think it is not a far cry." He turned a page. "It is part of why the Book of Enoch is not canon. Provenance matters. Authorship matters. The canon was not assembled carelessly."

I looked at the photographs.

This is why it's dangerous.

Not a conspiracy theory — those were easy to dismiss, full of internal contradictions and motivated reasoning visible from a distance. This was something else. A reinterpretation built on facts I couldn't dispute, presented by a scholar I had no basis to dismiss, arguing a conclusion I could follow step by step from its premises. It was like standing in the Church of the Open Hand eight months ago watching people receive something real — genuine warmth, genuine presence, genuine healing — without being able to see yet what was underneath it. Without Jacob across the room and thirty years of formation telling me what the frame actually was, I could follow this argument.

I could follow it right now. I could see exactly how Voss had arrived where she arrived. I could see the path from there to wherever human understanding, or Nephilim understanding, for that matter, would corrupt it.

"The text is a mirror," Jacob said. He was looking at Genesis now, not at me. "It shows the Nephilim what they want to see. Nathanial wanted supremacy. The text gives him supremacy. Someone hungry for belonging —"

"Wait." I sat back.

Jacob looked up. Something moved in his eyes — the quality of attention he gave when he knew I was going somewhere and wanted to see where that was.

"We're descendants," I said. "So is Roiya. But that's our family lineage — we know where we came from." I held his gaze. "Besides us three and Nathanial Lim — how many Nephilim descendants are there? And more importantly, how many of them know what they are?"

Jacob sat back in his chair.

The question settled into the room and stayed there.

He was quiet long enough that I didn't rush it. Jacob thinking was worth waiting for.

"What is the point, then," he said finally. Not quite a question.

"The Bible as canon," I said, "is a testimony. Old Testament and New. It is the verified, assembled, Spirit-guarded record of what is true. The Dead Sea Scrolls — they contained pieces of canonical scripture."

Jacob nodded. "Pieces of non-canonical scripture too. Enoch among them."

"Right. And what's on these tablets goes against both canonical and non-canonical scripture?"

He met my eyes. "Yes." A beat. "That alone is sufficient reason to discard them."

I nodded slowly. The argument was answerable. That wasn't the issue. The issue was the distance between a clear answer and the people who would never hear it — the ones who would find those tablets through a social media article, without thirty years of formation, without a Jacob.

Which brought me back to Roiya.

I rubbed my fingers against my temples. "She knows her lineage now. She's been studying. She's asking the right questions." I looked at the photographs on my desk. "Do we bring her into this one?"

Jacob was already shaking his head. Slow. Certain. "Inadvisable."

His one word answers brought a certain comfort to a struggling thought process.

"Yeah." I didn't like it. I liked it less the longer I sat with it. "Walking her directly toward a text designed to exploit exactly what she's still working through — that's the mistake."

"Yes."

"She won't like being kept at distance."

"No," Jacob agreed. "She won't."

We sat with that for a moment. The discomfort of a right call that didn't feel good.

I picked up one of the photographs and looked at it again — the careful columns, the preserved surface, the argument laid out in a dead language by an author who had not signed his name.

"It may not matter anyway," I said. "With everything on social media."

Jacob looked at me.

"She may already know," I said.

The office was quiet. The coffee maker had nothing to add. Outside, the evening had settled into the particular stillness of a city that had no idea what was moving through it.