? The An-Gal Universe

  Episode 7

  The Flood

  The End of the First Time

  The world screamed.

  Above the buried shelters of Atlantis, the sky burned white. For a moment, the heavens glowed brighter than the sun—and then the light fell. The asteroid struck the northern ice cap with the fury of creation unmade.

  The impact tore the planet open.

  For a thousand miles in every direction, ice became fire. Two miles of frozen mass vaporized in a single breath, exploding into the upper atmosphere in towers of steam that punched through the stratosphere. Shockwaves rippled outward faster than sound, faster than thought.

  The oceans rose to meet them.

  Tsunamis thousands of feet high raced across the world, devouring coastlines. Entire continents vanished beneath walls of water that moved with the weight of mountains. Every wave carried the bones of empires, every retreating tide left silence where cities had stood.

  The flood did not come for Atlantis alone.

  Across the world, cities of stone and light met the same end. Great walls—carved with precision no chisel could match today—cracked and fell beneath the advancing seas. Temples older than memory, aligned to forgotten stars, were swallowed whole.

  In the high plateaus of the west, where vast terraces once climbed toward the heavens, water and ash rained together. In the lush valleys of the east, monoliths toppled like chess pieces before a rising tide. Even the mighty rivers, whose banks had cradled the first songs of mankind, turned against their makers—surging backward, drowning their own birthplaces.

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  Across every continent, the story was the same: the Age of the First Builders ended in a single night.

  Only the greatest stones remained. Cathedrals of granite, shattered but defiant. Pyramids half-buried in new deserts. Circles of megalithic rock that would one day become legend.

  The rest—art, fire, language—was gone.

  Mountains crumbled. Valleys drowned. The air turned to boiling rain.

  Atlantis itself did not fall. It was scoured.

  The flood slammed into its concentric rings like the fist of a god. Walls of crystal and gold shattered as if they were clay. The pyramid at its heart exploded outward, its crown hurled into the sky, its foundation ground down to stone. What had been the greatest civilization in the world was erased—not collapsed, but cleansed.

  And when the waters finally withdrew, only a vast scar remained—a circle carved into the earth’s memory, where the city had been. The Eye of the world. The Eye of the Richat.

  Below the ruin, deep in the buried sanctums, the seven who had defied Rhaegon felt the world die.

  The earth convulsed above them. Shockwaves rippled through the bedrock. Even here, in the deepest halls of Anunnaki engineering, the light failed and the walls buckled. Mafdet pressed her hands to the trembling stone. “Hold,” she whispered to the earth, though she knew it could not hear.

  They could do nothing but wait—the gods reduced to witnesses.

  When the last echoes faded, they emerged into the light of a ruined dawn.

  Smoke covered the horizon. The air was thick with the smell of salt and ash. Where Atlantis had stood, there was only silence, and a circle of scarred stone gazing back like an unblinking eye.

  Thoth looked upon it and whispered, “The world has been washed clean. But so has the memory of what we were.”