The Golden One
Chapter 7 – The Full Moon
Three years had passed since Aphrodite's last visit.
The full moon rose slowly, enormous, far too white. The entire field turned silver. The ark, already finished, already stocked, already sealed from within, looked like a sleeping animal in the middle of the clearing.
I was prepared.
And, at the same time, I was not.
No one truly prepares for the extinction of their own species. You can stack wood, store seeds, train the body, bless a hull. You can calculate. You cannot rehearse the silence that comes after.
I stood on the upper deck, hands on the rail, looking at the golden ground where the last of my race still walked. Some ate. Others slept. No one looked at the sky. No one felt the weight of the moon.
For an instant, the thought returned.
'Take a few of them.'
Only an instant.
Then it sank to the back of my mind, where I had already buried it years before.
They would be dead weight.
For the Golden Humans, living and dying barely mattered. It was almost the same as sleeping. There was no desire. There was no fear. There was no reason to fight. Saving them would change nothing. It would only take space, food, air — and draw attention.
If anyone later asked why I had survived, the favor of Zeus and Aphrodite would already be enough. The king of the gods and a principal goddess. That alone marked me as different. One mortal. One only.
If there had been many inside the ark, it would have looked suspicious.
I could even say, if they asked, that I was saved only by coincidence: an old blessing on the wood, nothing more.
There was no reason to save them.
The moon reached its highest point.
Then the sky laughed.
A thunderbolt left the clouds with a force that made the chest tremble. It was not ordinary thunder. It was a decree. The first drop fell on my hand. Then came the rain — intense, heavy, endless, as if Olympus itself had been turned into a jar.
The seas of the world began to tremble.
I felt it before I saw it. The earth under the clearing vibrated. Far away, a roar of water. The streams swelled. The low fields vanished. The union of earth and sea closed over everything — mud, salt, rain, torn roots. Later, from that same mixture, Antaeus would be born, son of Poseidon and Gaia. On that night, however, there was no birth. There was only the end.
The water reached the ark.
The blessed hull rose.
The world, outside, fell.
I was thrown into Poseidon's great sea. Not as a common shipwrecked man. As a stubborn piece of wood in the midst of a furious god. The ark spun, rose, dropped, struck waves that should not have existed in the field I knew. Outside, between mist and rain, the first breath of extinction spread.
Sighs.
Whispers.
Death walked in the fog.
Hades was there, even without a form. I heard him. Not with my ears — with my skin. Cries without a mouth. Blood that was not blood, and yet could be felt: the iron smell of earth swallowing golden bodies that did not fight, that merely fell asleep while the mud pulled them back.
Poseidon screamed in the sea. Torment. Wave against wave. The hull of the ark groaned, but did not yield. Zeus's blessing held every plank.
And Zeus…
The thunder did not stop.
Every bolt was a signature. Every crash, a confirmation. The new era did not ask permission. It erased.
I went down from the deck and shut the last gate from inside. Water beat against the outside like fists. Within, the trees I had planted trembled at the roots, the animals cried softly, the wine in the amphorae chimed.
I sat on the wooden floor, back against the wall, the moon still visible through a high crack — white, cruel, perfect.
'It is happening.'
'I knew. I always knew.'
Even so, the chest hurt in a way training never taught.
Outside, my race was ending.
In here, I continued.
Not by merit. By calculation. By an ark. By a wise request made to a king who wanted to erase his father. By a goddess who had returned one last time with pomegranate seeds in her lap.
The rain did not stop that night.
Nor the next.
Poseidon's sea became too large to have a name. Gaia's earth became too small to have an owner. And between the two, the ark floated — a world within another world, carrying the last Golden Human who refused to sleep.
I rested my forehead on the cold wood.
'Do not look at the present.'
'The present is still screaming.'
'Think of what comes after. Until this ends.'
Zeus's thunder rolled again, too close to sound satisfied.
I did not sleep.
I stayed listening to the sighs in the mist, the screams in the sea, the rain against the hull.
The tribulation had not ended.
It had only begun.
And I was already thinking of the future — not because the present was light, but because it was the only way to get through it.