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Ancient Earth. A quick view of a mother reading “The tales of Enlil and Enki, by the Brothers Grimm ” to her children. Enlil and Enki are indeed very real beings of great power in this world, but that is exactly why they picture so prominently in even children's stories: cultural heroes and icons, who had lifted the local species upward from the dust.
Morning comes, and as the sun crests the horizon, bolts of plasma not of the Earth sweep across all of the lands as great sheeted flames from heaven, tornadic winds and a pitiless rain of fire and sand, great balls of fire unrolling and shooting forth in streams that ignite whole streets at once; quartzite statues discolor and scorch at thousands of degrees, granite edifices explode, multi-ton faces slough from blocks of diorite; across the city's beautiful rolling parks, some of the towering trees crisp away in a flash while the material form of others responds to these forces by a lithifying in the instant and shattering in turn. To the west, the lands and lakes blow open, flooding downward and racing across a great ringed city, a torrent of mud scouring a great city and razing all to the bedrock in its course to the ocean. Farther west, central to the ocean, a small continent sank, leaving behind only shallow water limestone and granitic fragments evidencing its passing.
This scene is repeated in every continent from west to east, and from east to west again.
Pulses of meltwater wash across once-dry lands, in some cases eroding the very foundations and bringing about subsidence. Whole tectonic plates shift, rising in some places and falling in others, bringing up what was submerged, while swallowing whole regions full fathoms downward into the depths, accompanied by basalt plumes and vast hadean bodies of mineral brine unleashed thereby. Methane clathrate finds its release from pressure within the oceans' abyssal crevasses even as the main turned the light magenta of bacteria and archaea multiplying and belching forth hydrogen sulfide in unprecedented abundance. As lakes and oceans boil, the steam combines with released carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds and blasted topsoil particulates so that the very rains of the Earth are as acid and temperatures plummet for decades and centuries hereafter. Some people survive, though only handfuls here and there that had been deep within the ground when the twilit sky had grown bright.
Flash forward ~11,600 years to modern digs, two secret societies at an archaeological dig hundreds of miles from the desert's nearest border, one trying to discover and unveil The Truth, the other trying to keep buried the Hidden History. A cold truce prevailed as they debated over an uneasy agreement: a cry is heard “That could be fourth dynasty!” over how some primitive slaves had shaped granite with bronze tools, boring 500 times as quickly as modern technology... using sticks and stones — and it was clearly them, given the crudely performed graffiti etched onto a few surfaces, as long as one ignored instances of overlapping superior carvings with far older weathering and the question of how they'd managed to perform CAD-level precision work. Clearly they simply died off or moved away due to having depleted all of their nearby water sources. Each side feels some uncomfortable tickling thought beneath all of this, as if it doesn't quite sit right, but it skitters away whenever they pause to give it attention. Each side is thoroughly infiltrated by the other, the agents of each often knowing of only one or two others (hence typically making matters worse for everyone), and some of the double agents are actually triple agents. As if entranced, neither side ever thinks that the ancient tome might be just some book, nor that the clearly religious arrangement might simply be someone's normal home. Neither side ever has a chance to wonder why such thoughts don't occur to them or how they're able to so blithely ignore such glaring inconsistencies.
The one thing that all agreed heartily on, slapping one another's backs smugly, was that the Schoch — von Däniken — Wilcock paradigm was clearly and thoroughly put to rest.
Far out in the cold and dark depths of ice beyond the wall around their world, a voice whispered, lulling them.
O ~~~ O