A silver age—when the current generation of gods, the Olympians, began to rule. Men had been nothing but blubbering babies, supported by their mothers until they were a hundred years old. Zeus had destroyed them for their impiety by raining down fire from the heavens...
A bronze age—when warlike men had nearly devastated the Earth and caused such great pain and anxiety to Mother Gaia that Zeus decided to send a terrible flood. Zeus had given Pandora, a beautiful woman, a box containing curses. He then offered her to Epimetheus as wife. When Epimetheus accepted her, Pandora eventually opened the box and caused the flood. Most of mankind drowned, except for Deucalion and his pious wife Pyrrha. These two survivors, by casting stones over their shoulders, had become the father and mother of the current age of men...
—which was an age of iron. Men were made from stone as much as flesh and were just as hard and flinty inside as that implied. They warred, stole, murdered, and dragged women and children off as slaves. If her father was to be believed, all their great heroes had waged a single war for ten years now without stopping.
And this world would end in darkness and an earthquake.
Isme wondered what the next world would be like. Each world was worse than the last—and so she expected that the next would be the worst yet. This is why she followed her father’s instructions to learn as much as possible how to survive. After the darkness and earthquake, the fifth age of men would begin.
Not iron, not stone, Isme thought. I wonder what the new men will be. I wonder who will create them—and she glanced at her father, at Epimetheus, and thought:
Perhaps Father will make them, too. Or perhaps there will be some new race of gods who will replace the Olympians the way they replaced the Titans.
Her father was watching her carefully, as though expecting some reaction. Isme considered; was she supposed to feel something? Perhaps he expected her to be happy about him revealing that he was one of his stories, which she so loved.
Yet Isme found she was hardly surprised. This seemed like an inevitable revelation—she had always known, in some way, that her father was part of the stories. And in a way, she thought, this relates me to the stories, too—I am the daughter of Epimetheus. And birth child of someone else, some other man I do not know, who has not been here all my life, and therefore I do not love like Father...
And she said, “Is that what you needed to tell me? What do you want me to know—to guess my birth father? Why is he important when the world is ending?”
Epimetheus lifted a big paw-like hand to rub at his naked crown. He said, “Do you recall all the singing creatures in my stories?”
“Yes,” said Isme. And she began to list them: “There are sirens, and nymphs and dryads, and Muses, beautiful Grandmother Kalliope, and even some of the gods—Apollon, Dionysos, Hermes...” And her mind circled to her favorite, and just like that, she knew. “And Orpheus—the man who could sing the dead back to life.”
Stirring in her seat, she said, “It is him, isn’t it? He was the man I was born to. And that is why I am here with you, instead of him. Because he was torn to pieces and killed by the maenads.”
If she was going to have a birth father aside from Epimetheus himself, then she could not think of a better one. Isme had always liked the story and admired the tales of Orpheus’s wonderful music. She believed that he had received his songs from the same place she did—the deep inner well inside which she could hear their voices before they were sung, asking to be born into the world.
But she paused, frowned. “Wait. That cannot be truth. Isn’t Orpheus’s wife dead? He was not able to bring her back to the living because he broke Hades’s condition and looked back at her. He cannot be my father because then I would have no mother.”
“You did,” said Epimetheus. He scratched at the back of one hand with the other. “She was queen of a small town near Thrace. And she was one of the maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces. You were born nine months later.”
That sounded odd to Isme, because she did not understand how her birth father being torn apart could produce a child, but she accepted this as just another strange thing that happened in stories. She hypothesized, “And this queen’s husband was angry for his wife having such a child, so he had me exposed to die in the wilds, and you found me.”
Her father chuckled. “You know the pattern of stories well, Isme.” He regained his troubled look. “But not quite. You see, your mother’s husband did not know. They had been trying for a child for many years and when you were born, you looked to be the only heir. Therefore, he took you to Delphi to hear about your fate. The priestess gave him this prophecy: that you would witness and understand the end of the world.”
Somehow, while everything else had seemed like puzzle pieces falling into place, and therefore was not altogether that surprising, the news of this prophecy seemed to leap out at Isme like some kind of clawed animal. She felt all the muscles in her back, her arms, turn rigid and trembling from the strain.
She had known of the prophecy ending the world since before she could speak.
But—
“The prophecy of the end of the world—it was mine?” she asked. “I thought... I thought that your brother had said the prophecy.” Even as she spoke, more understanding was coming to her—for if her father was Epimetheus, “the afterthought,” that meant his brother was Prometheus, “the forethought,”
