the Black Sea.
“The research center is on St. Ivan Island,” Sveti said, pointing to a landmass in the middle of the bay, where a lighthouse sat at the highest point.
“The island was inhabited by Thracians between the fourth and seventh centuries B.C., but the lighthouse—or an early version of it—wasn’t constructed until the Romans arrived in the first century B.C. The island was considered holy, and has always been revered as a place of mystical discovery. The Romans would have found temples and monastic chambers built by the Thracians. To their credit, they preserved the nature of the island: A temple of Apollo was built and St. Ivan has remained a place of contemplation, ritual, worship, and secrets.” Sveti said, “We’ll dock in a few minutes, which leaves me just enough time to give you an update. As I understand it, you are well acquainted with Dr. Azov, but perhaps it is best if we start from the beginning.”
“No need,” Vera said. “I know that Azov has occupied the center on St. Ivan Island for over three decades—since before I was born. His outpost was created in the early eighties, when a body of research pointed to the presence of well-preserved artifacts under the Black Sea. Before this, angelologists stationed in Bulgaria worked near the Devil’s Throat in the Rhodope mountain chain, where they monitored the buildup of Nephilim and, of course, acted as a barrier should the Watchers escape. But as information came to light about the significance of the Black Sea—of Noah and the sons of Noah, in particular—Azov petitioned for an outpost here as well.”
“Clearly you’ve followed his work,” Sveti said. “Yet I wonder if you or your colleagues are aware that we are, at this very moment, working on the most exciting recovery project of the decade.”
“I assume that almost anything with Dr. Azov behind it would be of that nature,” she said.
Sveti smiled, as if pleased to have found a fellow Azov admirer. “I don’t have to tell you, then, that Azov is doing something that no one in the history of our field has done before. This center was founded so that we could conduct on-site exploration of artifacts pertaining to Noah and the Flood.”
Vera looked past Sveti to the island. She could make out the details of the lighthouse, its smooth stone spiraling around and around until it reached a series of windows at the top. Looking back toward the shore, she saw the village rising in the distance, as if emerging from the sea.
“So this is where the Nephilim got their second start,” Vera said.
“Over the years there have been many conjectures about what might lie underneath our waters—the lost civilization of Atlantis being one of them—but the most interesting theory, popular since the fourth century, is that Noah’s Ark landed on Mount Ararat, on what used to be the coast of Turkey.”
“But that’s a thousand miles away from here,” Vera said.
“True,” Sveti said. “And it’s no longer even close to the edge of the Black Sea. Scholars have always believed the actual recovery of objects from the ark to be impossible for this reason. A little over a decade ago, however, academics at Columbia University, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, published a book that changed the nature of investigations about the Flood. They believed that the myth of the Flood—which can be found in nearly every major mythological system, from the Greek to the Irish—had originated from a cataclysmic event that occurred roughly seventy-six hundred years ago. They posited that, as glaciers melted, water from the Mediterranean breached the sill of the Bosporus, and a deluge of water gushed over the land, wiping out ancient civilizations and creating what is now the Black Sea.”
Vera remembered when the book was published. Azov had mailed her articles about the controversy. “Serious scholars of the region agreed that the Bosporus had been breached, but they thought the scale that Ryan and Pitman proposed was completely off the mark. If I recall correctly,” she added, “their theories were attacked as unsubstantiated.”
“They were at the time. But then Robert Ballard, the American oceanographer and nautical explorer who’d made his name by discovering the Titanic, began to explore the Black Sea with submarines and advanced equipment. Even skeptics had to wonder if they weren’t onto something. What the world at large did not know was that Ballard was actually working under the advisement of Dr. Azov. And, as it turns out,” Sveti said, handing Vera a finely