Prologue
Genesis 6:1–4 — Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
Matthew 24:37-39 — But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.
For centuries, men had debated what those ancient words meant. Some believed they described a world that had vanished forever. Others believed they were symbolic.
They were not.
Millenia ago — in an age that human history could not fully account for — the Earth had been populated by creatures that should never have existed. Many were the offspring of the Watchers: fallen angels who were not part of the Luciferian rebellion but had abandoned their station and descended to Earth, who had taken human women as their own. Many were also the offspring of those who fell in the Luciferian fall. From those unions came something the ancient texts called by a single word.
Nephilim. Giants. Hybrid offspring of heaven and earth, carrying within their biology the genetic inheritance of two orders of creation that were never meant to combine. They were powerful beyond human strength, longer-lived than ordinary men, possessed of abilities the human body and mind could barely comprehend.
They were also immeasurably dangerous. Their violence was not the violence of animals competing for survival. It was the violence of intelligence applied to appetite without moral restraint. They had nearly ended humanity entirely.
Only the Flood stopped them.
Or so mankind believed.
The Flood did not destroy everything. Some went underground — deep into cave systems extending miles beneath the surface, into places no human explorer had ever reached. Some sealed themselves inside structures the world would later call pyramids, built to survive not merely time but catastrophe. Some descended into the oceans, into cities constructed on the floors of seas no human technology could yet reach. Some fled into space. Some escaped into dimensional realms that existed beyond the world humanity could perceive. Others were imprisoned by divine authority in the place the ancient texts called Tartarus — bound, restrained, and waiting for a judgment that had not yet come.
But none of the many who survived truly vanished. And more came into being after the flood when the rebel angels once again produced offspring with human females.
They waited. For thousands of years they observed from their hidden places as human civilization assembled itself. Cities. Empires. Religions. Science. Technology. Humanity grew more powerful with every passing generation. Eventually mankind came to believe it ruled the Earth.
It did not. Mankind had never been alone.
Some Nephilim remained hidden beneath mountains and ancient ruins. Others slept inside underwater structures. Still others lived in caverns deep beneath the Earth. Some walked among mankind without knowing their true ancestry. Others knew exactly what they were and concealed their origins. Some even pretended to be visitors from distant worlds. All waited for the day they could reclaim the world that had once belonged to them — for the day they could once again take the daughters of men.
There were also the angels who fell with Satan, a different group altogether from the Watchers, yet they too had taken wives from among men and produced offspring.
There were millions of these beings — the survivors, the sleepers, the ones who had waited through the long centuries of human civilization. Once there had been billions, but that was before the Flood. The long sleep had not diminished them. If anything, it had intensified them. They were apex predators, the most dangerous things that had ever existed on this planet, and unlike every other apex predator in Earth's history, they were intelligent. Strategically intelligent. Capable of planning across decades and centuries. Capable of studying human civilization and identifying every weakness in it. And, except in certain circumstances, they were immortal.
Not all the spirits of the dead Nephilim were imprisoned. According to the Book of Enoch, God permitted many of the disembodied spirits of those who perished in the Flood to remain on earth. These became what the world today calls demons. Since the Flood, a portion of them have wandered the earth — harassing, oppressing, and possessing human beings. The remainder were cast into the Abyss, bound and waiting for the day of their release. In the meantime, bodies were being prepared for them.
They had a plan for the Earth. Eliminate humanity and reclaim the surface of the planet. They had already taken control and fully occupied the vast world beneath it, the oceans, the caverns, and the underground cities humanity had never found.
To them, mankind was not a civilization to be conquered or a population to be subjugated. It was something simpler. Food. Slaves. And physical union for purposes too sinister to contemplate.
Their plan for humanity was not complicated. Billions would die — men, women, children, the old, the young — without distinction, without mercy. The planet itself would become unrecognizable. Only a small number of survivors would remain, kept alive for purposes the ancient texts had described purposes that generations of human scholars had preferred to interpret as metaphors.
Many of these Nephilim had been the gods and demigods of the ancient world, continuing their existence after the Flood. The Greek, Roman, and other myths were not myths. These beings were real entities with real names. Their exploits were real and recorded in ancient archives.
The original Nephilim were not alone. Their hybrid bloodlines had continued across the centuries. Some descendants became giants. Others appeared completely human, moving through human society without detection. Some carried Nephilim traits without ever knowing the truth of their ancestry. All were part of the same ancient bloodlines.
No weapon in humanity's arsenal had been designed for this war. No intelligence agency had files on this enemy. No government had a plan.
But in meetings held in the spiritual realm, in the sky above the earth and in the hidden places beneath it, plans for worldwide war were being made and orders were being issued.
A summons had gone out. And the war — the war that had been waiting since before the Flood, since before the first empire, since before the first human city raised its walls against the darkness — was about to begin.
Behind the invasion and plan for war stood mankind's oldest enemy. He had orchestrated the Nephilim program from the beginning. He had directed the Watchers. He had used the fallen angels. He had built an army that combined the supernatural power of beings older than human civilization with the specific cunning of a mind that had studied humanity since the Garden and knew every weakness in it.
And the war he had been building toward for thousands of years was finally to begin.