“The end of all flesh has come before me.”
Noah’s heart lodged in his throat as he stared at the sudden presence before him – a man in a simple white tunic. The sheer magnitude of the words, the incomprehensible weight of them threatened to suck his very soul right out of his lungs. The man looked surprised Noah had so instantly grasped the full implications of the declaration and he slowly sat down on a large round bolder as if weary of standing – or just weary. A fear Noah had never felt in over five hundred years of life iced his blood. It wasn't a fear one might feel for one’s self. Not a fear of pain or suffering or even death. It was more like the anguish felt by fathers when they lost a child, times a million. The idea that this reality could be simply deleted as

[This message has been edited by tnwilz (edited February 25, 2009).]

[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited February 26, 2009).]
 

The rest seems a little slow and seems to get lost in Noah's inner anguish and meditations on the kind of fear he's experiencing. Not sure I'm ready to care so early on: like the stranger in the bar who insists on telling you all about everything that's wrong with their life.

Other than that, I'm primed for an interesting spin on an old tale, but I'd need to see the spin begin fairly soon to hold my interest.
 

You've got an awful lot crammed into this start, but I think that what I had read would make me want to read on.