Two poets, each writing from INSIDE the degraded age, each dating themselves against a lost golden age — and each betraying knowledge that the dark age is a corridor, not a terminus. The Purana states it outright (a seed-remnant carried across the boundary into the restored Krita age); Hesiod admits it in a single subjunctive ('or been born afterwards'). The interregnum is survivable and temporary in both, and both texts are themselves artifacts produced inside the gap they describe.
At the close of the Kali age, after Kalki: 'the minds of those who live at the end of the Kali age shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time shall be as the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age, or age of purity.' The dark age is explicitly an interval with a scheduled end: 'the Krita age shall return.'
Hesiod counts the metallic ages and places himself inside the worst one — and treats it as an interval, not an ending: 'Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards' (ll. 174–175). 'Born afterwards' concedes there is an afterwards: something better on the far side of the iron age.
Vishnu Purana IV.24 wording ('pellucid as crystal', 'seeds of human beings', Krita return) verified against Wilson's translation at wisdomlib (doc116021, also sacred-texts vp117). Hesiod ll. 174–175 wording standard in Evelyn-White (1914), full text checkable at theoi.com.
Our fact-checkers corrected the first draft:
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The first age ends not with a death but with a withdrawal, and the withdrawal leaves the same two marks: (1) the world is visibly poorer · Hesiod's hidden 'means of life,' the Euahlayi's vanished flowers and honey; and (2) the withdrawn presence still watches from concealment · golden-age spirits 'clothed in mist' keeping watch, Byamee's three branded trees standing as an untouchable claim on the emptied earth.
Two unconnected traditions furnish the between-worlds interval identically: everything drowned back into one primeval water; a span measured in cosmic units (millions of years / a night of Brahma); and the sole survivor a god withdrawn into or onto a SERPENT, explicitly unseen by men and gods, waiting out the gap.
In both traditions repopulation after the flood is not biological but liturgical: the survivor's post-landing sacrifice is the literal manufacturing step for the next humanity.
The water rises when human blood enters it · and gives back what it takes.