The Guardians of the Lost Sea
Decades after the disappearance of a historian chasing a forbidden map, a retired naval officer receives a cryptic journal — and a second chance to uncover the greatest secret of all.
In 1963, Captain Samuel Rourke retired from the Royal Navy with little more than a pension and a tarnished reputation.
He had seen things during his service — lights beneath impossible depths, signals with no origin — things no one wanted to explain.
One rainy afternoon in London, a battered parcel arrived at his doorstep. No return address.
Inside: an old leather-bound journal and a photograph.
The journal belonged to a woman named Elena Varga — a historian officially listed as "missing at sea" in 1922.
The photograph showed a fragment of an ancient map, a compass with a broken needle, and a faint, handwritten note scrawled across the bottom:
"Terra Desolata. The guardians watch still."
At first, Rourke dismissed it as another conspiracy theory.
Until he flipped to the last page of the journal — a set of coordinates, eerily close to the location of a patrol mission he had once undertaken...
The same mission when his ship’s instruments went haywire, and the crew reported hearing voices from beneath the waves.
Driven by a hunger he couldn’t name, Rourke chartered a private vessel — the Asterion — and set sail into the South Atlantic.
As they neared the coordinates, strange phenomena began.
The stars twisted at impossible angles.
The sea turned a color no man aboard could name — neither blue, nor black, nor green.
And sometimes, just beyond the mist, they glimpsed ruins — impossible towers half-submerged, their architecture defying every known law of stone and gravity.
One night, as the Asterion drifted through the dead calm, a small boat approached under the cover of darkness.
Three figures boarded: cloaked, silent.
They did not speak, but handed Rourke a heavy cloth bundle before vanishing back into the mist.
Inside: a sphere of crystal, humming faintly with warmth.
Etched across its surface — the same unfamiliar runes from Elena’s maps.
When Rourke touched it, visions flooded his mind:
Cities of silver and obsidian.
Creatures unlike anything the world had ever known.
A civilization thriving before the first humans ever walked upright.
A voice — or perhaps many — whispered inside his skull:
"Guard the threshold. Forget the path."
The Asterion turned back the next morning, crew shaken and silent.
Rourke knew he would never speak of what he had seen.
The journal, the crystal — all locked away beneath layers of secrecy, swallowed by agencies that called themselves "protectors" of the old order.
And somewhere, across the endless gray sea, the ruins still shifted in the mist.
Waiting.
Watching.
For the next soul brave enough — or foolish enough — to seek the forgotten world.
He had seen things during his service — lights beneath impossible depths, signals with no origin — things no one wanted to explain.
One rainy afternoon in London, a battered parcel arrived at his doorstep. No return address.
Inside: an old leather-bound journal and a photograph.
The journal belonged to a woman named Elena Varga — a historian officially listed as "missing at sea" in 1922.
The photograph showed a fragment of an ancient map, a compass with a broken needle, and a faint, handwritten note scrawled across the bottom:
"Terra Desolata. The guardians watch still."
At first, Rourke dismissed it as another conspiracy theory.
Until he flipped to the last page of the journal — a set of coordinates, eerily close to the location of a patrol mission he had once undertaken...
The same mission when his ship’s instruments went haywire, and the crew reported hearing voices from beneath the waves.
Driven by a hunger he couldn’t name, Rourke chartered a private vessel — the Asterion — and set sail into the South Atlantic.
As they neared the coordinates, strange phenomena began.
The stars twisted at impossible angles.
The sea turned a color no man aboard could name — neither blue, nor black, nor green.
And sometimes, just beyond the mist, they glimpsed ruins — impossible towers half-submerged, their architecture defying every known law of stone and gravity.
One night, as the Asterion drifted through the dead calm, a small boat approached under the cover of darkness.
Three figures boarded: cloaked, silent.
They did not speak, but handed Rourke a heavy cloth bundle before vanishing back into the mist.
Inside: a sphere of crystal, humming faintly with warmth.
Etched across its surface — the same unfamiliar runes from Elena’s maps.
When Rourke touched it, visions flooded his mind:
Cities of silver and obsidian.
Creatures unlike anything the world had ever known.
A civilization thriving before the first humans ever walked upright.
A voice — or perhaps many — whispered inside his skull:
"Guard the threshold. Forget the path."
The Asterion turned back the next morning, crew shaken and silent.
Rourke knew he would never speak of what he had seen.
The journal, the crystal — all locked away beneath layers of secrecy, swallowed by agencies that called themselves "protectors" of the old order.
And somewhere, across the endless gray sea, the ruins still shifted in the mist.
Waiting.
Watching.
For the next soul brave enough — or foolish enough — to seek the forgotten world.
Comments