The Map Beneath the Ashes
When a professor vanishes while chasing forbidden history, his last message leads a former student to a discovery humanity was never meant to find.
The letter arrived two weeks after Professor Mallory vanished. No return address—just a torn scrap of parchment inside, stained and brittle, marked with symbols I had never seen before.
He had been obsessed with lost civilizations, convinced that history hid more than it revealed. His last email to me was short: "If they find me first, burn everything." I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
Curiosity got the better of me. I traced the symbols, running searches that led to dead links and corrupted files. Finally, one fragment surfaced—an ancient city predating known history, erased from every official record, mentioned only in whispers as “the Origin.”
That night, my apartment filled with the sharp, metallic scent of burning paper. I rushed to the study and found the letter smoldering in its locked drawer, though nothing else was touched. Beneath the ashes, etched faintly into the wood, was a set of coordinates.
I shouldn't have gone. I know that now.
The site was deep in the mountains, far from any map. The ground there felt wrong—too soft, as if something massive slumbered just beneath the soil. Half-buried stones jutted out, carved with the same symbols from the parchment.
I dug until my hands bled.
Just as twilight bled into night, I uncovered what looked like the entrance to a chamber. The air that rushed out was cold and dry, filled with the scent of old earth and something else... something sterile.
At the threshold, a figure stood, watching me. Not quite human—too tall, too thin, the face a blurred suggestion of features that shifted when I tried to focus.
It raised a hand—not in greeting, but in warning.
The ground shuddered once, like a pulse, and every light, every star in the sky above, blinked out.
He had been obsessed with lost civilizations, convinced that history hid more than it revealed. His last email to me was short: "If they find me first, burn everything." I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
Curiosity got the better of me. I traced the symbols, running searches that led to dead links and corrupted files. Finally, one fragment surfaced—an ancient city predating known history, erased from every official record, mentioned only in whispers as “the Origin.”
That night, my apartment filled with the sharp, metallic scent of burning paper. I rushed to the study and found the letter smoldering in its locked drawer, though nothing else was touched. Beneath the ashes, etched faintly into the wood, was a set of coordinates.
I shouldn't have gone. I know that now.
The site was deep in the mountains, far from any map. The ground there felt wrong—too soft, as if something massive slumbered just beneath the soil. Half-buried stones jutted out, carved with the same symbols from the parchment.
I dug until my hands bled.
Just as twilight bled into night, I uncovered what looked like the entrance to a chamber. The air that rushed out was cold and dry, filled with the scent of old earth and something else... something sterile.
At the threshold, a figure stood, watching me. Not quite human—too tall, too thin, the face a blurred suggestion of features that shifted when I tried to focus.
It raised a hand—not in greeting, but in warning.
The ground shuddered once, like a pulse, and every light, every star in the sky above, blinked out.
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