*TALE OF THE LOST ISLAND*
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CHAPTER TWO
The wind outside Eliot's home whistled like a voice caught between time and tide. He had barely slept, the mysterious journal from the shipwrecked chest still resting on his desk like a ghost begging to be read. He flipped it open again, scanning the pages in the dim glow of the oil lamp. There were fragmented entries, notes in rushed handwriting, and at the heart of it—a half-burnt map drawn in charcoal ink, marked Beware the Path Beyond the Tempest.
The map was incomplete. But there was a signature at the bottom in faint, slanted script: M. Albrecht – Cartographer of the Forgotten Waters.
"Who the hell are you?" Eliot muttered.
He didn't have to wait long to find out.
The next morning, after a sleepless night, he visited the town's oldest archive—a cluttered, dust-choked room tucked behind the abandoned lighthouse. Miss Adera, the keeper, a frail woman with eyes sharper than her wrinkled face betrayed, shuffled toward him.
"Looking for ghosts, Eliot?" she asked, voice like sandpaper.
"I need to know if you've ever heard of this name." He showed her the journal page with the cartographer's signature.
Her smile faltered. "M. Albrecht… that name hasn't been spoken in decades."
Eliot leaned in. "You do know him."
She looked around, then motioned him deeper into the stacks. From a rusted drawer, she pulled out an old newspaper clipping: "Local Mapmaker Declared Missing After Strange Voyage Into the Outer Shoals." Dated over 60 years ago. The photo showed a younger man in a worn leather coat, eyes distant, a compass around his neck.
Miss Adera whispered, "They say he charted a place that shouldn't exist. A place the sea tried to erase."
Eliot's pulse quickened. "The Lost Island?"
She didn't answer, only handed him a cracked key wrapped in cloth. "This opens a room beneath the chapel ruins near Hollow Bay. That's where Albrecht kept his records. If you're really going after this… take a lantern. And don't trust the silence."
Later that day, under gathering clouds and with only the journal and a flickering lantern in his satchel, Eliot arrived at the ruined chapel. Ivy had nearly devoured the stone walls, and seabirds cried overhead like warnings. He found the trapdoor beneath the collapsed altar—rusted, but the key worked.
What lay beneath was not just a room—it was a vault of madness.
Maps lined the walls—maps that moved subtly when unobserved. There were charts of impossible coastlines, islands shaped like spirals, paths that looped into themselves like mazes. And in the center of the room stood a cracked globe that spun on its own, whispering in a tongue not of this world.
But most haunting was a mirror mounted to the far wall. Beneath it, carved into the frame, were the words:
"Only Those Who Are Lost May Truly See."
Eliot stared into the mirror, and for a heartbeat, he didn't see himself. He saw an ocean of stars, a sea with no horizon, and a figure—shrouded in mist—waiting on a shore of black sand.
Then it was gone.
As Eliot gathered what he could, a final note hidden beneath the globe caught his eye. In Albrecht's script:
"The island does not exist on any map because the island is not merely a place. It is a memory. A wound. A gate."
Eliot stepped out of the vault, changed.
He now knew the journey ahead wasn't just through sea or storm—but through something deeper.
Something forgotten.
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