The Drowned Coordinates

It was 2 a.m. at Torrento Airport. The terminal was empty except for the faint hum of cleaning drones. A night guard named Marco was making his usual rounds.

As he passed Gate 12, something flickered — not blue, not white — but the hue of deep water, like the glow of a drowned city breathing under glass.

The light vanished.

But on the floor, Marco found a piece of paper — aged, wrinkled, stamped faintly with a seal that read:

"Republic of Torenza."

His pulse quickened. He’d seen that name before — not in official archives, but in forbidden corners of the internet.

Torenza — a country that supposedly vanished without ever existing, yet still haunted people’s dreams.

---

Two days later, Marco took the paper to the Torrento Archives, a government building said to store decommissioned maps.

An elderly woman named Dr. Livia worked there, known as the keeper of “cartographic anomalies.”

> “Who told you that name?” she asked quietly.

“No one,” Marco said. “I found it.”

“Then you didn’t find it,” she replied. “It found you.”

She handed him a weathered folder labeled:

“Atlas Fragment — Tartaria Division, 1899.”

Inside were pieces of a dismantled map — rivers with no deltas, borders erased mid-line, continents torn at their edges.

> “This is the last known Tartarian map,” Livia whispered.

“Torenza was their final port. When the world erased them, they folded themselves into their maps.”

---

That night, Marco dreamed of cities beneath the sea — lanterns glowing, bells echoing underwater.

A woman stood on the shore, watching him.

Her face was identical to the woman from the viral video — the Passport of Torenza.

> “Don’t search for the map,” she said in the dream.

“Because lost maps don’t reveal paths. They devour those who look for them.”

When he awoke, his real passport lay open beside him. On one blank page, an impression had appeared — two intersecting circles split by a thin line. No ink. Only pressure, as if embossed by an unseen hand.

---

By morning, the Torrento Archives had been sealed.

Dr. Livia was “transferred for medical observation.”

Unmarked vehicles appeared outside Marco’s apartment.

That night, he studied his passport again. Beneath the strange symbol, faint letters glowed for a moment before fading:

“Follow the tide north.”

He looked up an old airport blueprint. Near the northern runway, a decommissioned access point appeared — Gate X-9.

It no longer existed in official records.

---

At midnight, Marco went there.

Rain fell everywhere — except there.

The air shimmered, bending reflections into liquid patterns.

When he touched the rusted handle, the world went silent.

The door opened — not to a terminal, but to the sea.

Below him, a submerged city stretched across the ocean floor — domes of glass, towers of bronze, and currents pulsing like breath.

The woman from his dreams stood on the water’s edge.

> “Torenza was never destroyed,” she said softly.

“It was removed from their maps and written into ours.”

Marco stepped forward. The water rose but didn’t drown him. It felt alive — warm, like a pulse.

His passport fluttered open.

Blank pages began filling themselves — not with ink, but with memory.

New coastlines appeared.

New eras.

New coordinates that didn’t belong to this reality.

He looked down at his reflection — but the man staring back wasn’t him.

> “You don’t remember, do you?” the woman whispered.

“You were one of us — the last cartographer of Tartaria.”

The tide surged.

The air fractured.

And the passport sealed shut, glowing faintly with light from beneath the sea.

Then—nothing.

---

The next morning, Gate X-9 was welded shut.

Authorities cited “a minor electrical breach.”

Marco’s apartment was found empty.

Only his passport remained on the table.

Page 7 read:

“Tartaria remembers.”

And below it — that same bisected-circle seal:

Republic of Torenza.

---

Witnesses later claimed that, on moonless nights, a faint coastline appears off Torrento’s northern pier — visible only for seconds before sinking back beneath the waves.

Those who see it too long… sometimes vanish.

Their passports, when found, are always blank — except for one silent mark, pressed into paper like a heartbeat:

⊘

---

Some maps don’t guide you to places.

They lead you back to what the world chose to forget.

Stay ready for Part 3 — “Map of Silence.”