The Forgotten Atlas: Part IV — The City Beneath the Reflection

The sea outside Torrento was no longer behaving like a sea.

At dusk, when the tide receded, the coastline revealed something impossible—fragments of cobblestone streets, faint outlines of doors, and lampposts standing upright beneath the waves.

Locals began calling it The City Beneath the Reflection.

And every night, the reflection seemed to rise a little higher.

---

Elissa Voss, now marked as missing, had not vanished completely.

In fragments of security logs, she was seen walking across the Torrento runway barefoot, eyes unfocused, as though listening to something only she could hear.

A technician swore he heard her whisper,

> “They’re rebuilding it... below the surface.”

Her passport, recovered later from a rain gutter near Gate 12, bore a new seal—no longer the bisected circle, but an open eye surrounded by tidal lines.

The inscription beneath read:

“The Atlas breathes.”

---

Meanwhile, deep within the government’s Subaqueous Archive Facility, a team of linguists and hydrologists examined an object that had surfaced off the Torrento coast: a fragment of parchment sealed inside glass, still perfectly dry.

When exposed to light, the map within it began to shift.

New coastlines appeared and disappeared like breathing patterns.

Dr. Ilya Crane, head of the investigation, noted in her report:

> “Every location that appears corresponds to a site previously submerged—or erased—from global records between 1900 and 1971.”

One coordinate blinked longer than the rest.

When overlaid on modern maps, it landed directly beneath Torrento’s harbor.

---

That night, a diver named Julian Marek descended into the harbor to investigate.

His final transmission, recorded at 3:12 AM, was a whisper distorted by static:

> “There are windows down here. Lights... moving inside... It’s a city... It’s still alive.”

The video feed showed his helmet light sweeping across submerged facades—balconies, signs in Tartarian script, and something like a train platform, perfectly preserved.

Then a pale hand touched the lens from the other side.

The signal cut out.

---

At dawn, the harbor water turned mirror-clear.

From the cliffs above, onlookers saw silhouettes walking beneath the surface—men and women carrying lanterns, crossing invisible bridges.

Among them, one figure stopped and looked up.

Her face was unmistakable: Elissa Voss.

She raised her hand, palm against the water’s inner skin, and mouthed the words:

> “Remember the map.”

Moments later, the reflection fractured—rippling like shattered glass—

and the sea became opaque again.

---

Days later, Torrento Airport experienced its second anomaly.

Every digital flight map in the control tower flickered and displayed a new destination for exactly one minute:

TOR — TRZ | Route Active | Status: Boarding

No such flight existed.

No such code was in the system.

Yet one security camera at Gate 12 caught a single passenger walking through an unlit door at the end of the terminal.

The timestamp read: March 19, 2125.

---

Afterward, pilots began reporting strange light patterns over the sea during descent—rows of lanterns tracing what looked like streets beneath the tide.

Some swore they could see buildings flicker in and out of existence as if the city below were trying to return.

The government, again, denied everything.

The files were marked:

ATLAS_004 — Cartographic Reversal.

---

But among certain circles—the forgotten archivists, the midnight historians, the believers in Tartaria—a phrase began circulating:

> “Every century, the erased reclaim their shape.”

And beneath Torrento’s quiet waves, faint glows continued to rise.

They say if you stare too long into the reflection, your own shadow starts walking without you—toward the city that waits below.

---

Some maps were never meant to end.

Some simply turn the page themselves.

Stay ready for Part V — “The Cartographer’s Daughter.”