"When the Sea Remembers: A Ballad of the Isle That Breathes in Centuries"

By: [aftab khan]

Poetic Story:

They say the sea forgets.

It washes footprints from sand, buries wreckage beneath coral, and pulls names from driftwood until no syllable remains.

But once every hundred years,

the sea remembers.

And in that remembrance, it lifts from its belly

a place not charted,

not mapped,

not named in any language that survives.

This place is Virelia,

The Vanishing Isle.

On the eve of the century’s turn,

Dr. Mireille Anson—historian, skeptic, dreamer—

read a line from a crumbling sailor’s journal:

"There is an island that comes not from the world, but from the wound of it."

"She sings once in a hundred years, and those who hear her must answer."

She answered.

She sailed northward into the cradle of storms,

past Greenland’s ghost-white breath

and into waters where compasses died and even birds grew silent.

Her vessel creaked like it feared what lay ahead.

Her crew, brave and mad, slept in layers of doubt.

And then, as midnight struck the first full moon of 2124,

the sea sighed—

and the mists opened like eyelids slowly waking.

There it was.

Virelia.

Not ruins. Not bones of a lost world.

But whole. Alive.

Golden sands shimmered beneath obsidian cliffs.

Forests of violet leaves swayed with no wind.

Rivers ran in colors that broke the mind.

And in the heart of the island:

a great black ziggurat, humming with memory.

She stepped onto the shore,

and time stepped back.

The team began to forget.

Names blurred. Clocks spun wildly.

One crewman aged a decade overnight; another became a boy again.

They met a cartographer from 1824

who had been there for “a week… or a century.”

He wept when he saw them.

He wept harder when they tried to leave.

In the temple's core,

they found a floating orb—

not glowing, but remembering.

Every thought they held it mirrored.

Every truth they feared, it whispered.

And it offered them a choice:

“Stay, and become eternal memory."

"Or leave, and be cast into forgetting.”

Mireille refused both.

She carved truth into stone.

She inked her skin with the island’s map.

She buried records in the caves of the shore,

hoping the sea might keep them safe

until someone else,

a hundred years from now,

would remember too.

When Virelia sank again,

it did so not with thunder,

but with a gentle breath—

as if it were only going back to sleep.

She floated for days,

half-starved, half-certain it had all been real.

They found her.

She spoke of the island.

No one believed.

She painted the black ziggurat in her hospital cell

until her hands bled and her mind broke.

But some remembered.

And they waited.

Now it is 2224.

A crew readies its voyage.

Among them is a woman with a tattoo she can’t explain—

coordinates etched across her ribs,

passed down through blood,

perhaps by a mother who never returned.

The sea is calm tonight.

And far beneath the surface,

Virelia begins to breathe again.