Words are not my first language.

For ten years I have written in images. I have reduced our archipelago’s scabrous coastlines and unforgiving shoals to gentle contours and benign gradients. I have flattened the world’s summits, filled in its trenches, repealed its third dimension. There are no histories in my images. No footnotes. No grisly explanations for the borders that separate our island-states. The streets of our cities are narrow, vacant lanes on my parchment, unpeopled by penniless children, unsullied by spilled blood.

For ten years I have been a mapmaker, and for ten years I have told my stories in curves, hachures, and inlays.

Not here. Here I must employ sentences, paragraphs, and chapters — devices that are as foreign to me as alidades and azimuths must be to you. For this place cannot be charted, and no combination of routes and waypoints can describe the strange journey that brought me here. I am beyond the limits of my own cartography, lost to dead reckoning.

Forgive me, therefore, if I ramble. Excuse me, dear reader, if I mislead. I am an unpracticed writer, working with an unfamiliar alphabet. I can only hope to improve as I go along.

And there is something else.

In maps, entire continents are laid out at once, as a bird might survey them from above, and readers are free to inspect whatever points they find most intriguing, in whatever order they please. But the events of a written narrative are revealed sequentially, over the course of a finite timeline. This is a constraint of the medium itself, for a reader’s eyes cannot absorb thousands of words in one fell swoop, as they might a map or a picture. Words are like bricks: individually meaningless, useful only in the context of their accumulation.

But I am ten years a mapmaker. I will not write upon an axis. I will not mold my plot to fit a bell curve or a sinusoid. I do not subscribe to the notion that a story should begin once, at the beginning, or terminate at the end, or even at all. Time is not so simple, in my experience. And for precisely that reason, I will make no apologies for any lingering effects that this account has upon its readers’ sense of linearity – which is to say, upon their sense.

The last vestige of great Atlantis now rests upon a rotting table in its capitol’s highest tower. It is a letter, scrawled in a curious script upon alien paper, and though it is all that remains of my country, it contains on a single page its whole tragic history.

I might have reproduced it here and avoided all of this miserable recordkeeping, save for two problems. First, that you’d have not understood it. And second, that it does not start at the center. We must begin at the center.

At the center of the world is an island, and at the center of that island is the Adytum, and at the center of the Adytum is the world.

This is the first maxim in our catechism, a formula that children are made to recite before they are old enough to grasp its absurdity. There are six hundred and fourteen maxims in the Atlantan catechism, one for each island in our archipelago, and they are all absurd. More specifically, each is a recursion, a nauseating form of paradox that pretends to build toward some point only to fold in on itself, to collapse, to self-destruct. Our suicidal maxims are as memorable as they are useless.

But the Adytum itself is eminently useful. It is sacred to all Atlantans, and particularly to we cartographers. This is because of the atlas upon its floor, the map of our archipelago, of our world, from which all other maps are born. It is etched into an immense plate of orichalcum, a disc some three hundred yards in diameter. Upon its surface our world is reproduced in such minute detail that a man walking across it might discover a new lake on some distant peninsula simply by pausing to catch his breath, or revisit the hill on which he was born by kneeling to retrieve a dropped coin. Doubtless the map owes some of its precision to the sheer scale of the strange canvas upon which it is drawn. But anyone who visits that ancient place, as I have done, cannot help but wonder whether it owes some of its impossible intricacy to a physics very different from our own.

Indeed, it is said that before they made the world, the gods created the Adytum as a kind of headquarters, a command center, and that the map on the floor of that place is the blueprint from which they worked.

I have little faith in such mythologies, and less in the men who peddle them. But it is true enough that the Adytum has been there for as long as anyone can remember, and that there are references to it in the earliest of our texts. It is true, too — though I cringe to admit it — that the images cast upon that colossal wheel have proven so accurate over the decades that our guild of mapmakers has devolved to a company of profiteering scribes, content to copy sections of the Adytum onto canvas for sale to merchants and sea captains. We seldom mount our own expeditions. Too many of them, bankrolled by some romantic doge, have ended in our merely confirming what was already in the Adytum for all to see. And so our expertise has shifted from cartography to calligraphy. We take the Adytum’s map on faith, and we add to it place names, scales, compass roses and other such flourishes.

There is one legitimate form of cartography, however, that we still practice: the mapping of Atlantan cities, which are conspicuously absent on the floor of the Adytum. Some posit that the Adytum’s map simply predates our cities, and thus could not have accounted for them. Others believe that the map is a representation of Atlantis’s future, and interpret the omission of our cities as evidence that some vengeful pantheon will one day strike our race from the face of the earth. Until that time, anyway, the task of mapping Atlantis’s cities falls to my guild.

Most of our population is clustered around fourteen islands toward the center of the archipelago, where the weather is most temperate and the seas most placid. But there are small towns and settlements sprinkled across more distant islands — colonies of outcasts, military outposts, mining outfits, and the like. It was upon a mapping excursion to one such far-flung community that I found — or, rather, was led to — a lagoon.

It should not have been there. The Adytum depicted dry land at its coordinates, and the Adytum is incontrovertible.

But it was there nonetheless.