PROLOGUE
Alex was a young man haunted by mysterious dreams. He was born and raised in Athens, Greece, within an affluent family. His father was a businessman, his mother an art collector. He was the youngest of three children.
Ever since childhood, Alex had possessed a fervent passion for reading. He loved to explore the history of religion, especially the myths of Greece and other ancient civilisations. Thanks to business trips with his parents, Alex was able to explore many lands across the globe and engage with diverse peoples and cultures. He was deeply captivated by the ancient civilisations that once cradled the Mediterranean – Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, and, above all, his Greek homeland, for which he bore a profound pride. He discerned a common thread weaving through all these great realms, finding them to be hauntingly, almost uncannily, familiar.
One silent moonlit night in his high school years, on a summer cruise with his family, Alex sat alone in his cabin gazing out through the porthole. They were somewhere southwest of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. Suddenly, away in the distance, he saw a haunting sight: a colossal vortex of white water surging up from the sea and spiralling into the night sky. Unable to believe his eyes, Alex experienced a moment of sheer terror. With his heart in his mouth, he watched as swells radiating out from the eruption reached the yacht, which swayed and shuddered under the impact. He was about to cry out in alarm, but then, as swiftly as it had appeared, the waterspout collapsed back into the depths of the sea. Nothing was left of the disturbing phenomenon except a faint residual turbulence in the water marked by patches of white foam.
Stunned and trembling, Alex rushed into the corridor and pounded on his parents’ door, but they remained lost in a deep slumber. Returning to his room, Alex hurriedly logged the yacht’s coordinates, marking the exact location of the anomaly. He spent the rest of the night scouring maritime and geographical data, discovering legends of a ‘sacred sea’ in the heart of the Mediterranean. It was a realm that sailors spoke of only in hushed tones and steered well clear of.
The following morning, as the yacht continued its journey, Alex recounted everything he had witnessed over breakfast. His parents, however, in high spirits after a restful night’s sleep, merely exchanged glances and laughed it off. They insisted that they hadn’t felt anything unusual during the night, arguing that the Mediterranean was perfectly safe and crowded with passing ships. In their opinion, it was likely just a common waterspout, and waves and sea foam were nothing out of the ordinary. After offering these brief reassurances, they quickly moved on to another topic.
That night, Alex lay awake, contemplating the occurrence. He knew in his soul that this was no ordinary event. He began to bridge the connection between those coordinates and the cryptic dreams that had lately haunted him – dreams in which he was pulled into a great vortex, descending into another world.
Amidst the restlessness of a mind that refused to be stilled, a terrifying thought and vision arose, almost like a prompt summoned from the deepest recesses of his memory: a ‘Mediterranean Cataclysm’ that had swallowed the civilisation of Atlantis, submerging sacred lands and ancient energies whose traces might still lie hidden beneath the waves.
From that day on, Alex dedicated every spare moment to studying the mystery of Atlantis and the legends of the Great Flood recorded in the Bible and across countless other cultures.
At the age of eighteen, after graduating from high school, Alex’s family sent him to Harvard University in the United States to study Management and the History of Science. During his time there, Alex became close to Noah, an aging professor of scientific history. Two decades prior to this, Noah, then an officer training US military personnel on indigenous cultures during the Iraq War, had been wounded in the leg during a suicide bombing. As a result, he walked with a limp. Noah was serious in his teaching, yet approachable and friendly outside the classroom. He lived alone in a house overflowing with books, a sanctuary that Alex found deeply intriguing.
Inevitably, Alex met other people at Harvard who were to prove important to him. His best friend was a Spaniard named Thomas. Gifted in technology and engineering, Thomas was at once articulate, introspective, and emotional. In his second year, Alex met Elena, a young Italian woman who was both intelligent and innocent, and they became a couple. Then there was Maria, a writer who specialised in historical themes and a talented lecturer with a discreet and profound nature. Maria was also Noah’s trusted companion.
In his final year at Harvard, with only two months remaining until graduation and his scheduled return to Greece, Alex proposed inviting Noah, Maria, Thomas, and Elena to arrange a time during the summer break. He planned for them to fly to his homeland at the end of July to tour the capital, Athens, and then sail aboard his family’s yacht to explore the Greek islands. He intended to take Noah to the exact spot in the Mediterranean Sea where he had witnessed the mystical spectacle in his youth, hoping the wise man could offer some insight into what he had experienced.
It was from this voyage that many unexpected events unfolded, launching Alex on a mysterious journey of discovery that would gradually unravel the secrets of history.
