It could not be seen, only felt. Just below the surface of this world, in the other realm, just where the senses are baffled, the warning dwelled.

There was something…something…a change in the wind, a chemical tint in the air, the uneasy lapping of the sea…all these were warnings. The very earth was tilted slightly…ever so slightly…yet tilted all the same.

Far away, inside our beautiful city, people rise to look out on the day. Laborers stop short of their tasks to glance back, animals are still and perceptive—receiving the vibrations, mothers call their children to the window. "Come and see," they say, "come and see something you will never see again."

I am standing on the shore, outside the walls of the city. I will never re-enter it. I can feel it in my very marrow…tragedy, loss, hate, a certine finallity of things…yet I know not what to do. I stand idle on the sand. What could I—what could anyone--have done to stop the madness?

Out upon the luminous waves I gaze. There is something wrong; the water is unnatural, uneasy. Lo! There is movement there! The Earth…the bones and crust of it…are being ripped apart below me. Magma seeps into the salty water, hell rising, a great wave of energy ripples over the land…and back. The ground is moaning, opening up to receive our blood. The terrible, terrible misuse of power, and its horrific effects.

The water recedes, and then, with tremendous force, comes rushing back over the shore. The impact knocks me down, grinding my face into the gritty sand. I desperately seek to grab onto something…anything. My flailing hands grasp only the sand that quickly slides through my fingers. The water pulls me down and back, and I see no more.

Others would describe the sight I did not see, the water rushing over the stone walls. It drowned thousands in their homes, their temples, their gardens. Our city—our sacred, beautiful city—was lost beneath the waves, with our stone work and gardens, and our clansmen. Mothers would describe how they lost them…how they could not hold on to their precious children. The children would say how they simply groped in the dark of their eyes and woke somewhere else.

Some would always remember as they climbed desperately onto the fleeing ships, and looked back as their homeland dissapeared beneath the churning, red-lit waves. Yet those most haunted by it, would be the ones like me. The ones who drowned with Atlantis.

In the still of the night, I can see it against the black behind my eyes…the water, the wave, the darkness…the end. I am a lost soul, carrying the memory of horror long since past. Doomed to forever pass it on to every child that will come to dwell within my womb. Doomed to drown again, night after night.