[ WP ] The world is made up of millions of tiny islands rather than continents . Civilization has developed independently on each one and they are now interacting for the first time .

The island was fertile. It was temperate. Fruit trees of every imaginable variety grew generally, thriving. Cows, pigs, lambs, and chickens, as well as wild game, were plentiful everywhere one went; they grazed, and roamed, and scampered, and leaped about the island in never-diminishing numbers. 
 
 The people lived in little towns, scattered about the island. There were towns on the coast, in the jungle, and at the foot of the great volcano. The townspeople usually fared well-enough without leaving their towns; and when they did need to leave, in order to trade, they trekked down footpaths to the town nearest theirs, conducted their business there, and then returned to their homes. 
 
 Things were simple. 
 
 The great ocean stretched to the horizon in every direction, and though the island's inhabitants swam in the ocean's waters, and though they built makeshift rafts on which they could sit and fish, they had no thoughts or dreams of life beyond the island. 
 
 `` The blue water stretches to the end of the world,'' said the wise old men. And all believed them. They had no need or cause to think otherwise. 
 
 That is, until the volcano, dormant for thousands of years, made good on the promises implied by its subterranean rumblings and erupted. 
 
 Rumi was out collecting medicinal plants in the jungle when it happened. The earth started quaking. Birds rose in clamorous rings from the foliage. He heard a deep rumble, followed by a deafening bang in the distance. 
 
 What was that? Rumi wondered. He had never head something so loud, so immense-sounding, so terrifying before. 
 
 He climbed a tree to get a better vantage point. Bright magma was spewing out of the volcano's central vent into the sky. A pillar of hateful flames twisted upwards; swirling around it were clouds of black smoke. 
 
 It is the god of the mountain, he thought. He is punishing us for failing to feed him a girl in the spring. 
 
 Rumi slid down the tree and ran towards the coast, where his village was. When he got to the village, the villagers were panicking. They ran in and out of their shelters, and wailed in the streets, and prayed, and gesticulated violently at the sky and the sea. A little girl stood still in the midst of the commotion, transfixed by the violent red light, by the clouds of hot ashes gradually encroaching, blotting out the sun. He saw his father running towards him. 
 
 `` Rumi!'' his father yelled. `` Rumi! Come now, son of mine!'' 
 
 He ran after his father, following him down to the beach. His grandmother, his mother, and his younger sister were all sitting on a raft, ready to depart. Rumi and his father waded through the water and got on the raft. Then they pushed off, into the turbulent water, and paddled away from the end of their civilization and towards the edge of the world as they knew it. 
 
 -- - 
 
 They paddled through noon and through sunset; they paddled in the moonlight, ceaselessly. In the dark sky the stars were like pinholes through which the bright gods could look and watch their progress. Behind them, where the island was burning, the horizon glowed dimly, red. 
 
 `` We have seen the apocalypse,'' said Grandmother, shaking her head. `` And soon we will float off the edge of the world.'' 
 
 Rumi remembered the screaming, the panic, the chaos. He thought of the thousands who by now had died by fire or suffocation. He thought of the transfixed little girl. He wondered if she, if any others had escaped, but he doubted it. Few had rafts. Even fewer had their rafts ready to go in time. 
 
 `` We are lucky,'' he said. `` The gods have spared us.'' 
 
 For two more days they paddled, under the burning sun, in the blistering heat, and under a moon like a blind-man's eye, in the cold. But after two days they were exhausted and dehydrated. 
 
 Grandmother was becoming delirious. She spoke of places beyond our world. She raved about islands whose inhabitants could fly, and could kill their prey and enemies from hundreds of feet away. She passed in and out of consciousness. Towards the end she foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog. She clutched the arm of Ariel, Rumi's little sister, and dug her nails deep into her skin. Ariel made no sound. Soon after that, Grandmother died. 
 
 It was early on the third night. The whole family was slumped uselessly on the raft, nigh dying of thirst. Rumi spotted a glow in the distance. It was n't the dim red glow of a fire, though. It was white. A white aura. White like the light of the moon. 
 
 `` Look,'' he said, shaking his father awake and pointing. His father groggily blinked, sat up, and looked. 
 
 They began paddling towards the light. 
 
 What they saw as they neared the island was unlike anything they could imagine. Rumi rubbed his eyes as if he might thereby rub his mind free of his hallucination. But it was no hallucination that loomed before him. 
 
 It was the island of Atlantis... 
 
 
 
 

