Yellow Jacket

The Maps

Every serious scholar of the Collapse knows the same truth: the world we walk does not match the world that was.

This is not a matter of interpretation or mistranslation. It is drawn in black and white, ink and carbon, steel and data. Pre-Collapse maps, preserved in glass vaults, etched on copper plates, archived in shattered servers, all show the same impossible thing.

Two massive continents. Not islands, not coastlines, but full landmasses, each the size of known nations combined. Their shapes vary slightly between sources, but their locations do not. They were there. They are not now.

The Records

The Star Atlas of Witherhall – A map preserved in waxed vellum, charting sea lanes with meticulous accuracy. It places the western continent precisely 4,800 nautical miles beyond current trade routes. The parchment shows no sign of forgery, no fading ink, only a coastline that should be there and is not.

The Delta Core Data Logs – Recovered from a fractured blackbox server, its star-maps are corrected for curvature and tidal drift. The logs clearly plot a southern continent, coordinates exact to the decimal. Those same coordinates today return only featureless ocean floor.

The Iron Plates of Iscar – Heavy copper plates, embossed by machine. Each plate depicts hemispheres with raised ridges for land. Both missing continents stand proud from the surface, impossible to erase or misinterpret.

The Glass Globes of Carath – Hollow spheres once used as teaching tools. Two sit in the archives of Kyrrabad, crystal-clear, continents carved within like air bubbles. You can turn them in your hand and watch the world rotate. The missing continents gleam plain as day.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The Vanishing

Exploration expeditions have sailed to both coordinates. Submersible lances have sounded the depths. In both places, nothing remains but ocean. No shoals, no archipelagos, no scattered islands. Only abyssal trenches, miles deep, as if something vast was torn out and the sea poured in.

Satellite imaging confirms the same: featureless water where coastlines should be. Only a faint circular scarring in the seafloor, like the rim of a crater, hints at what once existed.

Theories

The Drowned Hypothesis: The continents sank during the Collapse. Entire civilizations pulled under, leaving only the ocean above. Supporters cite the crater-like seabeds as evidence.

The Erasure Hypothesis: More extreme theorists argue the continents were not destroyed but deliberately removed. Stripped out of reality, excised like rot. They point to the fact that the gods will not answer questions about them.

The Cartographer's Error: A minority position insists all these maps stemmed from a single mistake, copied endlessly. But the variation of scripts, technologies, and ages makes this unlikely. The evidence comes from too many hands, too many centuries.

The Names

On every record, the continents are labeled. In runes, scripts, glyphs. Dozens of languages, none of them recognizable. Some symbols seem to match, others diverge, but all are untranslated.

The scripts do not correlate to any known tongue of the Nine, the Princedoms, or the tribes. Machine analysis has failed. Priests call them "forbidden alphabets." Scavvers mutter that the words change when you look too long.

What cannot be denied is that every preserved map, every single one, carries a deliberate mark for both continents.

Closing Thought

The world has not forgotten the missing continents. The evidence is there in vellum and copper, data and glass. Almost every pre-Collapse map confirms them. Almost every record locates them. And yet when ships sail to those coordinates, there is nothing but ocean, deep and empty, scarred like a wound.

Two continents. Two names no one can read. Two absences at the edge of every map.

The world we know is missing something vast.

And the maps remember.