BAYHAND

Liora had always been drawn to the strange corners of history, the half-whispered legends buried between the lines of old manuscripts. In the dusty archives of her university, she found it — a map brittle with age, its ink faded yet persistent. There, on the ragged coastline, was a word she had never heard before: Bayhand. The name stirred something inside her, like the echo of a memory that wasn’t her own. She traced the faded ink with her fingertip. No such place appeared on any official charts, and none of her professors had mentioned it. Yet the map seemed authentic, its lines too precise to be the work of imagination. Liora felt as though the parchment itself was daring her to look beyond the ordinary. Curiosity was her weakness, and Bayhand had already hooked her heart. Over the following weeks, she scoured every record she could find, but Bayhand was absent from history, as if it had been deliberately erased. No census, no trade routes, no ships recorded its name. That silence only deepened the mystery. How could a town vanish so completely, yet leave behind a single, stubborn word? Her nights became restless. She dreamed of waves crashing against rocks, of voices calling her name across the foam. The map lay under her pillow, as though it were whispering to her in sleep. By dawn, she had made her decision: she would find Bayhand, no matter the cost. With a small satchel of clothes, her notebooks, and the map folded neatly in her pocket, Liora left the city behind. She did not tell her colleagues where she was going. After all, how could she explain she was chasing a place no one believed existed?