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He didn't want to lose the page. He didn't want to risk the browser crashing or the tab refreshing into a 404 error. With a quick, practiced motion, he swiped his palm across the screen. Click.

He didn't know it then, but that single image would be the only evidence left. When he tried to show his sister an hour later, the website was gone. The URL led to a "Domain For Sale" landing page. The maritime archive didn't exist in any database. Screenshot_20221218_110753_Chrome.jpg

The screen showed a grainy, sepia-toned chart of a coastline that didn't seem to exist anymore. In the bottom right corner, a hand-drawn ink illustration of a sea serpent curled around a compass rose. But it wasn't the monster that caught his eye; it was a tiny, handwritten note scrawled in the margin of the digital scan: “For those who find the way, the lighthouse never went dark.” He didn't want to lose the page

Elias felt a prickle of electricity on his neck. His grandfather had been a keeper at a station three towns over until it was automated in the eighties. The old man used to mutter the exact same phrase into his tea whenever the fog rolled in. The URL led to a "Domain For Sale" landing page

He had been falling down a rabbit hole for three hours. It started with a search for "best sourdough starter temperature" and somehow ended on a digitized archive of 19th-century maritime maps.