If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance you will find us. A civilization frozen in time, a city stuck in the past, its people frozen statues with active minds. Oh, our minds torment us. All these years, we’ve been thinking and dreaming painful dreams, aching flashes of the past or haunting visions of the future. The water was poisoned, the balance was at the brink, people were hungry and thirsty and tired but, most of all, desperate. We made mistakes, we were arrogant and greedy and didn’t know how to handle our gifts. We’ve frozen everyone, a temporary solution to a possibly permanent problem. It hurts when I think we had so much potential, we could have done so much better. Please, I beg you, do not repeat our mistakes. We know things, things that we eventually forgot and left behind, things you should not ignore. Do not abuse your power like we did. We are a city sunken in the water, frozen until the time comes. If you’re reading this, perhaps the time has come.

Dear Diary

Today is an important day. Today may be the last day I write to you. Tomorrow I don’t know if I’ll be alive. I am scared!!!! I’m so scared, I can’t stand ignorance. I am afraid. I am afraid of death, I am afraid of the moment of disaster. I fell stressed inside me, I feel fear and ignorance. Ignorance scares me, I can’t stand it. They usually say that when you know you are going to die, you do things you want to do. I don’t know what I want!!! Well, I know, I want to live!!!

Dear Diary,

I have been stuck here for a while now... I can still hear the children screaming, trying to get away, but the water was too fast. It caught us all. The freezing water made us suffer and we were all begging god for forgiveness and for him to spare our lives but it didnt help. It was too late, before we knew it our whole town was under water, unable to escape. I am now just able to play, play till its over.

If you are reading this it means someone has found our records. I entrust you are a friend and not a foe.  I must believe that you are a friend and will read our accounts with empathy and understanding. 

I am one of those who documented what happened to us here at Ardus Unda, sometimes at great risk to myself and my colleagues. One of my forebears, the great Dorothea, always said we should concern ourselves with the things that matter, to seek and tell the truth.  So that became my job. I’m not the only one, and so along with my records you will find documents and artefacts shared by others.  They aren’t in any specific order, but share different events and aspects from our history.

Ardus Unda was once a great culture, like a modern Venice really – a crossroads between oceans, a melting pot of people from different cultures.  Our people shared the abundance of what our natural environment and human endeavours produced and we lived in peace. How times changed. 

As you read more, open your heart to our stories and our plight. 

Yours in trust

The Documentor