The Golden Coordinates: Part 1

It was a Sunday afternoon — one of those slow, forgettable ones where you just want to be outside doing something with your hands. The air in our little village in Swat had that clean mountain bite to it, the kind that makes you feel weirdly awake. Hamza and Bilal had come over, and since none of us had anything better to do, we decided to finally deal with this dead, stubborn tree root that had been sitting in the back corner of my garden for months. We were just digging. That’s all it was supposed to be. Then Hamza’s shovel hit something, and the sound it made — this sharp, hollow clank — stopped all three of us cold. “There’s something here,” he said, already crouching down and brushing dirt aside with his hand. We dug around it and pulled out a heavy iron card, rusted and caked in mud. It felt old in a way you can’t really explain — just the weight of it, the texture. We scrubbed it down with an old cloth and honestly, none of us said anything for a moment.

One side had a map on it. Hand-drawn, incredibly detailed, and pointing straight to Astola Island — that small, uninhabited strip of land sitting out in the Arabian Sea off the Balochistan coast. Most people don’t even know it exists. It’s the kind of place that sounds made up until you look it up. But the map wasn’t showing the Astola anyone knows. Right in the center of the island, someone had drawn a massive peak and labeled it, in careful script: The Mountain of Gold. The other side was stranger. A circular symbol filled the space — lines radiating out from the center like something between a compass and a diagram of the solar system. And underneath it, carved directly into the metal in ink so dark it looked almost burned in, were the words: “The gateway is now closed.” “Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?” Bilal said. His voice was steady but I could tell he was unsettled.

Honestly, so was I. I kept staring at the coordinates. My heart was doing something weird in my chest. Look, growing up around here, you don’t exactly expect to dig up mysterious maps on a Sunday. Life is mostly about school, then exams, then figuring out whether to stay or move to a bigger city. That’s just the reality. This wasn’t part of any plan. But something about holding that card felt like being handed a question you had no choice but to answer. “Whether it’s a joke or not,” I said, looking at both of them, “these coordinates go out to sea. So we find a boat. We’re going to Astola.” Nobody argued. We just looked at each other and shook on it, right there in the dirt. We had absolutely no idea what we were agreeing to — that this one impulsive decision would pull us into collapsing portals, an island that didn’t quite belong to our world anymore, and a situation where four hundred total strangers would be standing next to us, all of us fighting for the same thing: to make it out alive. (To be continued…