There are those who say time is a river, flowing implacably from the beginning to the end. They are wrong; speaking only from the brief experience of a few short years of life.

Time is an ocean; vast and endless, spreading out in all directions at once, and we are all adrift on it. With proper rudder and sails we can attempt to control our destiny; but the currents are uncharted and unchartable. Great and terrible storms have blown across the ocean of time, storms which have been known to wipe entire civilizations from the earth; to erase their histories from history.

My name is Maia, and I am immortal. I have walked the Earth and sailed her seas; and ultimately the stars, for day after lonely day beyond count. I was ancient when the pyramids of Egypt were built. I have seen civilizations rise and fall, or destroyed so utterly by war or calamity, that even the very memory of  their existence has been lost to time. I remember them all.

I was fifteen when I became what I am today.
Now I am so old.
I used to have so much mercy...

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More than 10,000 years ago civilization flourished. A seafaring kingdom arose that spread art, architecture, technology and agriculture to every corner of the globe. More advanced in many aspects than the ancient Greeks and Romans, their shipcraft was unequaled by any other civilization during the entire age of sail. For over a thousand years they stood as the virtually unchallenged rulers of the world.

In a single night of fire and terror Atlantis was wiped from the face of the earth forever. In the space of a single heartbeat, 100,000 years of uninterrupted human evolution came to an end. A comet the size of a large mountain broke up on entry into the atmosphere, its pieces making landfall on the ice sheets of what is now Canada and the north Atlantic, spinning the earth's crust on its mantle; shifting the poles by over 2,000 miles. The ice sheets of the last ice age were suddenly shifted to temperate climates while large parts of the Asian continent were forced above the Arctic Circle. The last ice age came to an end in the geologic blink of an eye,

The Earth rang like a bell from the impact as the shock wave traveled completely around the world several times. Every living thing that was not sheltered high in inland mountains was incinerated by the global firestorm that followed the impact; or obliterated by the miles-high tidal wave that followed, striking every coastline on the planet and sweeping hundreds of miles inland.

The apocalypse left only a few primitive tribes living in fear for generations. What pitifully little was left of mankind started over from the ashes. So complete was the destruction that it took millennia before even the simplest forms of writing were reinvented. Yet a legend echoed down through the ages of a young woman who came up from out of the sea in the aftermath of that holocaust...