Excerpt: The Icefields

The only known photo of Atlantis rested in a green jar made of volcanic glass, sealed and unopened for the last 350 centuries. Allison Order saw it once, as a child. The green bottle was large and square, a jug, with blunt, parallel grooves around the neck, designed to slide into place in a forgotten machine. The mouth was capped with a jade plug.
The photo rested in the bottle at an angle, delicate, preserved despite its age in a gaseous suspension. The green jug had not been moved or shifted in so long that it had settled into a groove in the stone shelf .
Allison had been too young at the time to understand the significance of the photo. A child of fifty, she stared, rapt, at the strange image, in its awkward angle. The photo entranced her. It didn't seem real.
The others in the room at the time (two of her uncles, a few faeries and a troll named Molly) did not speak about or look at the artifact. They all knew what it was, knew it's history and its status as Most Rare of All, almost sacred, and they all avoided its mention as simply as they avoided thinking too much about the past. There was too much of it. This thing, with its provenance, strained a mind's ability to comprehend.
Young Allison had wanted to ask questions, a dozen, or a hundred, but she knew intrinsically that she had better not. She saved her questions that day, and over the years that followed, she gradually found some answers, here and there.
She saw that photograph in her dreams.

The photo was not the Atlantis of folklore.
It did not feature ocean, nor any shining city. No spires. No majestic arches. No antediluvian riches or ancient outlandish science.
What the photograph showed, in silvers and white and black on eggshell paper crumbling in the top right corner, was a face. The face of a girl.