Chapter 1
https://www.miraclenovela.com/2025/07/Asmaa_0421709731.html
The Island of No Return
The Island of No Return
By Asmaa Nada
chapter 2
“Oh… despair had completely taken over all of us back then. None of my friends believed that any of us could ever escape from that cursed island… the Island of Doom!”
It all started back when I was in my final year of high school—just before college—when my grandfather Vladimir returned after being gone for… what? Twenty, maybe thirty years? I honestly can’t remember exactly.
When he came back, he was around sixty years old, and the fear on his face was impossible to ignore. His eyes were always wide with terror, and his behavior? It was full of panic and paranoia.
He wouldn’t sleep at night. Instead, he’d sit by the window for hours, watching the streets like a man waiting for something—or someone—terrible to appear.
Sometimes, he’d go outside and build strange circular fires from piles of wood, all around the house.
And that wasn’t the worst of it.
He dug a trench—yes, a real trench—underneath the mansion. He reinforced its walls with steel, turned it into a kind of underground fortress. But to him, it was more than that. It was his personal library.
A massive, unsettling library packed wall to wall with books—hundreds of them—all about snakes. Their types, sizes, behaviors… and how to kill them.
Maps were scattered all over the floor—thousands of them, old and new, crumpled and torn, marked with red circles and strange symbols.
In every corner, he placed these huge statues. Stone beasts with eyes made of red glass, staring blankly at anyone who walked by. They were eerie. Unnatural.
One day, I gathered my friends in my room and told them some of the stories Grandpa used to tell me…
Stories about ancient treasures made of pure gold, rubies, and glowing coral—scattered all across a place he called “Anaconda Island.”
That’s what he named it. That’s how he drew it—over and over—on maps, on scraps of paper, even on the walls.
According to him, the island was surrounded by a chain of other islands, but it sat right in the middle—the heart of them all.
It was overflowing with riches: fruit trees, exotic foods, gold, pearls, and coral more beautiful than anything you could imagine.
But despite all that… not a single human soul lived there.
No one dared to stay.
No one could steal even a single jewel.
Because anyone who did…
was cursed.
Only the unlucky ever found themselves trapped on that island.
For years and years, the people on the neighboring islands kept offering human sacrifices—every single year on the exact same day.
They would leave behind a boy or two, barely twenty years old, abandoned on the shore of that cursed island.
That day… was the day the creature came out.
Every year, like clockwork, the monster of the island would crawl out of the jungle, slither down to the beach… and hunt its offering.
It would swallow them whole—alive—into its massive, gaping mouth.
But it didn’t kill them right away.
The victim stayed alive inside it… for days.
Too weak to fight back, too numb to scream—thanks to the powerful venom it injected with a single, swift bite.
It would keep the victim inside, draining every trace of life:
First the blood… then the skin… then the flesh…
Its body would melt them slowly using a corrosive, acid-like fluid…
Until all that remained were bones.
And when it was done, it would spit those bones out—high up in the treetops at the center of the island.
That was the only proof left behind… that a human had ever stepped foot there.
My friends and I?
We used to laugh at these stories. We thought they were just wild fantasies—fairy tales from a paranoid old man.
We didn’t believe in some giant legendary serpent that Grandpa kept drawing on paper or whispering its name like it was sacred.
Well… not all of us.
My friend Alice actually did some digging online. She found pictures of massive snakes—real ones—stretching several meters long.
But even those looked nothing like the horror that filled Grandpa’s eyes whenever he even mentioned the creature’s name.
Three more years went by.
Grandpa's health got worse—bad enough that he refused to leave the trench.
So, my father had to bring doctors into the mansion and set up an entire medical room for him—down there, underground.
I used to sit with him for hours, helping him draw maps—exactly how he instructed me.
But these weren’t maps of the sea or the outer shape of the island…
No.
They were maps of the inside of the island.
At the time, I didn’t really understand.
But I loved Grandpa deeply.
And I wanted to give him peace of mind.
So I thought: If I ever did end up on that island, I’ll use these maps to escape. Maybe I won’t even last a day there, but I’ll try.
What I didn’t realize…
Was that he wasn’t preparing me to escape quickly.
He was trying to teach me how to survive as long as possible.
He wanted me to study the maps, so that one day—if I had no other choice—I could build a wooden boat from the island’s own resources…
coat it with tar… and make a run for it.
By the end of my fourth year of college, I had finally graduated.
But Grandpa had passed away.
Dad didn’t feel like celebrating… not with grief still hanging over the house.
So instead, just a few weeks after the funeral, he surprised me with a gift:
A massive boat.
My own.
With one condition:
Never sail beyond the borders of our country's waters.
I was thrilled.
My friends and I would often take the boat out for short rides, just for fun. We never strayed too far—never ventured deep into the open ocean.
And when I wasn’t sailing, I was down in the trench—immersed in the books, the maps, and the journals Grandpa left behind.
Back then, I still saw them as myths… not warnings.
One of the first entries in his journal read:
> "In the folds of pitch-black night, and the silence that swallows the wind… beware the whisper.
Be still—don’t move.
Be like the statues scattered across the island.
Hold your breath if you can.
If you can’t… then know this:
You are nothing more than an appetizer.
Just a starter dish on a plate made especially for him.
You’re in his island.
His kingdom.
Enjoy the magic by day… but hear me well:
Never go too deep.
Or you will never come back.”
Can you imagine it?
That terrifying warning wasn’t hidden in the middle of the journal or scrawled at the end…
It was written right there, bold and clear, on the very first page.
How could anyone resist reading more after that?
The way Grandpa described each day on the island—so vivid, so real—you could practically feel yourself there.
He wrote about what it was like trying to escape from something you couldn’t even fully see.
All you ever caught was a glimpse of its massive head and a small part of its neck—towering above the trees, coiled up, preparing to strike.
Sometimes, you’d just see its trail—the enormous path it left in the dirt after slithering by.
The mark was so deep and wide that a full-grown man, over two meters tall, could lie comfortably in that groove like it was a trench carved in stone.
And the bones…
Oh God, the bones.
Dangling from tree branches, covered in the creature’s thick, sticky saliva—like some kind of twisted Christmas decorations.
---
One day, while I was examining one of Grandpa’s old maps, trying to understand what he’d drawn and why he labeled things so strangely…
I got startled.
My friends had barged into the trench, laughing and shouting.
I jumped up, quickly trying to fold the map and hide it.
“Caught you!” Antoine yelled in my ear, laughing.
Everyone else burst out laughing too.
I sighed, wiped a hand down my face, trying to stay calm.
Antoine leaned in teasingly and tried to grab the map.
> “What’s the matter, huh? You reading one of those women’s magazines?”
Mark grinned and shot back,
> “Those are your specialty, Antoine.”
Before I could react, Alice snatched the paper from my hand and stepped away to get a better look.
Everyone quickly gathered around her.
She stared at the map with wide eyes.
> “Wow,” she said, almost whispering. “This is actually… kinda creepy.”
Then Elizabeth began to mockingly recite the words scribbled at the top of the map, acting like she was onstage in some dramatic play:
> “Stay still… be a statue… don’t go deep… you’re just the appetizer…”
Tina broke into a fit of laughter.
> “What is this? A vampire island survival guide?”
Mark shook his head,
> “I’m not sure what that map is, but I found it among my Grandpa Arthur Vladimir’s stuff.”
Antoine nodded slowly,
> “Oh right… your grandpa. The one who vanished in the middle of the ocean and came back years later… found floating on a wooden raft, barely alive, eyes filled with terror. And this—this map—was in his hand.”
Raymond leaned in, inspecting the paper,
> “It looks like an internal map. Like… it shows paths inside an island.”
Mark added,
> “Yeah. I found another one just like it—inside one of Grandpa’s old snake books.
I used to help him draw these maps in his final days.
Back then, I didn’t understand any of it…”
Then Mark opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out another map.
But this one… this one was drawn with golden ink.
Raymond’s eyes lit up the moment he saw it.
> “Dude… this is a historical treasure!
There are only two copies of this map. One is in the Egyptian Museum, and the other… is right here. With you.”
Antoine raised an eyebrow.
> “Alright, Professor History—what’s the difference between this map and the one Alice is holding? Besides the shiny golden ink, obviously.”
Raymond carefully placed the golden map on the table and weighed down its corners with a few small figurines.
He began pointing at parts of the map as he spoke:
> “Look here—North and South America. And here’s Africa.
Now check out this ring of islands—forming a rough circle around a central one.
Right there—in the middle—is a golden serpent’s head.”
> “This isn’t just a decoration,” he continued.
“It marks the exact location of the island.
The museum version only shows the archipelago.
But this one?
This one has the serpent. That’s the difference.”
He pointed at Alice’s map.
> “That one is more like a hand-drawn path map—it shows specific routes inside the island.
But this golden one?
It tells us where to find it.”
Chapter 3
https://www.miraclenovela.com/2025/07/Asmaa_01316299310.html