The old man didn't answer immediately. He slid his glass across the polished wood, the sound of glass on varnish screaming in the tense silence between them.
He leaned in, invading Andrew's personal space. The smell coming off him wasn't just old booze and mud; it was the scent of ozone, crushed pine needles, and salt spray. It was the smell of a storm waiting to break.
"You ask *where*," the stranger rasped, his eyes locking onto Andrew's. They were a startling, milky blue, like sea glass worn down by decades of waves. "But the question is *what*."
He tapped his temple with a grimy finger. "Maps lie. Satellites are blind. They only see what reflects light. They don't see what swallows it."
Andrew's breath hitched. His hands were shaking under the bar counter, his knuckles white. Every instinct he had left from his corporate training screamed at him to leave, to call security, to run. But he couldn't look away.
The man lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, reciting words that sounded less like a sentence and more like a spell he had memorized to keep himself sane.
*"Where the ocean drinks the burning sand, and the green roots eat the stone. A heart beats in the silence, where no human seed is sown. Find the island that casts no shadow, deep in the Emerald Throat."*
The riddle hung in the air, heavy and strange.
"A forest..." Andrew whispered, his mind racing to decode the imagery. "Inside a desert island? A place where humans have never stepped?"
"The Emerald Throat," the old man nodded, a manic grin splitting his face. "A pocket of the world that time forgot. It's not on your GPS, boy. It's not in your guidebooks."
Andrew felt a shiver run down his spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. It was a volatile cocktail of emotions. Terror, certainly—this man was dangerous, and the place he described sounded impossible, perhaps even hostile.
But beneath the fear, his heart was pounding with a rhythm he hadn't felt in years. *Excitement.* Pure, unadulterated adrenaline.
The "silly dreams" he had crushed under the weight of his office job were clawing their way back to the surface. The idea of a place untouched, a place where survival wasn't about office politics but about life and death... it was intoxicating.
"Does it exist?" Andrew asked, his voice barely audible. "Truly?"
The old man grabbed Andrew's wrist. His grip was like iron, calloused and hot.
"The question isn't if it exists," the stranger hissed. "The question is... are you brave enough to get lost?"