Chapter 33
Log entry
Location: The British Admiralty’s Hydrographic Office
The early entries detailed conditions aboard the ship: currents, weather patterns, navigational challenges, crew morale.
Set among them were observations less official, but no less exact.
Isolation. Fatigue. The slow erosion of certainty.
I had recorded these things as data, believing them relevant, but amid the careful logging, it became a diary of things that were more important than coordinates.
The beautiful story of love between Victoria and Innominatus.
Every movement had been logged.
Now, with the book on the small desk before me and the sound of footsteps approaching beyond the door, I understood what it truly was.
Not a record.
A confession.
A vestige of love.
Despite what lies I told the society and others, they would find out all of Victoria and Innominatus’s secrets as soon as they opened the logbook. They would know where to find them. They would know everything.
My fingers shook as I dipped the quill in the pot of black ink and wrote my final log before I would turn it in. I was known for carrying it at all times, and the men aboard the ship had already informed the Admiralty and the society that I had it.
I had no choice but to turn it in and out Victoria and Inno.
I held the quill over the last page, my hand trembling as the weight of everything pressed against my wrist. The ink glimmered, dark and alive in its pot.
With a careful, resolute flick of my wrist, I tipped the pot across the page, letting it spread and swallow names, routes, and precise markings that could have led anyone to them.
Each blackened blot, each obscured line, became a shield; a barrier between the world and the fragile lives I could never touch but could protect.
Page by page, I turned the journal, leaving smudges and crosses wherever the details were too dangerous to remain.
The maps I had charted with exacting care transformed before my eyes.
No longer guides, but sentinels. The logbook I had poured my heart into became a vessel of concealment, a story written in shadows to guard Victoria and Innominatus from a world that could never understand the magnitude of their love.
I would never sail the seas again, at least not in the way I had dreamed; my career charting the world ended before it could truly begin.
But as my mother had teased me in lighter times, I had always longed to write a story that might outlive the hand that penned it, a tale timeless and enduring.
Perhaps now I would have my chance. Perhaps Victoria had given not only Inno a second chance at life, but she had given me one as well—one that did not rely on charts or maps to make an impact, but on the preservation of something greater than ambition: the immortality of love.
I closed the book, feeling the weight of its promise settle in my hands.
Beyond these pages, beyond these lines, Victoria and Innominatus would endure—hidden, untouchable, and free.
And now, in sharing their story with the world, I could make them known in a way that would never betray them, a story that lived in the hands of others, safe yet eternal.
Encouragement to live life with love and intention the first time, for you might never get a second opportunity.
Perhaps this book, this logbook turned tale, is what I was meant to create all along: not a record of places charted, but of hearts that could not be confined and a love that could not die. And perhaps, in giving up the world I knew, I had finally found a life I was meant to live.
Log entry
April, 1803
Location: The British Admiralty’s Hydrographic Office
The end & the beginning.
I went in search of a story I could tell for a lifetime, and instead I returned with a secret that could never be told.