A Cartographer's Pendant

In 77 AD, the eighth year of the reign of Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, an expediton to map out the Mare Sarmaticum sets out on a Roman war galley from a port on the northern coast of Gaul. Pulled by a mysterious pendant carried by the expedition's cartographer, it meets a dark fate on a distant island far beyond the Empire's borders.

The expedition's demise sets of a chain of events that lead others to follow in its steps over the next two thousand years. And all of them end up on that same island attracted by the invisible pull of the long dead cartographer's pendant.