Lost for centuries. Now being brought back.

Let me introduce myself, since we are going to be spending time together.

I go by the pseudonym Légende X. It is a creative identity built for storytelling without borders. I chose anonymity on purpose because the stories should be the thing you remember, not the person telling them.

My story began on a small island, where I grew up losing myself in folklore and stories that made the rest of the world disappear. Years later, in Canada, I watched my own son treat books as something to survive rather than enjoy, and noticed something else at the same time: dozens of cultures sharing streets and schools knew almost nothing about each other. That gap struck me as a problem worth fixing.

Stories could fill that gap, the right ones, where the history, the geography, and the culture arrive together, and the reader forgets to notice they are learning anything at all.

What began as a single ebook has grown into something considerably larger, a unique ecosystem that now includes this newsletter.

Through Légende X Chronicles, you discover forgotten legends and the real world behind them. You explore the history, geography, and culture of countries across the globe, with insights on education, art, travel, relocation, and economic opportunities.

This first edition begins with two things that were supposed to be gone forever. One is a bird. One is a building. And right now, against all reasonable expectation, someone is seriously trying to bring each of them back.

The Dodo has been extinct since the 1660s, gone from Mauritius within a century of humans arriving, a record so efficient it almost qualifies as an achievement. For 350 years it has been the world's shorthand for irreversible. You do not say "as dead as a Dodo" about something you expect to see again.

Except there is a laboratory in Texas that is currently trying to change that. Colossal Biosciences is working from the Dodo's closest living relative using gene-editing tools to rebuild the lost genetic blueprint one section at a time. In 2023, they partnered with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation with the long-term goal of returning the bird to the island it came from. Whether it works is an open question. That it is being seriously attempted at all is the remarkable part.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria is a different kind of story, though it starts in the same place: gone.

It guided ships into one of the ancient world's greatest ports for more than 1,600 years. It stood over 100 metres tall, the only one of the Seven Wonders built to actually do a job rather than simply impress people passing by. A series of earthquakes brought it down in the 1300s, and its stones settled into the harbour, where underwater archaeologists found them again in 1994. Then, in the summer of 2025, the PHAROS project, led by Isabelle Hairy of France's CNRS alongside Egypt's Centre d'Études Alexandrines, began lifting them out: twenty-two blocks from the seabed, some weighing between 70 and 80 tons, including the lintels of the main doorway and a previously unknown gateway that blends Egyptian design with Greek engineering. Each block is being scanned and virtually reassembled into a digital twin, a model that researchers hope will finally show how the Lighthouse was built, and why it eventually stopped standing.

The Lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Of the seven, only the Great Pyramid of Giza still stands where it was built, which it has been doing since around 2560 BCE and at this point seems fairly committed to continuing. The rest live on in fragments, coins, and the accounts of travelers who swore they stood in front of them. So I spent a few weeks doing my own version of the work those archaeologists are doing, not with cranes, but with the historical record: the measurements, the coins, the descriptions. Seven digital art pieces, each one an attempt to show a Wonder as closely as the evidence allows, before the fires and the earthquakes and the slow forgetting finished what time started.

They are yours with this edition. I will get to that at the end.

The full story of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, how they rose and fell, is on the site.

Read: Seven Wonders of the Ancient World →

My first interactive ebook follows that Dodo story all the way to the laboratory.

Can the Legendary Dodo Bird Be Revived? is 159 illustrated pages about the bird, its island, and the scientists trying to undo its extinction. It starts on Mauritius and ends in that Texas laboratory. Inside there are quizzes, crosswords, two international art contests with cash prizes, and a global treasure hunt.

Three more blogs have been published, and anyone can read them.

This edition's gift is The Lighthouse of Alexandria and The Great Pyramid of Giza wallpapers from my Seven Wonders of the Ancient World collection, formatted for your screens in desktop and mobile sizes.

Marvels of the ancient world, rebuilt from historical records. Signed, free for personal use.

The collection lives in the Free Resources section. You will need to log in to download it, and if you are reading this without an account, that login is free and takes about ten seconds.

Free Resources →

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