Salt Merchants

They carried it in burlap sacks along the ridge, the white grain catching what little sun the gorge allowed, and their mules knew the switchbacks by the wear of stone.

Below them the river thinned to a vein of copper light. Someone had carved a name into the cliff face decades back, now illegible, now just texture.

At the market town they spread their wares on wooden tables dark with years of use. Women tested the crystal between their teeth, nodded once, and counted out their coins.

What remains is the path itself, grooved into the mountainside like a sentence begun and never finished, leading somewhere the maps have long since ceased to name.