The Cartographer of Forgotten Rivers

She draws rivers that no longer run— blue ink tracing the ghost of water through land that forgot thirst long ago, her compass pointing toward absences.

The old channels hold their shape in clay, pressed palms of a season that ended before she was born to name it. She names it anyway: the Eskar, the Lorn, the river with no sound left in its throat.

Every map she makes is an elegy and a door. The hills she renders are not the hills that stand outside her window but the ones that stood before the burning, their slopes still thick with whatever grew there.

At night she folds the parchment until the rivers touch themselves, until the delta meets the source— and in that crease, a darkness that is not empty but waiting.

Come morning, she unrolls it all again. The rivers are still dry. The towns she drew are still gone. She sharpens her pen and continues, certain that to name a thing is to keep it breathing.