The Cartographer's Last Map

He drew the coastlines from memory, each bay a sentence he had spoken once and could not unsay — the harbor mouth still tasting of departure.

His instruments were wrong by now, the north arrow drifting like a name at the edge of sleep, almost retrievable, almost lost.

He knew the mountain was not where he placed it. Still, the ink moved through his hand the way water moves through a stone town after the rain has left — purposeful, looking for the lowest place to rest.

What he charted was not land but the shape of his attention: where he had paused, where he had turned to watch the light change over something ordinary and felt the ordinary shatter.

They will use this map to go somewhere real. They will arrive slightly off, slightly amazed, and think the world itself was the one that shifted.