The plateau rose abruptly from the scrublands, a slab of black stone pushed upward by some ancient violence and then abandoned by time. From its edge, the Inland Sea spread out like a dull mirror, catching the light of both suns and breaking it into bands of copper and ash. The wind up here was constant, low and insistent, carrying salt and the cries of distant birds that never came close.
Kael had climbed it because no one else did.
The stone was too smooth in places, too sharp in others, and the ascent offered no shelter. Nothing lived here long. Nothing stayed. It was the kind of place belief slid off rather than gathered, and that alone made it valuable.
He had not expected to find anything.
The map revealed itself only when the light struck at the wrong angle. Kael noticed it by accident—an interruption in the stone's texture, lines that did not belong to erosion. He crouched, brushed dust aside with his sleeve, and froze.
It was etched directly into the plateau.
Not scratched. Not carved crudely.
Etched with patience.
Lines spread outward in careful arcs and angles, coastlines traced with a confidence that suggested the hand had known them intimately. Islands floated where the Inland Sea now churned. Peninsulas curved where nothing but open water remained. Some borders were sharp and certain. Others were blurred, overwritten, corrected.
Fifty-one continents.
Not symbols. Not approximations.
Records.
Kael's throat tightened.
He followed the lines slowly, fingers hovering just above the stone as if touching it might wake something. Oceans were marked with names he recognized only faintly—old words, pre-imperial, pre-divine in flavor. Names humans no longer used because nothing answered to them anymore.
Aerthyra.
Not as myth.
Not as theology.
As geography.
Kael found the continent beneath his feet and traced it inward. Vaeloria. The coast here was wrong—too wide, too smooth—but inland the markings tightened, growing more precise. Forests were indicated not by trees but by absence, by negative space where stone had been deliberately left untouched.
Moonwater lay there.
Ashfields too, though it was not named—just a faint notch beside a dry riverbed, as if the cartographer had paused, considered, and decided it did not matter enough to record properly.
Kael swallowed.
Someone had stood here once and known the world whole.
Not ruled it.
Known it.
He leaned back on his heels, the wind tugging at his cloak, and felt very small in a way that had nothing to do with fear. Vaeloria was a fragment. One sliver of land among many. And yet belief pooled here more easily than elsewhere because stories were still close to the ground.
Distances here were crossed by mouths, not mandates.
Rumor, not law.
That was why he could not outrun it.
Kael straightened and studied the rest of the map. Other continents bore heavier markings—dense clusters of lines and sigils worn almost flat by time. Places where something had settled deeply enough to leave scars even stone remembered. He did not need to know what lived there to understand the implication.
Belief, once established, hardened.
It stopped asking.
It stopped moving.
Here, on Vaeloria, belief was still fluid. Still young enough to shift, to cling, to assign meaning wherever it found resistance.
To him.
Kael pressed his palm flat against the black stone and closed his eyes. He could almost feel it—the faint hum beneath the surface, not magic, not power, but memory. Someone had made this map before gods learned how to fence the world. Before continents were parceled into thrones and jurisdictions.
Before belief became a resource.
"If I stay," Kael said softly to the wind, "they'll finish deciding what I am."
The words felt heavier spoken aloud.
He imagined Ressan Ford again—the fires, the marker by the river, the hesitation in people's hands as they waited for him to act. He imagined more villages, more signals, more problems carried to his doorstep because walking was easier than choosing.
Belief would thicken.
And thicken.
Until refusal was no longer an option but a betrayal.
Kael opened his eyes and looked out over the Inland Sea. Ships crawled across its surface like insects, following routes dictated by generations of fear and habit. None of them would ever come up here. None of them would ever see the map.
That was the point.
He stepped back from the etched stone, deliberately scuffing dust over a portion of the lines, not to hide them—weather would undo that soon enough—but to remind himself that knowledge was not obligation.
He could leave Vaeloria.
He had to.
Other continents waited beyond the horizon, places where belief had already hardened into something monstrous or brittle, where expectations were owned by gods or demons or old systems too entrenched to bend easily around a single man.
There, he would not be mistaken for an answer.
There, he would be an intrusion.
Kael preferred that.
He turned away from the plateau's edge and began the descent, choosing a path that would shred boots and skin alike, anything to slow pursuit. Behind him, the map remained—patient, indifferent, complete without him.
Ahead of him lay oceans, borders, and lands that would not care who he was until he forced them to.
As Kael walked, the wind shifted, carrying salt and distance and something else—anticipation, perhaps, or simply the sound of the world rearranging itself.
He did not look back.
If he did, he feared he might start planning instead of moving.
And planning, he knew now, was how people became gods long before anyone worshipped them.