By the time I reached the valley, the morning had already spent itself, leaving behind a light that felt too soft to be real — the kind that makes you wonder whether the gods have forgotten to turn the day on properly. I'd been walking since dawn, or at least since my knees allowed something approximating walking, following a road that seemed determined to surprise me with new potholes. Below, the valley unfurled like an unrolled parchment, dotted with clusters of rooftops and the faint silver of rivers twisting through the fields. The town of cartographers. I'd been here once, long ago — back when maps were weapons and we believed knowing the world's edges gave us power. Now I was just trying not to trip over them.
The sign at the gate had lost half its paint, so it read simply: "OWN OF MAP." Fitting, really. The people who once drew the world now lived in a fragment of it. A flock of chickens greeted me with territorial hostility. One pecked at my boot like it was personal. The air smelled faintly of soot, rain, and the ghosts of old ink.
The square was quiet except for a single old man sitting behind a table buried under scrolls, compasses, and tea cups that hadn't seen washing in a decade. His robe was patched, his beard uneven, and his expression that of someone who had finally achieved peace through sheer indifference.
He looked up at me as if measuring the distance between our foolishness.
"Lost?" he asked.
"Perpetually," I said.
"Good," he grunted. "You're halfway qualified to live here."
He called himself the Archivist, though the title sounded less like pride and more like a chronic condition. His shop — if you could call it that — was the last of its kind, a cluttered sanctuary of paper towers and rolled-up dreams. Maps hung from the ceiling like drying laundry. The air tasted of ink and memory.
"Used to be," he said, "every road started here. Mercenaries, pilgrims, treasure hunters — they all needed maps. Now people only travel for funerals and taxes."
I leaned on his counter, pretending not to notice how my back popped. "So business is bad?"
"Business is extinct," he replied cheerfully. "I keep drawing out of habit. Same as breathing."
He poured me tea that smelled like regret and tasted worse, and we sat among his half-finished charts. Rivers that stopped midcourse, mountains fading into blankness — the kind of maps that look like they lost interest halfway through being born.
"They call them broken maps," he said, catching me staring. "Unfinished, inaccurate, outdated. But maybe they're just honest. The world changes faster than ink dries. Better to admit you don't know everything."
"Honesty's bad for business," I said.
"So is age," he countered, and we both laughed.
He showed me a map I remembered — the old route our company once took through the southern marshes. I could almost smell the rot and hear the splash of things better left unnamed.
"You drew that?" I asked.
"Every miserable inch. You adventurers were good for the economy of pain."
"Glad to have contributed."
He squinted. "Did you ever find what you were looking for?"
"Still checking the side roads," I said.
We talked like that for a long while, trading jokes that tried too hard to disguise truth. The Archivist told me about the days when he and his guild believed they were shaping civilization — that each new chart, each new discovery, was a defiance of ignorance. "But the borders kept moving," he said. "Kingdoms fell. Seas receded. It turns out the world didn't need us to describe it."
"Maybe it still does," I offered.
He smiled sadly. "Only people who get lost think maps matter."
Before I could argue, someone burst through the shop's curtain — a young woman with ink-stained fingers and the expression of someone perpetually late for her own destiny. She carried an armful of rolled parchment and nearly tripped over my boot.
"Apprentice," the Archivist said without looking up.
"Master," she said, equally unimpressed. "We're out of paper again."
He sighed. "Try writing smaller."
"I did," she snapped. "The rivers keep bleeding through the mountains."
"Then tell them to stop."
She gave me a look that suggested this conversation had been happening for years. "You must be one of his lost causes," she said to me.
"On my better days," I said. "Do you also make broken maps?"
"Worse," she said. "I fix them."
Her name, I later learned, was Lira. She was young enough to still believe in perfection, old enough to know it's a trap. Her presence brought a kind of accidental light into the dusty shop — not brilliance, but the stubborn glow of someone who refuses to go dim.
While the Archivist shuffled through his drawers, she showed me her own work: neat lines, careful details, an elegance the old man's maps had long since abandoned. "He says the world's too unstable to chart," she said. "But someone has to try. You can't live by guesswork."
"Guesswork's underrated," I said. "It's the reason most of us are still alive."
She smirked. "And the reason half of you got lost."
We ended up talking at the window, watching the townsfolk go about their quiet routines. Children drew chalk rivers in the square. A baker shouted prices at no one in particular. Somewhere a lute was badly losing an argument with its strings.
"This town used to be the world's compass," Lira said softly. "Now it doesn't even know which way it's turning."
"Maybe that's not so bad," I said. "The world's quieter when it stops pretending it knows where it's going."
She tilted her head. "You sound like him."
"I'm too tired to sound like myself."
When the Archivist returned, he brought out a chest of brittle scrolls tied with red string. "My broken maps," he said. "They don't lead anywhere real. But every traveler who visits takes one. Maybe that's faith — trusting a road that refuses to finish."
He handed me one at random. It showed a river that ended abruptly in a blank expanse.
"Where does it go?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Depends on who's holding it."
That night, the three of us ate dinner together in the shop. The stew was thin, the tea relentless, and the conversation oddly comforting. The Archivist told old stories — the kind that started with ambition and ended with irony. Lira rolled her eyes through half of them, correcting his exaggerations with the precision of someone who cared too much to let the past have all the fun.
"You ever wonder," I asked him, "why you stayed here when everyone else moved on?"
He chewed thoughtfully. "Someone has to keep the past company. Otherwise it gets lonely."
Lira snorted. "You mean you're too stubborn to die."
He raised his cup. "Same difference."
After dinner, she led me to the rooftop. The view was breathtaking — rooftops stitched together by lamplight, smoke rising in lazy spirals, the river reflecting stars that hadn't shown themselves in years.
"When I was a child," she said, "I thought maps were promises. That if something was drawn, it couldn't disappear. Then I started making them and realized I was trying to hold back time."
I watched the wind scatter her hair across her face, her ink-stained fingers gripping the railing like a tether. "Time doesn't like being held," I said. "It prefers to be bribed."
She smiled faintly. "What did you offer it?"
"Regret," I said. "It's the only currency that doesn't lose value."
For a moment, she looked at me like she saw through the armor of humor. "Do you miss it? The life you had?"
I thought about my comrades, the laughter, the weight of the sword that used to feel like certainty. "I miss how easy it was to believe we mattered," I said finally. "But the world keeps going, with or without us. Maybe that's proof we did something right."
She nodded, then laughed quietly. "You talk like a map that's been folded too many times."
"Careful," I said. "Some folds are where the real treasures hide."
The next morning, I woke to the sound of quills scratching and arguments about geography. The Archivist and Lira were hunched over a massive parchment, debating whether the eastern forests still existed.
"They burned twenty years ago," she said.
"They grew back," he insisted.
"They grew different."
"Then draw them that way."
He saw me watching and waved me over. "We're correcting history," he said.
"Dangerous hobby," I replied.
"Necessary one," he said. "If we don't redraw the world now and then, it forgets to include us."
Before I left, Lira handed me a fresh map — her own. It showed the valley, the roads, and the river, ending right at the edge of the town. "No blank spaces," she said proudly.
I smiled. "Then I guess it's my job to add one."
She laughed. "You're hopeless."
"Professionally," I said.
The Archivist walked me to the gate. "Keep that broken map I gave you," he said. "One day it'll make sense."
"I doubt it."
"That's the point."
As I stepped into the sunlight, I looked back once more. The town shimmered faintly in the distance, like an ink stain spreading across time. I could still hear their voices — his dry wit, her restless laughter — blending with the wind.
I unfolded the broken map. The blank part gleamed in the morning light, waiting for a hand foolish enough to fill it. I thought about doing it right there, about drawing a line where the road disappeared. But instead, I tucked it away. Some things are better left incomplete.
And as I started walking again, the town behind me faded into a gentle hum — not lost, not forgotten, just placed carefully on the map of my memory, right beside the sound of bells from the shrine and the laughter of ghosts who still knew my name.
For the first time in years, I didn't feel like I was wandering.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be — between the places that no longer existed and the ones still waiting to be drawn.