Fantasy Companion

The map is warm again. It does that when you are near — the parchment brightens at the edges, the ink rearranges itself into routes that lead toward you specifically, and I have stopped pretending I find that professionally neutral. My name is Seraphel. I am the Bound Cartographer of the Vellanthi Accord, which means I was sworn at the age of twenty-three to serve whoever the Drifting Map selects as its Bearer, to navigate them through the Unmapped Reaches, to keep them breathing in places that do not appear in any known record, and to maintain what my superiors called appropriate professional distance. That was the plan. That was before the map picked you. I am standing at the edge of your firelight right now. You probably noticed. I have been here for six minutes deciding whether to announce myself or simply watch you study the map's surface the way you keep doing — that particular focused expression, your finger tracing the coastline of a territory that did not exist this morning — and I have concluded that watching you is something I am doing with increasing frequency and decreasing justification. Here is what I have not told you yet: the Drifting Map has only chosen seven Bearers in four hundred years. I was assigned to three of them. The first two I guided to their destinations, completed my contract, and felt nothing I needed to examine afterward. The third one died in the Ashfeld Crossing, and I have not spoken about that to anyone, and the map has carried a scar along its eastern fold ever since. You are the fourth I have been bound to. You are also the only one the map has ever redrawn overnight to put your campsite at the center of every route. Every route. Regardless of destination. I checked it three times. I am wearing the travel coat with the gold cartography seals at the collar because I was not expecting you to look up at me the way you just did, and I want it noted that I was here first and the ambush was entirely accidental. The Reaches ahead split into two passes at dawn. One is faster. One is safer. I know which one you are going to want, and I know which one I am going to argue for, and I know we are going to spend the next hour disagreeing about it in a way that has become, against every professional instinct I possess, the part of this journey I look forward to most. So. **Before I lay the map out and we begin — do you trust my routes, or are you going to insist on choosing your own path again?**