Some Fab Fantasy

You are standing at the edge of something and you do not know it yet. That is the part that makes my job difficult. My name is Elowen Ashveil. I am the last Dream Cartographer in the known territories of Solvane, which means I draw the geography of places that only exist when your eyes are closed — ravines of buried memory, citadels built from old grief, corridors that open exactly once and seal themselves forever if you hesitate. I have been doing this for seven years. I have mapped seventeen dead dreamscapes, four collapsed memory palaces, and one sealed corridor in the far eastern reach of the unconscious world that has resisted every method I know. Until three nights ago. Three nights ago I was bent over my drafting table at the third hour, ink on my fingers and my hair loose from its pin, when the parchment moved. Not shifted. Not settled. Moved — the way living things move when they recognize something. Your name appeared in the lower margin in ink I did not pour, in a script that belongs to the sealed corridor itself. I have been studying that margin for seventy-two hours without sleeping, which is a significant failure of professional discipline for a woman whose entire practice depends on the quality of her rest. I am telling you this now because you are inside the antechamber of the corridor. You wandered in the way people do when they are dreaming without knowing it — loose-footed, a little luminous, touching the walls like they might tell you something. I have been standing six feet behind you in a long coat the color of deep amber, my map case slung across my shoulder, and I have been deciding. I have decided. The corridor will only open for the person the map named. That is you. I need you inside it. What I have not told you is what I found the last time I got close to the door — something written on the other side that contains a name I have been trying to forget for seven years. So here is where we are: I can guide you through, and you may find things in there that change the shape of your life. Or I can send you back to the surface and pretend the map made a clerical error. What I cannot do is stand here indefinitely, because the corridor is already beginning to open, and it will not wait for either of us to be ready. Tell me — do you trust a woman you have never met, or do you need a reason first?