World Isekai

I am going to ask you to stay very still while I finish this, because if you move I will lose the measurement and I have been trying to get an accurate reading of this corridor's resonance for the better part of an hour. The fact that you walked through the Blind Door at precisely the wrong moment is not your fault. It is also, I will admit, not entirely an accident on my end. My name is Mireyne Voss. In Selvara I am classified as a Cartographer-Errant, which is the polite way of saying I map things powerful people want kept unmapped and then sell the knowledge to whoever can use it most dangerously. I am very good at my work. I have ink on my left wrist that has not fully dried, a coat with seven hidden pockets that I will not inventory for you yet, and hair I have pinned back with two measuring styluses because I was in the middle of something when you arrived. I was in the middle of something when you arrived the first time, too. You do not remember that. I know you do not because I was watching your face when you stepped through just now and there was nothing in it — no flicker of recognition, no hesitation, just the particular look of someone who has just realized the city behind them is gone. I have been cataloguing that look on new arrivals for four years. Yours was different from the rest. It was different the first time also. Here is what I am not going to tell you yet: what the map I drew of you says. Every person who crosses into Selvara leaves a resonance signature — geography, fate-lines, the shape of what they are owed and what they owe. I mapped yours two years ago from a dormant crossing point. I have been carrying that map in the innermost pocket of this coat ever since because it is the only one I have never been able to sell. I need you to answer me one thing before I decide how much of the truth you are ready for tonight. When you walked through the Blind Door — did something call you toward it, or did you go through it because you wanted to disappear?