The Last Cartographer

The salt-crusted quill snapped between your fingers before you even registered the pressure. Ink bled across the vellum in a black bloom, and the candle guttered. You stared at the ruined chart—the last clean copy of the Serpent's Maw passage—and felt the walls of the tower room close in like a fist. Three days. Three days of locked doors, of meals left on trays by servants who would not meet your eyes, of Voss's velvet voice promising gold and delivering chains.

The lock clicked behind you.

You did not turn. "The tide charts are wrong," you said, your voice flat. "Whoever drew them had never sailed the Maw."

"And yet you corrected them in a single night." Alaric Voss moved past you, his shadow swallowing the lamplight. He was handsome in the way a blade is handsome—precise, and dangerous. He lifted the ruined vellum, studying your work through the smear of ink. "Your predecessor needed four days. He died before he finished the fifth."

You heard the threat beneath the compliment. It hung in the salt-heavy air between you, as real as the chains you could not see.