She walked for days. The Amaginations did not obey distance. A step could take her from a clockwork ocean to a library where every book was blank but whispered her childhood arguments. She saw her mother’s disappointed face stitched into a constellation. She saw the lover she had left for cartography, now a lighthouse keeper on a sea of might-have-beens.
The fox accompanied her, offering useless advice. “Left here. No, right. Actually, stand still and insult the horizon. That sometimes works.”
“Draw what you hid,” it rumbled.
She took out the vellum—still blank, still warm—and instead of a pen, she pressed her thumb to the page. The map absorbed her whorl. And then it began to draw itself.