Margot’s fingers traced the coastline of a country that no longer existed, her charcoal leaving dark smudges across parchment the color of weak tea. Outside her attic workshop, the sustainable fashion boutiques of Prague’s New Quarter hummed with tourists, but here among her maps, time moved differently.
She had inherited the workshop from her grandmother, along with a peculiar affliction: the ability to remember places that the world had forgotten. Not destroyed places—forgotten ones. Entire kingdoms that had somehow slipped through the cracks of collective memory like coins through floorboards.
The latest had come to her in dreams for three nights running. A coastal nation called Thymbra, where people had cultivated vast underwater gardens and trained dolphins to deliver messages between floating cities. She could taste their kelp wine, feel the barnacled texture of their architecture. But when she searched every database, every ancient text, she found nothing. Thymbra had been erased not just from maps, but from history itself.
“You’re the cartographer who draws impossible places,” said the woman who appeared in her doorway that afternoon. She wore a modern blazer over a dress that seemed to shift between purple and green depending on the light—a fabric Margot had only seen in her visions of Thymbra.
“I draw what I remember,” Margot replied carefully.
The woman stepped closer, and Margot noticed her eyes were the deep blue-black of ocean trenches. “My name is Coral. I’m from the last embassy of Thymbra, hidden in what you now call the Maldives. We’ve been searching for someone like you for generations.”
Margot’s hand trembled as she set down her charcoal. “Thymbra is real?”
“Was real. Is real. It’s complicated.” Coral pulled out what looked like an ordinary smartphone but emanated a faint bioluminescence. “There was a great forgetting. Not a war, not a catastrophe—something else. Our entire civilization was retroactively edited from existence. Only a few of us remain who remember, living in the spaces between your world’s certainties.”
“But why?”
Coral’s expression darkened. “We discovered something we shouldn’t have. A pattern in ocean currents that revealed the world itself is just one of many drafts, constantly being revised by something vast and incomprehensible. When we tried to map these other drafts, these parallel sketches of reality, we were… redacted.”
Margot looked at her half-finished map of Thymbra’s coast. “And you want me to complete this.”
“You’re already doing it. Every line you draw pulls us a little more back into existence. But there’s a cost.” Coral gestured to the stack of maps covering Margot’s desk—dozens of other forgotten places. “Each realm you restore takes something from you. Haven’t you noticed?”
Margot had noticed. Her childhood memories had grown foggy. She could no longer remember her father’s face, her first dog’s name, the taste of her grandmother’s soup. She was trading her own history for these lost worlds.
“There’s a climate of forgetting spreading through your world now,” Coral continued. “Information disappears, stories change overnight, even your climate itself seems uncertain of what it should be. The barriers are weakening. Soon, the forgotten realms will either return entirely or vanish forever, taking much of your reality with them.”
Margot picked up her charcoal again, feeling its familiar weight. “How many more maps?”
“Seven kingdoms, three empires, and one democracy that voted itself out of existence.” Coral smiled sadly. “We voted on whether we should exist, and the ‘no’ campaign won by a single vote. Even I voted no, in a moment of existential doubt.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You draw impossible places. Is it really so strange?”
For the next hours, they worked together, Coral describing the bioluminescent towers of Thymbra’s capital while Margot drew. With each detail—the meditation pools where citizens floated in salt water to share collective dreams, the tidal turbines that powered their amber streetlights—Margot felt her own memories dissolving like salt in water.
“What happens to a cartographer who forgets herself completely?” Margot asked as the sky darkened outside.
Coral was quiet for a moment. “You become a map yourself. A living document of all the places that never were, walking through a world that can’t quite see you.”
Margot considered this fate. It didn’t sound entirely unpleasant. To be a living archive of impossible beauty, forgotten wonders, lost dreams. She thought of her grandmother, who had spent her final years speaking to people no one else could see, describing places no one else remembered.
“She was one of us, wasn’t she? My grandmother.”
“The finest cartographer of forgotten realms we ever knew. Until you.”
As midnight approached, Margot finished the map of Thymbra. The moment she lifted her charcoal from the paper, she felt it—a shifting, like tectonic plates adjusting in her mind. Through the window, she could swear she glimpsed a phosphorescent glow from the Vltava River, as if bioluminescent algae from Thymbra’s waters had suddenly remembered how to exist.
“Six more kingdoms to go,” Coral said softly. “Are you ready?”
Margot reached for a fresh sheet of parchment, already feeling the next forgotten realm pulling at the edges of her consciousness like a half-remembered dream. “Tell me about the Empire of Floating Stones.”
As she began to draw, Margot wondered if anyone would remember her when she was done, or if she too would become a story that slipped through the cracks, leaving only maps of impossible places and the faint scent of kelp wine in an empty Prague attic.
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