Margot’s fingers traced the impossible coastline she’d drawn on vellum that morning, a shore that existed only when the moon was waning and the tide pulled memories from the deep. She worked by candlelight in her shop beneath Prague’s old astronomers’ bridge, where tourists never ventured and even Google Maps showed nothing but a gray void.
“Another realm manifested last night,” she told the cat perched on her ink pots. The tabby, named Swift after a singer whose lyrics Margot heard drifting from the world above, merely yawned. “This one speaks in colors that don’t exist yet.”
The brass bell above her door chimed—not with sound but with the scent of rain that hadn’t fallen. Her client had arrived.
He wore a coat that seemed to be cut from the space between stars, and his eyes held the particular exhaustion of someone who’d been trending on social media for all the wrong reasons. Marcus Aurelius Blackthorne, heir to a fortune built on sustainable fashion, had been caught on camera at the Met Gala claiming he could prove other worlds existed.
“They think I’m having a mental health crisis,” he said, setting a leather journal on her counter. “My therapist says these visions are just my brain’s reaction to climate anxiety.”
Margot opened the journal. Inside were sketches of places that flickered and writhed on the page—cities built from crystallized music, forests where each tree was a different person’s final breath, oceans that flowed upward into nothing.
“You’re not crazy,” she said. “You’re simply seeing what’s always been there. Like looking at those viral optical illusions, except these reveal actual places bleeding through.”
She pulled out her finest mapping quills, made from feathers of birds that existed only on Tuesdays. “The realms are collapsing into each other faster now. Every time someone denies they exist, they fade a little more. Soon I’ll be the last cartographer left who remembers how to chart them.”
Marcus watched as she began to draw, her hand moving with supernatural precision. The map bloomed across the parchment—not just showing locations but times, emotions, and the spaces between thoughts where entire civilizations thrived.
“There,” she pointed to a confluence of silver lines. “That’s where your visions originate. A realm that’s trying to evacuate its stories before it disappears completely. They chose you because you have the platform to make people believe.”
“But how do I convince anyone? They’ll say it’s AI-generated, or performance art, or—”
“You don’t convince them with words.” Margot rolled up the map and tied it with thread spun from departed dreams. “You take them there. This map doesn’t just show the way—it is the way. But know this: each journey erases a little more of the path. Eventually, even I won’t be able to find these places.”
Marcus took the map with trembling hands. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because I’m tired of being the last,” she said, turning back to her wall of charts depicting worlds that no longer answered when called. “And because someone needs to remember these realms when I’m gone. My previous apprentice left to become an influencer documenting wellness retreats. She forgot that the greatest journey isn’t to find yourself—it’s to find what’s beyond yourself.”
As Marcus left, the shop began its nightly ritual of existing a little less. By morning, Margot knew, another realm would have sent its final postcard—a sunset, perhaps, or the sound of rain on leaves that were never quite green. She dipped her quill in ink made from crushed possibilities and began drawing the next map, each line an act of defiance against a world increasingly convinced that only what trends truly exists.
Swift the cat watched from her perch, purring in frequencies only the forgotten realms could hear, as Margot worked through the night, racing against an erasure that crept closer with every sunrise.
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