Chapter 1 The Cartographer of Impossible Places

AMELIE Pov

The ink bleeds across parchment in lines that shouldn't exist.

I'm mapping a city called Velaskren—a place that lives only in my dreams and on these pages scattered across my study. Towers that spiral against logic. Streets that fold into themselves. Gardens where flowers bloom in colors that have no names. My hand moves with the certainty of memory, though I've never walked those impossible avenues.

This is what I do. What I've always done.

I'm a cartographer of places that don't exist yet.

Scholars pay me in silver to map their theoretical cities. Mystics commission me to draw the architecture of their visions. They call it a gift. I call it a burden I never asked for. Every line I draw feels like remembering something I've forgotten, like reaching for a word that sits just beyond my tongue.

The afternoon light slants through my window, casting long shadows across the wooden floor. Mine stretches from my feet to the wall, dark and ordinary. Except—

It moves.

Just for a heartbeat. Just a twitch at the edges, like something pulling away from me.

I freeze, pen hovering above the map. My pulse hammers against my ribs.

Never let your shadow touch another's.

My mother's rule. The only rule. Spoken when I was seven years old, with a terror in her eyes that made me swear without understanding why.

I stare at my shadow. It lies still now, perfectly normal, perfectly mine. But I felt it. That wrongness. That separation.

I set down my pen with trembling fingers.

Twenty-four years I've lived by that rule. Twenty-four years of stepping carefully, of measuring distance, of flinching away from anyone who gets too close. People think I'm cold. Distant. They don't know I'm just afraid of what happens when darkness touches darkness.

I don't even know what happens.

Only that my mother's fear became mine.

By evening, I need air. Need to escape these four walls that smell like ink and isolation.

The market square in Ashmir hums with life as the sun bleeds orange across the sky. Vendors hawk spiced tea and copper trinkets. Children weave between adults, laughing. A musician plays something haunting on a stringed instrument I don't recognize. The city is beautiful in this light—all weathered stone and climbing vines, where mystics and scholars and ordinary people exist in some kind of harmony.

I move through the crowd with practiced care, watching shadows.

Always watching shadows.

A woman's skirt brushes past me. I step left. A man's hand reaches for the same apple. I pull back. It's a dance I've perfected—the art of being present without truly touching anyone's space.

Then I see the street performer.

He's young, maybe nineteen, juggling balls of colored glass that catch the dying light. A small crowd has gathered. I stop to watch, keeping my distance. He's good—the kind of good that looks effortless but requires years of practice.

He tosses a glass ball high, and it catches the light like a falling star.

His shadow stretches long across the cobblestones.

Toward me.

I don't think. My body jerks backward so violently that the basket of herbs I've been carrying tumbles from my hands. Lavender and rosemary scatter across the stones. The crowd turns. The performer pauses mid-juggle, confused.

Heat crawls up my neck. I kneel quickly, gathering the scattered bundles, desperate to disappear.

"Are you alright, miss?" someone asks.

I don't look up. "Fine. I'm fine."

My hands won't stop shaking.

That's when I feel it. The weight of being watched.

I lift my head slowly, scanning the square. Most people have already returned to their business, but there—across the fountain, half-hidden in the shadow of a merchant's awning—stands a man.

I can't see his face clearly. The angle of the light obscures him. But he's looking at me. I know he's looking at me with an intensity that makes my breath catch.

There's something in his posture. Something in the way he stands perfectly still while the crowd flows around him.

Recognition.

But I've never seen him before. I would remember.

Our eyes meet across the distance, and for a moment, the noise of the market fades. For a moment, there's only him and me and this strange, impossible pull—like gravity, like magnetism, like something that has no name in any language I know.

He takes a step forward.

I grab my scattered herbs and run.

I don't stop until I'm back at my cottage, door locked, shutters closed. My heart pounds against my ribs like it's trying to escape.

Who was he?

Why did he look at me like he knew me?

I press my back against the door and slide down to the floor, hugging my knees. In the darkness of my cottage, I can barely see my shadow. It pools around me, ordinary and unremarkable.

But I remember the way it moved this afternoon. That twitch. That wrongness.

And I remember the stranger's eyes.

Something is changing. Something is wrong.

I've spent my whole life mapping impossible places, drawing cities that don't exist.

But tonight, for the first time, I wonder if the impossible is mapping me.