My gaze landed on a wicker basket beneath the side table. Soft white bundles overflowed the top, looking harmless enough. Cleaning rags, perhaps. Or packing scraps. Or the remnants of cotton soone had tossed out.
Perfect. Trash is rciful. Surely the atelier wouldn’t mind if I took so of his discarded scraps for my perusal.
I crouched and grabbed a fistful of the fluffy material. It felt strangely fine, softer than expected, almost silky. Probably expensive cleaning cloth that had been demoted to the bin. Even better. They’d finally have a noble purpose.
Durand stood placidly as I wrapped his torso and shoulders like a very dangerous infant being swaddled for the first ti by soone who had never t a baby. He blinked at once, and I managed to pin it down and immobilize it without resistance. A small miracle.
Durand’s blinking slowed to a content, marble-smooth stillness. Excellent. Stability achieved. My masterpiece of ergency swaddling complete, I gave the last wrap a firm knightly tug.
Only then did the throbbing in my ribs remind I was operating on a heroic 10 HP.
I sighed, dug into my belt pouch, and pulled out a small vial.
A healing potion... for bruised ribs inflicted by a rock-based toddler.
Saint rin, forgive .
I uncorked it and downed it in one swallow.
[Minor Healing Potion Consud: 25 HP]
[HP: 10 → 35]
That was when a voice drifted in from the door.
“Sir Henry?”
I turned.
Anabeth’s head peeked into the chartroom, her copper curls framing a look of puzzled delight—like she’d caught performing so strange woodland ritual rather than preventing structural apocalypse.
“Are you not going to follow?” she asked, blinking brightly.
“Yes,” I intoned.
She opened the door wider then pressed her arms to her cheeks. “Awwww,” she breathed. “Look at you two! Getting cozy with each other already!”
I stared back at her, dead-eyed.
Durand stared too, but with the flat indifference of a creature who didn’t know what ‘cozy’ ant, only that heobjected to it on principle.
Before I could correct her, Durand shifted in my arms.
It seed like an innocent wiggle.
Then one cotton-muffled elbow drove itself directly into my ribs.
[Skill Detected: Gentle Affection (Bludgeoning)]
[HP: 35 → 21]
A soft huhk escaped . The kind only knights, martyrs, and n experiencing internal organ rearrangent make.
[Intimidation Aura Amplification Activated]
“HUHK!” I thundered as if I was demonstrating ancient knightly dominance rather than protecting my spleen.
Anabeth clasped her hands earnestly. “Durand! You should listen closely when Sir Henry demonstrates the tenets of knighthood and valor!”
I followed my knightly dominance with smaller yelps of dominance. “Huhk... huhk...”
“Once you two are done, do hurry inside!” Anabeth chid. “Master Derevin is waiting!” Then she vanished down the corridor.
Once her footsteps faded, I inhaled carefully, then wrapped another layer of cotton around Durand. For good asure. For safety. For the survival of the knighthood.
The mont we stepped into the cramped chartroom, I made sure Durand was wrapped in a strategic, completely sensible layer of cotton. A full cocoon. A tactical softening initiative. I’d found the cotton in a bin beside the door, or at least what I assud was a bin. At that point, asking questions felt dically inadvisable. My cooldown wasn’t over, and after my earlier rhetorical tragedy, opening my mouth again felt like an invitation for fate to punch through another wall.
So Durand, now resembling a homicidal dumpling, toddled at my heel with significantly reduced capacity for damage. I would have loved—loved—for Anabeth to take responsibility for her own compact stone murderling, especially as she was the one Derevin actually liked at the mont, but she was in the middle of currying his academic favor, so the burden fell to .
Master Derevin glanced at only once as I maneuvered the cotton-swaddled nace to a harmless corner. His gaze always had this disapproving quality to it, sharp enough to shave vellum. It would have intimidated if I wasn’t supposed to be the intimidation incarnate myself.
Then he turned right back to Anabeth without a single acknowledgent that I had just prevented property damage, workplace injury, and possibly a small-scale ink apocalypse.
Yes. I was still fuming from the disrespect.
Then he slid a stack of parchnt across the drafting table without so much as a thank-you.
“Right,” he said, already reaching for a brass compass. “Miss Anabeth, you first. Sir Henry, you can observe from back there. Quietly, if possible.” He had asked for our nas earlier, and neither of us were willing to give out our surnas.
I stopped two full paces behind Anabeth, as if Derevin had drawn a chalk line on the floor. From that distance the table was an ordered array of instrunts: long-ard compasses built like jointed spears, weighted plumb-lines hanging in perfect discipline, rectangular inkstones arranged in reginted rows, vellum squared with marching gridlines, and a revolving prism whose faces turned with the rhythm of a patrol on rotation.
The compass looked familiar enough; Sir Roland had carried one just like it, and he’d boasted he could always find true north with the thing, even in fog thick enough to drown a horse. And he could, to his credit. North never escaped him.
Where that north actually led, however... that was another matter entirely. Half the ti we ended up in soone’s orchard while Roland insisted the mapmaker must’ve been drunk. He could always find north. He just didn’t know what to do with it.
Derevin placed the compass in Anabeth’s palms with the sa poised care Roland never bothered with, and I stayed where I was. “Chartmaking,” he began, “is the art of reducing the world without diminishing it.”
“That’s—pretty.” Anabeth gasped.
Pretty... aningless, though it might have just been because I wasn’t wise enough to understand it.
“In practice,” Derevin said, drawing the compass back and adjusting its hinge, “we begin with three fundantals: scale, orientation, and anchor.”
Ah. Finally, words with edges on them that a person could grasp.
“Scale,” he continued, placing the compass legs onto the parchnt, “is how much of the world you allow onto the page. A chart is a promise: this much distance in the world equals this much ink. Break that promise, and nothing you draw can be trusted.”
Anabeth nodded, bright-eyed.
“Orientation,” he went on, swiveling the compass so it pointed toward the far wall, “is direction. Every chart must declare its north, or the reader becos lost before they’ve even begun. A good chart makes its north obvious. A great one makes it inevitable.
“Lastly, the anchor,” he said, tapping the parchnt gently. “One fixed point. Sothing you know is true.”
“Like a hilltop?” Anabeth asked.
“Whichever landmark you knew existed in the vicinity: a hilltop, a tower, a river bend that’s existed longer than the kingdom that rules it. Anything whose position you can asure twice and get the sa result. Once you mark that anchor, every other bearing has sothing honest to answer to.”
Derevin set down the compass and reached for a strip of twine marked with evenly spaced knots. Theory, it seed, had finally run its course.
Good. If we lingered any longer in the land of ‘art’ and ‘truth,’ I might’ve walked straight into the revolving prism just to end my suffering.
“Now,” he said, adjusting the twine between his fingers, “this is where most novices make their first serious mistake.”
Wait. There’s more theory?
“They assu that once an anchor is chosen, the rest of the chart becos a matter of simple asurent,” he continued. “But of course that isn’t quite true, because the act of choosing an anchor is itself a judgnt call, and judgnt—however well-intentioned—introduces bias. You see, two chartmakers can stand on the sa hill, agree on the sa landmark, and still produce wildly different charts depending on what they expect to find beyond it. This was the central dispute during the Fourth Cartographic Revision, which I’m sure you’ve at least heard ntioned.”There were accusations of intellectual dishonesty, deliberate distortion, even quiet acts of sabotage. Entire border conflicts can be traced back to nothing more than incompatible anchor assumptions. So when I say ‘anchor,’” Derevin said, turning back to Anabeth, “I don’t rely an a point you trust. I an a point you are willing to defend when everything else begins to contradict it. Now, so schools argue that this makes chartmaking an inherently political act,” Derevin continued. “Others insist it is purely technical, provided the chartmaker is sufficiently disciplined. Personally, I find both positions a little naïve. There’s also the question of recalibration,” Derevin said, lifting the twine again. “If you return to the sa anchor years later and it no longer aligns with your previous asurents, is the fault with the world, or with your original assumptions?”
I stared at the table, trying to understand how a single word ‘anchor’ had managed to reproduce itself into sothing that felt three pages long.
Anabeth made a small, fascinated sound.
I stopped hearing the words and started hearing only the rhythm of them.
Sothing about traditions. Sothing about errors compounding over distance. Sothing about why the Western charts were still wrong, and always would be.
He was still going on about anchors.
At so point, I beca aware of the warm and low light on my face, slanting in through the high windows.
For one blissful, disoriented mont, I thought it was dawn. A new day. A rciful reset. I wondered vaguely when I’d fallen asleep and whether this ant Derevin had finally stopped talking.
Then I focused. The light wasn’t rising. It was sinking. It was dusk.
I’d either slept through an entire stretch of daylight on my feet while a man lectured uninterrupted about anchors, or only ten minutes had passed.
[Passive Recovery Detected: 3% Stamina]
Apparently, it was the latter. At least I had managed to conserve my energy through the most aningless part of the day.
Derevin finally cleared his throat and said to Anabeth, “Now, that was only the abbreviated version, of course, just enough to outline the theoretical disagreents and historical context. There are several supplentary fraworks, and at least three notable exceptions worth discussing, but we can return to those later. For now, let’s put your anchor to use.”
Praise the saints.
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