the cartographer

He traced the lines on the map and the map was not of land but of connections, threads spun fine, some bright with a living light and some gone to ash, grey and lifeless. The workroom was small and the single lamp cast a circle on the dust motes and the air was thick with the scent of old wood and something older, something like the weight of time itself.

He touched a thread, grey and faded, the one that marked the Society and he remembered the voices in that room, the long words carefully chosen, and the way they looked at him, or rather, the way they looked past him, not seeing, not truly.

He had tried to make it bright again, tried to force the color back into the faded thread, to belong, but it only dulled further, drained him of something vital, and the old man, the one who gave him the map, had warned him. It shows you, the old man had said, his voice a dry rustle, where your energy flows and where it stagnates. Dont hold on to what is gone.

He felt the weight of it now, the Society, the weight of not belonging, and it was not a failing, he knew, just a truth, a simple and undeniable fact.

His hand moved, slow and deliberate, and he began to untangle the thread, each loop a memory, a conversation, a hope whispered and now lost, and as he worked the air in the room seemed to shift, a lightness growing, and the other threads, the bright ones, seemed to glow with a stronger, more insistent light.

When the grey thread was free he coiled it carefully and he placed it in a small box, wood and velvet lined, not a trophy of victory, but a marker, a testament to a choice made.

He looked at the map again, his fingers tracing another thread, this one yellow, warm to the touch, the thread that led to the writers, and he felt it pull him, a different kind of pull than the Society, a pull toward something, not away.

He followed the thread with his eyes and the air, he thought, tasted cleaner out that way, a promise of something new, of finding instead of looking.

Or of being found.

By Love.