Inside, tables were piled with maps: of valleys and rivers, mountains and woods, streets and lanes. Each was drawn with precision, each line measured and labelled. Some were small enough to hold in one hand; others stretched across entire walls.
“Welcome,” said the cartographer. “You may look, but remember—maps are particular.”
Liora nodded.
She unfolded one map carefully.
It matched the terrain exactly. She traced a river’s bend with her finger, counted the steps between bridges, noted every fork in the paths. She smiled. The map held, in its way, all that could be held.
She tried another. Larger. More detailed. Again, precision gleamed from every line. Distances were true, angles correct, landmarks unmistakable.
Yet as she looked up at the hills beyond the tent, she felt a subtle hesitation.
The map, no matter how perfect, did not move with her. The hills breathed. The wind carried scents she could not mark. Shadows shifted in ways that no paper could record. Birds curved overhead, rivers rippled, stones settled differently from moment to moment.
The cartographer watched her closely. “The map is true,” he said. “It is not all.”
She selected another map, one sprawling across a wall.
It contained the paths she had taken in the garden. It contained the mirror and all its faces. It traced the game and its rules. It charted the court, its circular platform, its flawless verdicts.
And yet, when she tried to follow it in her mind, she found gaps.
Not errors. Not inconsistencies. Simply spaces she could not step into, corners the map did not reach. Paths that existed only in movement. Relations that could not be drawn without dissolving others.
“I see the precision,” Liora said. “I see the correctness. But something is missing.”
“Yes,” said the cartographer softly. “Some things do not travel well. They are the remainder. They are not wrong. They are not misplaced. They are simply not yours to carry on paper.”
She walked among the maps, hands gliding over surfaces that were flat, solid, unyielding. Everywhere, order and structure reigned. Everything within their boundaries was accounted for, contained, and repeatable.
And everywhere, beyond the boundaries, the world continued, not chaotic, not contradictory, not imperfect—simply larger.
Liora stepped outside.
The tent had walls, maps, tables. The world outside had the same hills, rivers, forests. She could not hold it all in her hands, could not mark every relation. She could not map the wind or the glance of a passing animal.
And yet she felt no lack, no failure. She felt recognition.
The maps were not incomplete; they were partial. They were always intended to be. And she, who had stepped through gardens that shifted, mirrors that multiplied, games that transformed, and courts that were flawless yet finite, understood.
She unfolded a blank sheet of paper.
It did not contain the world.
It did not need to.
She let it lie in her hands, and for the first time, she noticed the space between the lines, the air between the hills, the movement that no map could measure.
And in that remainder, in that relational excess, Liora felt a quiet satisfaction.
Nothing was broken. Nothing was wrong.
Some things, she realised, were never meant to be carried.
They were meant to be lived.
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