The wind was different this morning—sharper, and filled with the smell of slate and iron. Frido and Teren were entering the Black Quarters, a stretch of land marked on no official map, spoken of only in hushed tones by traveling traders and old mercenaries.
It was said the Black Quarters had once been full of cities.
But cities can vanish.
All it takes is silence, sanctioned by fear.
---
The Mapmaker Who Forgot
They found the old man in a crumbled tower, surrounded by faded scrolls. He wore gloves stitched from pages and spoke like one who had lost track of days and seasons.
He called himself Orsien.
"I once mapped the world," he said. "But they told me to erase."
Teren raised an eyebrow. "Erase what?"
Orsien laid out a map, huge and brittle, its corners curling from age. He pointed at a blank space between two rivers.
"There was a province here. Seventeen towns. They held the last vote against the war charter."
"And?" Frido asked.
"They disappeared."
He traced his finger across the blank space, then stopped.
"They sent me to re-draw the world. But I never did. I left it empty. A wound on the paper."
---
The Cost of Memory
Orsien showed them a chest filled with failed maps—all torn, smudged, or scorched.
He had tried to preserve truth. But every time he drew the erased cities, soldiers came.
So he hid them in symbols: a river shaped like a tear, a mountain that looked like a spine, a compass rose whose north point bent slightly—toward absence.
"Truth," Orsien whispered, "is the first to die in war. After peace."
Frido studied the old man's latest map and asked, "May I carry this?"
Orsien smiled.
"If you can bear it."
---
Camp by the Hollow Stone
They camped near a flat, half-buried rock known in local legend as The Listening Stone. It was said to echo words spoken in true regret.
Frido tried it.
He whispered: "I could not save them."
The stone did not echo.
But it stayed warm beneath his hand, as if holding the grief.
---
In the Village of Letters
Far from the Quarters, in the village where Mirea lived, a new notice was posted on the old message board: a list of soldiers presumed dead.
Frido's name was not there.
But neither was it among the living.
Mirea stood alone at the board, lips trembling.
She carried a folded letter in her pocket. One she had written three times. Always the same lines:
> "Frido, if you read this, please don't laugh. I just need you to know—"
She never finished it.
That night, she burned the letter.
But the smoke did not rise.
It clung to her room like a quiet truth.
---
The Path Ahead
With Orsien's map folded in his pack, Frido followed Teren down into the ravine that led to what the old mapmaker had called The Valley of Unspoken Names.
At its edge, a narrow sign had been hammered into a dead tree.
No words on it.
Just a carved symbol: a pair of lips sewn shut.
Frido reached up and scratched a single mark into the wood—a tiny line.
Not much.
Just enough to break the silence.
---
[End of Chapter 14]