The road disappeared while Kieran was walking on it.
One moment his boot hit solid dirt. The next, it met empty air.
He froze mid-step, arms flailing, then jumped back just as the ground split open in front of him. The road tore apart with a sharp cracking sound, collapsing inward to form a shallow ravine. Dust rose slowly, drifting like smoke.
Behind him, the caravan exploded into noise.
A horse screamed. A wagon tipped sideways. Someone shouted in pain. Another voice yelled orders that no one followed.
Kieran's heart pounded as he stared at the broken road. It hadn't eroded. It hadn't collapsed naturally.
It had moved.
The hills ahead were closer than they had been that morning. He was certain of it now. The sky felt stretched, clouds pulled thin like cloth under tension.
The world had shifted.
Again.
"Everyone stop!" a guard shouted. "Don't move!"
Merchants argued. One man fell to his knees and began praying under his breath.
Kieran didn't pray.
He reached into his satchel with shaking hands and pulled out the map.
The parchment was old, soft from years of folding. The ink had faded, but the symbols were still sharp. It wasn't his—not really. He'd taken it from a dead courier months ago, an old man who had pressed it into Kieran's hands while bleeding out on a roadside.
This one still works, the man had whispered.
Kieran unfolded it.
His breath caught.
The ravine was already there.
Not drawn in ink, but marked by an empty scar on the parchment, exactly where the road should have been. And curling around it was a thin glowing line, faint but alive, pulsing softly like a heartbeat.
A path.
Leading north.
Straight into land that had no name.
Kieran swallowed hard.
The map hadn't changed because the world shifted.
It had known the shift was coming.
A shadow fell over him.
"Where did you get that?" a woman asked.
Kieran looked up at the guard standing beside him, her scarred face tight with suspicion.
He stared back at the glowing line on the map.
And for the first time, he understood something terrifying.
This map wasn't showing where the world was.
It was showing where the world was going