The path that stretched ahead of Caliste was not marked by cobblestone or compass, nor lit by the clean geometry of civilization. It was shaped by wind and weather, by the ancient bones of hills too tired to remember their own names. His boots moved over uneven earth, trailing the dust of decision and silence, the crumbling breath of a time lost to ash and rain. The parchment, tucked now inside the inner layer of his coat, radiated a faint warmth that pulsed like a second heartbeat—steady, quiet, but insistent.
Each step he took was not just a movement through space but a crossing into memory, into something older than his current life, something that reached past the boundary of flesh and into the marrow of who he once had been. The map had marked a single point deep in the Eltherian Reaches—uncharted by most, avoided by all, and spoken of only in footnotes and faded margins in the older records of the Sanctum.
