THE MAP THAT ERASES COUNTRIES

Sael Corin had always been careful about ink. He’d spilled enough in his twenty-eight years to know that a single careless blot could ruin a map, a record, or, in some cases, a life. That lesson, however, did little to prepare him for what happened that morning.

The sun hadn’t even risen over the city of Gallowmere, but the air in the narrow streets was thick with tension. Sael crouched over his workbench in the back room of the guild’s vault, a crooked lantern casting dancing shadows across stacks of parchments. The smell of wet ink mingled with dust. He hated mornings like this. Something in the atmosphere told him trouble was coming, though he couldn’t have said what.

He was tracing the winding river of Arvess onto a new map when his quill hesitated. The ink refused to flow. Not for a second, not for a pause, not even a drip. His brow furrowed. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, shaking the quill, tapping it on the edge of the table. “Not now…”

The river on the parchment shimmered, softly, impossibly, like it had a pulse of its own. Sael leaned closer, squinting. And then he froze.

The village of Ryndale, a small cluster of huts nestled along the riverbank, had vanished. One second it had been there, painted carefully with brown ink and red markers to denote trade posts, and the next, the ink was gone. No trace. No smudge. Nothing.

Sael blinked, rubbed his eyes, and leaned closer again. Still gone. He pinched the parchment. “No… no, that can’t be. Maps don’t… vanish.”

But they had.

A sudden knock on the door made him jump. “Sael?” A familiar voice, urgent, cautious, called. Lysara Venn. His chest tightened. She had that look, always in trouble, always needing something.

He opened the door, and she stepped inside, hooded cloak still dripping with the city’s morning mist. “I told you to stay out of the vault this early,” he said, keeping his voice low. “You’re not supposed to,”

“Did you see it?” she interrupted, scanning the room, eyes wide. “Ryndale. It’s gone. The village… it’s gone!”

Sael’s hands shook as he pointed to the parchment. “I… I don’t know how. It just, disappeared. The ink… it reacted.”

“Reacted?” Lysara’s voice hitched, half in disbelief, half in fear. “You mean the Null Atlas… it, ” She stopped herself, realizing what she’d said. Sael stared at her, his stomach twisting.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I, I was just tracing a river, and now”

A loud, metallic clank echoed from somewhere deeper in the vault, like a chain snapping against stone. Both of them froze.

“You hear that?” Lysara asked. Her hand instinctively went to the dagger at her hip.

Sael nodded, swallowing hard. “I, I think… someone’s here.”

Before she could answer, a soft hum began to fill the room. Low, insistent, almost like a whisper through water. The parchment trembled under Sael’s fingers. Lines of ink, rivers, forests, mountains, shifted subtly, almost alive.

“Sael,” Lysara breathed, stepping closer. “It’s doing it on its own…”

The river on the map pulsed brighter, spreading like fire across the parchment. And then, impossibly, new shapes appeared, lines that didn’t belong to any land he had ever mapped. Strange mountains rose, forests unfurled, and at the center of it all, a black dot pulsing like a heartbeat.

Sael’s heart thumped violently. “That… that’s not on the atlas. I didn’t draw that.”

“No,” Lysara whispered, staring. “You didn’t. Something else is.”

The lantern flickered. Shadows stretched unnaturally along the walls. The black dot on the parchment seemed to throb, and a faint, almost human-like voice murmured, so faint he could barely hear it.

“He draws… he decides…”

Sael’s hand froze. He swallowed, every instinct screaming to run, yet unable to move. “Did… did you hear that?”

Lysara nodded slowly, pale. “It’s the atlas,” she said. “It’s… alive. And it knows you’re here.”

A sudden crash echoed from the main vault room, closer this time. Dust fell from the ceiling. Sael grabbed the map instinctively, hiding it under his cloak, but it was too late. A shadow moved in the doorway, tall, deliberate, human-shaped but with something wrong about its proportions.

Sael could feel the pulse from the map, growing faster. The black dot expanded, spreading across the parchment like ink in water.

“You shouldn’t have come,” the shadow said, voice distorted, like a chorus of whispers layered together. “He writes. You cannot stop what is written.”

Lysara grabbed Sael’s arm. “We have to get out. Now.”

But the shadow stepped forward, and in a voice so cold it made the room shiver, it said one word: “Erase.”

Sael’s fingers tightened on the quill, and for the first time, he felt the terrible weight of the Null Atlas, the knowledge that every line he drew could destroy… or save.

And in that moment, he realized: the world itself was waiting for his first mistake.