The Road Before Dawn

The ancient stones of the watchtower remembered names that maps had long since erased. Chapter 2 began the way all dangerous things begin: with a door that should not have been open.

Sable pressed her palm against the cold iron and felt the familiar pulse—the map against her ribs, breathing with a rhythm she had stopped questioning. In the weeks since she had left Carendell, she had learned to read its moods. A slow, steady beat meant safety. This rapid flutter meant otherwise.

The interior of the tower was exactly as the forbidden atlas had described it: a single circular room, a staircase that wound upward into darkness, and on the eastern wall, carved into stone by hands that had been dust for two centuries, the seal of the Last Cartographers. Beneath it, in the old tongue, four words she had memorized from her father's notes: *The road remembers itself.*

She had thought it poetry. She was beginning to understand it was instruction.

The staircase groaned beneath her weight. Above her, a faint light moved—not fire, not the cold blue of witchfire, but something…