"My Father Was a Mapmaker of Lost Places" (Genre: Mythic Fiction)

My Father Was a Mapmaker of Lost Places

By [SHAYAN]

My father never mapped the world as it was. He mapped the world as it could have been.

His study smelled of old ink and pinewood, always a little too warm, always full of paper—thin, curling like petals, covered in indecipherable lines and symbols no one else understood. I remember the way his hands moved, steady as the moon, as if he were not drawing, but listening. Like the maps whispered themselves to him from places no one else could see.

"These are not fantasy," he told me once, placing a hand over a map pinned to the wall. The parchment was soft and yellowed, sketched with mountains that shimmered slightly when the sun hit them. “These are places that got lost.”

I was nine then. I didn’t understand.

He never mapped real cities, or real oceans, or followed real stars. Instead, he charted The Valley of Forgotten Names. The Shoreline of Almost. The Path of Children Who Never Grew Old. He spoke of kingdoms that rose at midnight and vanished by morning. Of rivers made of memory. Of a door that opened only to those who had never lied.

People called him eccentric. A gentle lunatic. A dreamer. But I saw something in his eyes when he spoke of his maps—something ancient, something true.

When he died, they found hundreds of scrolls beneath the floorboards of his study. Rolled-up dreams. Cities with names like Soladen, Mirrowend, and The Hollow Where Sound Sleeps. My mother wanted to throw them out, donate them to some archive. But I couldn’t.

So I kept them.

Years passed. I moved away, buried myself in a world of logic and concrete. I became a teacher. A realist. I forgot how to imagine. My father faded into memory—a soft presence in old photographs, a name in a signature at the bottom of every forgotten map.

Until last winter.

It began with a letter. No stamp. Just a single piece of paper folded once, slipped under my door. In my father’s handwriting.

“The door is open. You must follow the red line.

X marks where I stopped. You must go farther.”

No name. No return address. Just a small map, yellowed with time, with a red line that curved like a question. There was a single mark in the bottom corner: X.

I should have thrown it away. Instead, I packed a bag.

It began in the forest near my childhood home. The trail wasn’t there before—but the map said it would be, and so it was. I walked for hours, maybe days. Time changed in that place, soft and loose. Shadows moved the wrong way. I heard wind whisper names I hadn’t spoken in years.

The red line led me to impossible places.

A hill where the moon touched the earth like a fingertip. A lake that reflected the stars of other skies. A desert where songs rose from the sand like steam.

Each place felt familiar, like I had been there once, perhaps in a dream, or before I was born.

I kept following.

And then I reached it—the place marked X. It was a clearing ringed with silver trees, their bark smooth as bone. At the center stood a desk. His desk. My father's, down to the ink stain near the drawer.

And on it, a single piece of parchment.

A blank map.

The wind stirred. I swear it spoke: "Now it’s your turn."

I don’t remember kneeling. I only remember the weight of the quill in my hand.

Now I map the lost places.

I map the cities built from laughter. The roads walked only by those who forgive. I draw rivers of longing, fields of silence, caverns full of forgotten dreams. I draw the faces of people who never got to speak their truths, and I give them streets, and skies, and stories.

I am no longer afraid. The world is far bigger than we ever knew.

Sometimes, if you’re still enough, you can find one of my maps beneath your pillow. Or between two pages of a book you haven’t touched in years. Or inside your own heart—folded and waiting.

And if you choose to follow it, you just might find him.

Still drawing.

Still listening.

Still mapping the lost.

Let me know if you'd like a version tailored to a specific age group, voice style, or if you'd like help turning this into a series.