The Cartographer’s Oath

When the old world was still folded between paper and belief, maps were considered sacred. Every line drawn was a promise—a shape of truth sworn to exist somewhere beyond the horizon. But in the winter of 1899, a single map was quietly removed from every archive of the Royal Geographic Society. Its name: The Atlas of Tartaria.

No record explains who ordered it gone. Only one surviving page remains, in the possession of a retired cartographer named Elian Voss, who had spent his youth charting coasts that no longer existed.

Elian lived alone in a crumbling observatory near the edge of Torrento, a coastal city whose airport now stretches over what was once the harbor of another age. He was the last living geographer to have held the Oath of Atlas—a vow to map only what could be found, never what was forbidden.

But one night, a letter arrived with no sender and no seal.

The paper was thick, the handwriting elegant, the ink faintly metallic.

It read:

> “You once charted a place that should not have been erased.

The woman from Torenza carries proof of it.

Find her before the tide does.”

Attached to the letter was a single object: a passport, the color of dried seawater. The cover bore a strange sigil—two intersecting circles divided by a horizontal line. Inside, the pages were blank, save for one stamp that shimmered faintly under candlelight: Republic of Torenza.

Elian’s hands trembled. Torenza was a myth, a name whispered in the corridors of forbidden archives—said to be one of Tartaria’s “mirror cities,” a place that existed between recorded coordinates, accessible only through certain alignments of geography and memory.

---

Two nights later, at Torrento Station, Elian saw her.

A woman in a gray coat stood at the ticket counter, arguing softly with a clerk. Her accent was indistinguishable—neither northern nor southern.

When she turned, her eyes met his—clear, distant, as if reflecting a shoreline behind him.

> “You’re late,” she said.

“The map is fading faster than expected.”

Her name, she claimed, was Kira Lestov, a historian from “the outer territories.”

But when Elian asked for her papers, she handed him the same passport he had received in the mail.

Inside, new pages had appeared—pages that weren’t there before. Each bore faint imprints of unfamiliar coastlines, rivers that looped into themselves, and mountains labeled in an extinct dialect of Old Tartarian script.

> “You mapped this once,” Kira said quietly.

“You just don’t remember.”

---

Over the following weeks, Elian worked with Kira in his observatory, trying to reconstruct the lost geography of Tartaria.

Every night, as they traced the lines of forgotten continents, the map would subtly shift.

A bay drawn near the Black Sea would disappear by morning.

A mountain range in Mongolia would flatten into plain.

And once, an entire peninsula folded into the paper itself, leaving only a crease shaped like a human thumbprint.

Kira began to weaken.

She complained of hearing waves when there was no sea breeze.

Once, she awoke screaming, claiming she saw people walking beneath the maps, their silhouettes moving behind the parchment like trapped shadows.

Elian feared she was losing her mind—until the same thing began happening to him.

---

Desperate for answers, they broke into the Municipal Archive beneath Torrento’s city hall. There, in the dust-laden basement, they discovered an unmarked drawer containing fragments of old maritime charts. One was titled “Transit Routes: Tartarian Trade Authority, 1871.”

Stamped in the corner was the same bisected-circle symbol from Kira’s passport.

In the margin, someone had written:

> “To erase a nation, you must first erase its coordinates.”

Kira stared at the note, trembling.

> “They didn’t destroy Tartaria,” she whispered. “They buried it in memory—beneath every updated map. Every border redrawn became a grave.”

Before Elian could reply, the lights flickered. A deep hum reverberated through the shelves, as though the building itself were exhaling.

When the lights steadied, several drawers had shifted positions—and the exit door was no longer where it had been.

---

They wandered through hallways that curved in impossible directions. The air smelled of salt and paper mold.

At last, they entered a vast chamber filled with suspended maps—dozens of them, floating midair like sails in slow motion. The room pulsed faintly, alive.

In the center stood a brass pedestal holding a single, open atlas: The Atlas of Tartaria.

Its pages moved on their own, revealing lands labeled in no known language. The borders shimmered, then dissolved.

Kira touched the map—and for an instant, her reflection appeared within the parchment itself, walking across the drawn roads.

Elian shouted, but his voice came out muffled, as if underwater.

The room rippled.

Kira turned toward him, her eyes glowing faintly blue.

> “They never erased us,” she said. “They turned us into maps.”

And then she was gone.

---

When authorities found Elian days later, the observatory was abandoned.

Every map in the room was blank.

Only one item remained on his desk—a single passport marked Republic of Torenza.

Inside was a handwritten message, fresh and wet with ink:

> “The coordinates realign every century.

The forgotten will return when the tide draws north.

Remember where the shore used to be.”

Elian disappeared soon after.

Some say he boarded a plane that never landed.

Others whisper that, on moonless nights, a faint shoreline appears off Torrento’s coast—where no satellite shows land—and that travelers who look too closely sometimes find a small, inkless stamp in their passports:

a bisected circle, faint as breath on glass.

---

In 2025, airport authorities in Torrento reported an anomaly.

A woman claiming to be from Torenza appeared at Gate 12, carrying a blue-green passport stamped with a date that didn’t exist.

When security reviewed the footage, her reflection in the terminal window didn’t match her movement—it was standing still, watching.

The recording was classified.

The file name: “Atlas_001 — Tartarian Revival.”

---

Some maps do not lead to places. They lead back to what the world has agreed to forget.

Stay ready for the second part of the story.