The Mapmaker's Secret

The ink was vanishing.

Even as Elias held the parchment closer to the flickering oil lamp, the script dissolved before his eyes like smoke on wind. He muttered under his breath, tracing the outline of the fading runes with a gloved finger.

“It’s a cipher,” he said. “Layered with some sort of reactive ink. Possibly lemon oil… no — wormwood extract. Clever.”

The cloaked woman crossed her arms, unimpressed. “You have until dawn. After that, the message will be lost.”

Elias ignored the urgency in her tone. Pressure rarely helped. He pulled out a silver stylus from his satchel — no ordinary writing tool, but a relic with obsidian etched into its tip, designed for copying faint inscriptions without smudging the original. It had once belonged to a monk who died in a Spanish prison for forging maps of forbidden relics.

Elias had paid for it with his own blood.

He carefully traced the letters, working by memory as the characters dissolved into yellowed nothingness. The woman — she had not yet offered her name — watched him like a falcon.

“Who sent you?” Elias asked without looking up.

“No one you’d believe.”

He smiled. “That’s precisely the kind of person I believe in.”

She said nothing, only handed him a sealed envelope. The wax bore the crest of a black owl clutching a serpent — a symbol Elias had only seen once, on a gravestone in Venice. He didn’t open it. Not yet.

Instead, he finished his tracing and held it up to the light. Symbols danced in a pattern too deliberate for coincidence. At the center was a shape — not a word, but a coordinate.

“Delphi,” he confirmed aloud, his voice nearly reverent. “But not the ruins everyone knows. This is older… deeper. Beneath the temple.”

“There’s a passage under the sanctuary,” she said. “Buried in the quake of 373 B.C. Forgotten. Until now.”

Elias rolled the scroll carefully, slipping it into a hidden compartment in his coat. “And you expect me to follow you there? No guarantee of treasure, no promise of return?”

“I expect you to do what you always do, Voss,” she replied. “Chase secrets no sane man would follow.”

He laughed quietly.

She wasn’t wrong.

They stepped out into the alley, the first rays of gray light splitting the fog. Somewhere in the distance, bells tolled from a minaret. The city was waking.

And so was something far older — something buried beneath centuries of ash and silence.