Turning Point 25
The water didn’t stop when the High Cantor vanished.
Corin stood knee-deep in the Dry Throne’s flooding chamber, watching the bronze map of the world disappear beneath a sheet of black seawater. His left hand throbbed where the burned map had seared his palm. His right hand hung useless at his side, fingers swollen and wrong, the bones the High Cantor had shattered grinding against each other with every stumble.
Sable grabbed his collar and hauled him toward the exit shaft. “Move. Now.”
“Bram—” Corin’s voice cracked.
“Bram is dead.” She didn’t soften it. Her face was streaked with grime and blood that wasn’t hers. “He died so we could get here. Don’t waste it.”
The water reached their waists. The bronze continents—Alderon, the Shattered Isles, the Wastes Beyond—slid beneath the rising tide like a drowned god’s last breath. Corin’s boots slipped on the submerged map, and he went under.
Cold. Dark. The taste of salt and copper.
Sable’s hand found his collar again, hauled him up. She was stronger than she looked, all wiry muscle and smuggler’s spite. “You don’t get to drown. Not after all this.”
They climbed. The shaft was narrow, barely wide enough for one person, and Corin’s broken hand screamed every time he braced against the stone. He used his elbows. His teeth. His forehead. Whatever it took to keep moving while the water rose behind them, hungry and patient.
When they finally burst through a rusted grate into the palace’s undercroft, the first thing Corin heard was silence.
Not the silence of peace. The silence of a city holding its breath.
He lay on the cold stone floor, chest heaving, and listened. No bells. No screams. No crash of water against buildings. The flood had stopped.
Sable crouched beside him, head tilted. “The tide’s going out.”
“That’s impossible.” Corin’s voice was barely a whisper. “The tide never goes out. Not fully. Not in a century.”
“Listen.” She pressed her palm to the floor. “The water’s draining. All of it.”
Corin forced himself upright, cradling his ruined hand against his chest. The undercroft was a maze of support pillars and forgotten storage rooms, but he knew the way up. He’d mapped the palace’s bones in his head a hundred times, even if he’d never been allowed inside.
They climbed stairs that hadn’t been dry in living memory. Water dripped from the walls, but it was *receding*—he could see the tide line on the stone, a dark stain that ended a hand’s breadth above his head and falling.
When they emerged into the palace’s grand courtyard, Corin stopped.
The city of Thalwick was visible. All of it.
For a century, the sea had swallowed the lower districts. The tiered canals had been the only way through the drowned streets, boats gliding over rooftops that had become reefs. But now, as the water drained in great rushing torrents, the old city was emerging from the deep like a corpse rising from a grave.
Half-sunk spires stood exposed, their bases crusted with barnacles. Windows that hadn’t seen sunlight in a hundred years gaped black and empty. The streets—real streets, cobbled and straight—ran with seawater that poured down gutters and into the canals, which were becoming rivers, which were becoming roads.
“Gods,” Sable breathed.
Corin couldn’t speak. His throat was too tight.
The city was *wrong*. Beautiful and terrible and wrong. The Thalwick he knew was a city of water, of boats and bridges and half-submerged architecture. This was a city of bones—the skeleton of everything that had been drowned, now exposed to the sky.
People were emerging from buildings. Dazed. Covered in silt. They stumbled into the streets and stared at the revealed ruins around them, at the buildings that had been underwater their entire lives.
A woman fell to her knees in the mud. She was crying.
Corin understood. He’d grown up in Thalwick. He’d never seen the lower districts. No one alive had. They were legends, stories, the drowned past that the Tideborn Council said was divine punishment for the kingdom’s sins.
But the council was gone. The High Cantor was gone. And the sea was leaving.
“We need to find the others,” Sable said. “The council members. The Choir. We need to make sure they don’t regroup.”
Corin nodded, but his feet wouldn’t move. He stood in the courtyard, watching the water drain, and felt something he hadn’t felt in years.
Hope. And terror.
Because if the water was gone, then everything the Tideborn Council had built was gone too. The laws. The tithes. The flood taxes. The Drowned Choir’s authority. All of it was washing away with the tide.
And what would replace it?
He didn’t know. No one knew. The city had been ruled by the council for so long that no one remembered anything else.
“Corin.” Sable’s voice was sharp. “Focus. We need to move.”
He forced himself to walk.
---
The palace was chaos.
Tideborn Council members—the ones who hadn’t been swept away with the High Cantor—were fleeing through the corridors, their fine robes soaked and torn. Servants ran past with armfuls of valuables. Guards stood at their posts, looking lost, their weapons useless against a threat that had already vanished.
Corin and Sable moved through the confusion like ghosts. No one stopped them. No one even looked at them. The city was in shock, and shock made people blind.
They found the council’s meeting chamber empty. The long table was overturned, papers scattered across the floor. A map of Thalwick lay half-submerged in a puddle of seawater, the ink bleeding into illegible smears.
Corin picked it up with his good hand. The paper was ruined, but he could still see the shape of the city—the tiered canals, the harbor, the palace at the center. It was the same map he’d drawn a hundred times, the same map that had gotten him exiled from the Guild.
“What do we do now?” Sable asked.
Corin stared at the ruined map. “We tell them.”
“Tell who?”
“Everyone.”
---
The first public gathering happened in the Grand Plaza, which had been a canal until three hours ago.
The water had drained enough that the cobblestones were visible, slick with mud and seaweed. Fish flopped in the gutters. The air smelled of salt and rot and something else—something clean, like the earth after a storm.
People had gathered. Not many at first. A few dozen. Then a hundred. Then more, streaming in from the newly exposed streets, their faces a mixture of wonder and fear.
Corin stood on the steps of the old fountain—dry for the first time in a century—and tried to find the words.
He was not a speaker. He was a mapmaker. He drew lines and labels and elevations. He didn’t give speeches.
But Sable pushed him forward, and the crowd was waiting, and he had to say something.
“The flood is gone,” he said. His voice cracked. He tried again. “The flood is gone. The Tideborn Council is gone. The Drowned Choir is gone.”
A murmur ran through the crowd. Some people cheered. Others looked terrified.
“The water wasn’t a curse,” Corin continued. “It wasn’t divine punishment. It was a machine. A system. The council was using the flood to keep something asleep beneath the city. And that something is awake now.”
He paused. He didn’t know how to explain the leviathan. He didn’t know if they would believe him.
“The sea will come back,” he said. “It always does. But it won’t rise the way it did. The city is going to change. The lower districts are going to be exposed. There’s going to be a lot of work to do.”
He looked out at the crowd. At the mud-streaked faces. At the children who had never seen a dry street before.
“I don’t know what happens next,” he admitted. “I’m not a leader. I’m not a prophet. I’m just a mapmaker who drew the wrong lines at the right time.”
A woman in the crowd shouted, “You saved us!”
Others echoed her. The sound grew, a wave of voices crashing over him.
Corin shook his head. “I didn’t save anyone. Bram saved us. He held the pillar so we could reach the Dry Throne. He died so the city could live.”
The crowd went quiet.
“His name was Bram,” Corin said. “He was a soldier. He lost his hand in the Undermarket. He could feel the stone move. He was the bravest man I ever knew.”
He stopped. His throat was tight. He couldn’t speak anymore.
Sable stepped forward. “The city needs to organize. We need to find the council members who fled. We need to secure the palace. We need to start rebuilding.”
She was practical. Direct. The crowd listened to her in a way they hadn’t listened to Corin.
“But first,” she said, “we need to bury our dead.”
---
The dead were everywhere.
Corin hadn’t noticed it before—he’d been too focused on survival. But as the water drained, the bodies were revealed. People who had drowned in the flood. People who had been killed by the Choir. People who had died in the Undermarket when the tunnels collapsed.
He walked through the streets with Sable, counting them without meaning to. Twenty-three in the Grand Plaza alone. More in the canals. More in the buildings that had been flooded for a century, their bones tangled in the ruins.
“Stop,” Sable said.
Corin blinked. “What?”
“You’re counting. I can see it in your face. Stop.”
He looked at her. She was covered in mud and blood, her dark hair plastered to her skull. She looked exhausted. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.
“I can’t,” he said. “I need to know.”
“Why?”
“Because someone has to remember them.” His voice was hoarse. “Someone has to know how many people died. Someone has to draw the map of what happened.”
Sable was quiet for a long moment. Then she nodded.
“Draw it,” she said. “But don’t let it eat you.”
---
They found the first council member hiding in a wine cellar beneath the palace.
He was an old man, white-haired and trembling, his fine robes stained with wine and fear. He raised his hands when Corin and Sable entered, his eyes wide.
“Please,” he said. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what the Choir was doing. I thought the floods were natural. I thought—”
“You thought,” Corin said, “or you chose not to look?”
The old man’s face crumpled. “I have a family. I have grandchildren. I couldn’t—I couldn’t risk—”
“People died,” Sable said. “Children died. In the flood that Corin predicted. In the district he marked as safe.”
The old man was crying now. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Corin looked at him and felt nothing. Not anger. Not pity. Just a vast, hollow emptiness.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said. “We’re going to take you to the plaza. You’re going to tell the people what you knew. And then you’re going to face whatever justice they decide.”
The old man nodded, still crying.
They found three more council members in the next hour. All of them had the same story. They didn’t know. They couldn’t have known. They were just following orders.
Corin didn’t believe any of them.
---
By evening, the plaza was full.
Thousands of people had gathered, standing in the mud and the seaweed, listening to the council members confess. The confessions were halting, incomplete, full of excuses. But they were enough.
The crowd’s mood shifted as the sun set. At first, there was anger. Shouts. Threats. But as the confessions continued, the anger faded into something else. Grief. Exhaustion. The weight of a century of lies finally lifted, leaving nothing but the truth.
Corin stood at the edge of the plaza, watching. His hand throbbed. His legs ached. He hadn’t eaten in—he didn’t know how long.
Sable appeared beside him. “You need to rest.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. The city isn’t going anywhere.”
He looked at her. “What happens now?”
“We rebuild.” She said it simply, like it was obvious. “We find the people who can do the work. We set up a new government. We figure out how to live without the council.”
“And the leviathan?”
Sable was quiet for a moment. “It’s gone. It drank the flood and went back to the deep. I don’t think it’s coming back.”
Corin wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that the nightmare was over, that the city could heal, that the dead could be mourned and the living could move on.
But he was a mapmaker. He knew that maps were never simple. There were always hidden depths, unseen currents, places where the ink bled into the unknown.
“I need to find Bram,” he said. “I need to bury him.”
Sable nodded. “I’ll come with you.”
---
They found Bram where he had fallen, in the collapsed tunnel beneath the palace.
The pillar that had killed him lay across his chest, pinning him to the ground. His face was peaceful, almost calm. His remaining hand was still pressed against the stone, as if he were listening to the earth one last time.
Corin knelt beside him. His broken hand screamed, but he ignored it.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should have seen it. I should have drawn the map differently.”
But he knew that was a lie. The map had shown the ambush. He had ignored it. He had been too focused on the Dry Throne, too certain that his vision was the only path forward.
Bram had paid for his certainty with his life.
Sable knelt beside him. “We need to move him. The tunnel isn’t stable.”
Corin nodded. He couldn’t lift the pillar with one hand, but Sable could. She was strong. She had always been strong.
Together, they pulled Bram free. His body was heavy, limp, the weight of death pressing down on them.
They carried him out of the tunnel, through the palace, into the streets of the newly exposed city. People watched them pass. Some bowed their heads. Others reached out to touch Bram’s shoulder, as if to thank him.
Corin didn’t speak. He couldn’t.
They buried him in the Sunken Gardens, where the water had receded and the soil was finally visible. The garden was a ruin—dead trees, broken statues, silt-caked paths. But the ground was soft, and the earth was ready.
Corin dug the grave with his one good hand. It took a long time. Sable offered to help, but he shook his head.
“I need to do this,” he said.
When the grave was deep enough, they lowered Bram into it. Corin stood at the edge, looking down at his friend’s face.
“You saved the city,” he said. “You saved all of us. I’m going to make sure everyone knows your name.”
He picked up a handful of soil and let it fall onto Bram’s chest.
“No more futures,” he whispered. “Just this.”
Sable put her hand on his shoulder. They stood together in the ruined garden, watching the sun set over a city that was finally above water.
The sea was gone. The flood was over. And the dead were buried.
But Corin knew, with the certainty of a mapmaker reading a familiar coast, that this was not the end. It was only the beginning of a new map—one he would have to draw with care, with truth, and with the memory of everyone who had been lost along the way.
Corin stood knee-deep in the Dry Throne’s flooding chamber, watching the bronze map of the world disappear beneath a sheet of black seawater. His left hand throbbed where the burned map had seared his palm. His right hand hung useless at his side, fingers swollen and wrong, the bones the High Cantor had shattered grinding against each other with every stumble.
Sable grabbed his collar and hauled him toward the exit shaft. “Move. Now.”
“Bram—” Corin’s voice cracked.
“Bram is dead.” She didn’t soften it. Her face was streaked with grime and blood that wasn’t hers. “He died so we could get here. Don’t waste it.”
The water reached their waists. The bronze continents—Alderon, the Shattered Isles, the Wastes Beyond—slid beneath the rising tide like a drowned god’s last breath. Corin’s boots slipped on the submerged map, and he went under.
Cold. Dark. The taste of salt and copper.
Sable’s hand found his collar again, hauled him up. She was stronger than she looked, all wiry muscle and smuggler’s spite. “You don’t get to drown. Not after all this.”
They climbed. The shaft was narrow, barely wide enough for one person, and Corin’s broken hand screamed every time he braced against the stone. He used his elbows. His teeth. His forehead. Whatever it took to keep moving while the water rose behind them, hungry and patient.
When they finally burst through a rusted grate into the palace’s undercroft, the first thing Corin heard was silence.
Not the silence of peace. The silence of a city holding its breath.
He lay on the cold stone floor, chest heaving, and listened. No bells. No screams. No crash of water against buildings. The flood had stopped.
Sable crouched beside him, head tilted. “The tide’s going out.”
“That’s impossible.” Corin’s voice was barely a whisper. “The tide never goes out. Not fully. Not in a century.”
“Listen.” She pressed her palm to the floor. “The water’s draining. All of it.”
Corin forced himself upright, cradling his ruined hand against his chest. The undercroft was a maze of support pillars and forgotten storage rooms, but he knew the way up. He’d mapped the palace’s bones in his head a hundred times, even if he’d never been allowed inside.
They climbed stairs that hadn’t been dry in living memory. Water dripped from the walls, but it was *receding*—he could see the tide line on the stone, a dark stain that ended a hand’s breadth above his head and falling.
When they emerged into the palace’s grand courtyard, Corin stopped.
The city of Thalwick was visible. All of it.
For a century, the sea had swallowed the lower districts. The tiered canals had been the only way through the drowned streets, boats gliding over rooftops that had become reefs. But now, as the water drained in great rushing torrents, the old city was emerging from the deep like a corpse rising from a grave.
Half-sunk spires stood exposed, their bases crusted with barnacles. Windows that hadn’t seen sunlight in a hundred years gaped black and empty. The streets—real streets, cobbled and straight—ran with seawater that poured down gutters and into the canals, which were becoming rivers, which were becoming roads.
“Gods,” Sable breathed.
Corin couldn’t speak. His throat was too tight.
The city was *wrong*. Beautiful and terrible and wrong. The Thalwick he knew was a city of water, of boats and bridges and half-submerged architecture. This was a city of bones—the skeleton of everything that had been drowned, now exposed to the sky.
People were emerging from buildings. Dazed. Covered in silt. They stumbled into the streets and stared at the revealed ruins around them, at the buildings that had been underwater their entire lives.
A woman fell to her knees in the mud. She was crying.
Corin understood. He’d grown up in Thalwick. He’d never seen the lower districts. No one alive had. They were legends, stories, the drowned past that the Tideborn Council said was divine punishment for the kingdom’s sins.
But the council was gone. The High Cantor was gone. And the sea was leaving.
“We need to find the others,” Sable said. “The council members. The Choir. We need to make sure they don’t regroup.”
Corin nodded, but his feet wouldn’t move. He stood in the courtyard, watching the water drain, and felt something he hadn’t felt in years.
Hope. And terror.
Because if the water was gone, then everything the Tideborn Council had built was gone too. The laws. The tithes. The flood taxes. The Drowned Choir’s authority. All of it was washing away with the tide.
And what would replace it?
He didn’t know. No one knew. The city had been ruled by the council for so long that no one remembered anything else.
“Corin.” Sable’s voice was sharp. “Focus. We need to move.”
He forced himself to walk.
---
The palace was chaos.
Tideborn Council members—the ones who hadn’t been swept away with the High Cantor—were fleeing through the corridors, their fine robes soaked and torn. Servants ran past with armfuls of valuables. Guards stood at their posts, looking lost, their weapons useless against a threat that had already vanished.
Corin and Sable moved through the confusion like ghosts. No one stopped them. No one even looked at them. The city was in shock, and shock made people blind.
They found the council’s meeting chamber empty. The long table was overturned, papers scattered across the floor. A map of Thalwick lay half-submerged in a puddle of seawater, the ink bleeding into illegible smears.
Corin picked it up with his good hand. The paper was ruined, but he could still see the shape of the city—the tiered canals, the harbor, the palace at the center. It was the same map he’d drawn a hundred times, the same map that had gotten him exiled from the Guild.
“What do we do now?” Sable asked.
Corin stared at the ruined map. “We tell them.”
“Tell who?”
“Everyone.”
---
The first public gathering happened in the Grand Plaza, which had been a canal until three hours ago.
The water had drained enough that the cobblestones were visible, slick with mud and seaweed. Fish flopped in the gutters. The air smelled of salt and rot and something else—something clean, like the earth after a storm.
People had gathered. Not many at first. A few dozen. Then a hundred. Then more, streaming in from the newly exposed streets, their faces a mixture of wonder and fear.
Corin stood on the steps of the old fountain—dry for the first time in a century—and tried to find the words.
He was not a speaker. He was a mapmaker. He drew lines and labels and elevations. He didn’t give speeches.
But Sable pushed him forward, and the crowd was waiting, and he had to say something.
“The flood is gone,” he said. His voice cracked. He tried again. “The flood is gone. The Tideborn Council is gone. The Drowned Choir is gone.”
A murmur ran through the crowd. Some people cheered. Others looked terrified.
“The water wasn’t a curse,” Corin continued. “It wasn’t divine punishment. It was a machine. A system. The council was using the flood to keep something asleep beneath the city. And that something is awake now.”
He paused. He didn’t know how to explain the leviathan. He didn’t know if they would believe him.
“The sea will come back,” he said. “It always does. But it won’t rise the way it did. The city is going to change. The lower districts are going to be exposed. There’s going to be a lot of work to do.”
He looked out at the crowd. At the mud-streaked faces. At the children who had never seen a dry street before.
“I don’t know what happens next,” he admitted. “I’m not a leader. I’m not a prophet. I’m just a mapmaker who drew the wrong lines at the right time.”
A woman in the crowd shouted, “You saved us!”
Others echoed her. The sound grew, a wave of voices crashing over him.
Corin shook his head. “I didn’t save anyone. Bram saved us. He held the pillar so we could reach the Dry Throne. He died so the city could live.”
The crowd went quiet.
“His name was Bram,” Corin said. “He was a soldier. He lost his hand in the Undermarket. He could feel the stone move. He was the bravest man I ever knew.”
He stopped. His throat was tight. He couldn’t speak anymore.
Sable stepped forward. “The city needs to organize. We need to find the council members who fled. We need to secure the palace. We need to start rebuilding.”
She was practical. Direct. The crowd listened to her in a way they hadn’t listened to Corin.
“But first,” she said, “we need to bury our dead.”
---
The dead were everywhere.
Corin hadn’t noticed it before—he’d been too focused on survival. But as the water drained, the bodies were revealed. People who had drowned in the flood. People who had been killed by the Choir. People who had died in the Undermarket when the tunnels collapsed.
He walked through the streets with Sable, counting them without meaning to. Twenty-three in the Grand Plaza alone. More in the canals. More in the buildings that had been flooded for a century, their bones tangled in the ruins.
“Stop,” Sable said.
Corin blinked. “What?”
“You’re counting. I can see it in your face. Stop.”
He looked at her. She was covered in mud and blood, her dark hair plastered to her skull. She looked exhausted. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.
“I can’t,” he said. “I need to know.”
“Why?”
“Because someone has to remember them.” His voice was hoarse. “Someone has to know how many people died. Someone has to draw the map of what happened.”
Sable was quiet for a long moment. Then she nodded.
“Draw it,” she said. “But don’t let it eat you.”
---
They found the first council member hiding in a wine cellar beneath the palace.
He was an old man, white-haired and trembling, his fine robes stained with wine and fear. He raised his hands when Corin and Sable entered, his eyes wide.
“Please,” he said. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what the Choir was doing. I thought the floods were natural. I thought—”
“You thought,” Corin said, “or you chose not to look?”
The old man’s face crumpled. “I have a family. I have grandchildren. I couldn’t—I couldn’t risk—”
“People died,” Sable said. “Children died. In the flood that Corin predicted. In the district he marked as safe.”
The old man was crying now. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Corin looked at him and felt nothing. Not anger. Not pity. Just a vast, hollow emptiness.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said. “We’re going to take you to the plaza. You’re going to tell the people what you knew. And then you’re going to face whatever justice they decide.”
The old man nodded, still crying.
They found three more council members in the next hour. All of them had the same story. They didn’t know. They couldn’t have known. They were just following orders.
Corin didn’t believe any of them.
---
By evening, the plaza was full.
Thousands of people had gathered, standing in the mud and the seaweed, listening to the council members confess. The confessions were halting, incomplete, full of excuses. But they were enough.
The crowd’s mood shifted as the sun set. At first, there was anger. Shouts. Threats. But as the confessions continued, the anger faded into something else. Grief. Exhaustion. The weight of a century of lies finally lifted, leaving nothing but the truth.
Corin stood at the edge of the plaza, watching. His hand throbbed. His legs ached. He hadn’t eaten in—he didn’t know how long.
Sable appeared beside him. “You need to rest.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. The city isn’t going anywhere.”
He looked at her. “What happens now?”
“We rebuild.” She said it simply, like it was obvious. “We find the people who can do the work. We set up a new government. We figure out how to live without the council.”
“And the leviathan?”
Sable was quiet for a moment. “It’s gone. It drank the flood and went back to the deep. I don’t think it’s coming back.”
Corin wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that the nightmare was over, that the city could heal, that the dead could be mourned and the living could move on.
But he was a mapmaker. He knew that maps were never simple. There were always hidden depths, unseen currents, places where the ink bled into the unknown.
“I need to find Bram,” he said. “I need to bury him.”
Sable nodded. “I’ll come with you.”
---
They found Bram where he had fallen, in the collapsed tunnel beneath the palace.
The pillar that had killed him lay across his chest, pinning him to the ground. His face was peaceful, almost calm. His remaining hand was still pressed against the stone, as if he were listening to the earth one last time.
Corin knelt beside him. His broken hand screamed, but he ignored it.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should have seen it. I should have drawn the map differently.”
But he knew that was a lie. The map had shown the ambush. He had ignored it. He had been too focused on the Dry Throne, too certain that his vision was the only path forward.
Bram had paid for his certainty with his life.
Sable knelt beside him. “We need to move him. The tunnel isn’t stable.”
Corin nodded. He couldn’t lift the pillar with one hand, but Sable could. She was strong. She had always been strong.
Together, they pulled Bram free. His body was heavy, limp, the weight of death pressing down on them.
They carried him out of the tunnel, through the palace, into the streets of the newly exposed city. People watched them pass. Some bowed their heads. Others reached out to touch Bram’s shoulder, as if to thank him.
Corin didn’t speak. He couldn’t.
They buried him in the Sunken Gardens, where the water had receded and the soil was finally visible. The garden was a ruin—dead trees, broken statues, silt-caked paths. But the ground was soft, and the earth was ready.
Corin dug the grave with his one good hand. It took a long time. Sable offered to help, but he shook his head.
“I need to do this,” he said.
When the grave was deep enough, they lowered Bram into it. Corin stood at the edge, looking down at his friend’s face.
“You saved the city,” he said. “You saved all of us. I’m going to make sure everyone knows your name.”
He picked up a handful of soil and let it fall onto Bram’s chest.
“No more futures,” he whispered. “Just this.”
Sable put her hand on his shoulder. They stood together in the ruined garden, watching the sun set over a city that was finally above water.
The sea was gone. The flood was over. And the dead were buried.
But Corin knew, with the certainty of a mapmaker reading a familiar coast, that this was not the end. It was only the beginning of a new map—one he would have to draw with care, with truth, and with the memory of everyone who had been lost along the way.