The rain fell with the consistency of regret. It hammered against the obsidian cliffs of Aethelgard, a sound that echoed not just in the wind, but in the marrow of anyone who dared linger too long on the Coast. The Coast, you see, remembers. It remembers the fall of the star-shards, the wars waged in the name of forgotten gods, and the slow, grinding erosion of time itself. And it remembers Benito.
Benito was a cartographer. Not a grand, lauded cartographer, but a solitary one, obsessed with the intricate details of the Coast. He wasn’t driven by ambition, nor by a thirst for knowledge. He was driven by a compulsion, a need to capture the ever-shifting landscape before it vanished entirely, swallowed by the restless sea. His maps weren’t accurate, not in the conventional sense. They were… impressions. They captured the *feeling* of the place – the damp chill, the scent of salt and something else, something metallic and faintly sorrowful.
“The water doesn’t reflect the sky,” he’d murmur, tracing lines on parchment with a charcoal stick. “It reflects the sorrow.”
Aethelgard itself was a geological anomaly, a place where the earth bled obsidian. It wasn’t volcanic in the traditional sense. The obsidian wasn’t born of fire, but of a deep, psychic resonance. The star-shards, fragments of a shattered celestial body, had fallen onto the Coast centuries ago, imbuing the land with a strange, unsettling energy. This energy, they said, was the heart of Aethelgard – the Obsidian Heart. Benito believed it was the source of the maps' strange qualities, the reason they shifted and changed even when he wasn’t looking at them.
“The Heart whispers to the lines,” he claimed. “It guides my hand, but it doesn’t always show me the truth.”
He'd spent his entire life attempting to chart the influence of the Obsidian Heart. His maps weren't geographically accurate; instead, they detailed the ebb and flow of the Coast’s emotional currents. A turbulent line represented a surge of grief, a calm curve, a moment of tranquility. The maps were, in essence, a record of the Coast’s psychic heartbeat.
But the Coast was vanishing. Not in a catastrophic, linear fashion. It was fading, dissolving, becoming less… real. The edges blurred, the cliffs crumbled, and the towns, once bustling with sailors and merchants, were slowly swallowed by the sea. The cause remained a mystery. Some whispered of a curse, others of a natural phenomenon. Benito, however, suspected something far stranger – that the Coast was rejecting its own memory, attempting to erase itself from existence.
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said, his voice raspy with exhaustion. “The more I try to map it, the more it disappears.”
His final map was a chaotic swirl of lines and symbols, a desperate attempt to capture the last vestiges of Aethelgard before it was lost. It was titled simply: “The Ghosts of What Was.”
1. The star-shards were believed to be fragments of the “Celestial Loom,” a device used by the ancient gods to weave the fabric of reality. Their fall was seen as an act of divine sabotage.
2. Benito’s journals, discovered after his disappearance, contained numerous references to “The Silent Ones,” shadowy figures said to inhabit the deepest caves of Aethelgard.