There are maps in the Thorn Court that no one remembers drawing.
They are kept in the oldest rooms of the archives, rolled tightly beneath layers of dust, their edges brittle with age. Some bear names still spoken throughout the realms.
Others do not.
No cartographer claims them.
No history explains them.
And yet, they remain.
There are roads inked across the parchment that lead nowhere. Borders that no longer exist. Names written in languages few can read and fewer still remember.
Some places have disappeared entirely.
Others are simply… missing.
Not destroyed.
Not abandoned.
Forgotten.
The oldest stories say there was a time before the realms became what they are now. Before histories were rewritten into legend and legend faded into little more than fireside stories.
A time before the Forgetting.
What happened then depends entirely upon whom you ask.
Some say it was war.
Some say magic.
Some insist there was never a Forgetting at all.
But there are strange things about the oldest maps.
Ink that refuses to fade.
Paths that appear where none were drawn before.
And places that remember what the people living upon them have long since lost.
Perhaps that is why certain maps were hidden away and others destroyed.
Or perhaps there are things in this world that were never meant to be found again.
The archives offer no answer.
Only a warning, written in an unknown hand along the bottom of one very old map:
The land remembers.
And beneath it, added much later in different ink:
Pray it does not remember you.
🥀 FROM THE THORN COURT ARCHIVES
Some histories are recorded.
Others are buried.
