Ulvan Dret picked up the cracked calfskin folio from the granite bench, his fingers tracing the gold-trimmed lettering on the front cover. Field Register of Ulvan Dret, Licensed Quarter Cartographer of the Northern Marches. The gold leaf had flaked away from the edges, leaving dull yellow scars on the brown leather. With a slow, deliberate movement, he flipped the heavy parchment leaves to the center spread. There, his official advancement ledger had been recorded and stamped by the regional land-mappers’ guild twenty years earlier.
Kezra leaned in close. She held the small brass animal fat lamp so the light fell across the neatly ruled columns. The ledger was drawn in the standard four-square format of the guild, recording every requirement for class advancement under the ancient laws of the craft. Her eyes moved down the lines, reading the numerical totals with an expert’s rapid understanding.
Beside the title of Quarter Mapmaker sat thirty-eight completed circuits. Only two short of the forty needed to unlock Horizon scale. But beneath that line, the ledger came to an abrupt, stale halt. Verified Ecologies: 05 / 06. Continuous Personally Walked Route: 112 / 160 Miles. Full-Depth Strata Profiles: 00 / 03. Across the bottom of the page. There, the regional guild stamp should have approved his entry into high-scale mastery, sat a blank, empty space, untouched by ink for fifteen years.
