Chapter 5 - The Road That Circles

She passed the dead tree for the third time just after noon.

The first time, she'd barely noticed it. A lightning-struck oak at the crest of a hill, bark blackened and branches reaching toward the sky like grasping fingers. Unusual, but not remarkable. She'd walked past it and kept going.

The second time, an hour later, she'd stopped. Stared at it. Felt something cold settle in her stomach. The same tree, the same hill, the same arrangement of stones at its base. She'd checked the compass out of habit, but the needle just pointed at her the way it always did now, useless for navigation.

She'd told herself it was a different tree. Lightning struck oaks all the time. The hills all looked similar. She was tired and paranoid and seeing patterns that weren't there.

But now, the third time, there was no denying it. Same tree. Same hill. Same stones. Even the same bird's nest wedged in the crook of a dead branch, visible against the pale sky.

She'd been walking for six hours and she was right back where she'd started.

The road plays tricks, the fisherman had said. Most folks give up before they get there.

She sat down on one of the stones at the base of the tree. Her legs ached and her water skin was half empty and somewhere in the distance she could hear birds singing like everything was fine, like the world wasn't broken in ways that defied explanation.

The journal came out. She flipped to the last entry she'd written, the one about the compass. Added a new line beneath it.

The road loops. I've passed the same dead tree three times. Six hours of walking and I haven't gone anywhere.

She stared at the words. They looked insane. They were insane. Roads didn't loop. You walked forward and you got somewhere, that was how roads worked, that was how the world worked.

Except the world didn't work the way it was supposed to. She knew that better than anyone.

She was still sitting there, trying to figure out what to do, when she heard footsteps on the road behind her.

The man looked worse than she felt.

He was maybe forty, with a patchy beard and clothes that had been decent once but were now wrinkled and stained from days of travel. His pack hung loose on his shoulders and his eyes had the glazed, hollow look of someone who'd stopped expecting anything good to happen.

He saw her sitting by the tree and stopped. Stared at her for a long moment.

"You're new," he said.

"What?"

"You're new. Haven't seen you before." He gestured vaguely at the road behind him. "I've been walking this stretch for... I don't know. Four days? Five? I've lost count. But I haven't seen you."

She stood up slowly. "You've been on this road for five days?"

"Give or take." He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Thought I was going crazy at first. Kept passing the same landmarks, ending up back where I started. Figured I was just turned around, you know? Easy to get lost in these hills."

"But you're not lost."

"No. I'm not lost." He looked at the dead tree, at the stones, at the bird's nest in the branches. "I know exactly where I am. I just can't seem to get anywhere else."

She felt something loosen in her chest. Not relief exactly, but something close to it. She wasn't crazy. She wasn't imagining things. Someone else was trapped here too.

"I'm trying to reach a lighthouse," she said. "On the coast. There's someone there I need to find."

"The Cartographer's Daughter." He said it like he'd heard the name before. "Yeah. Me too. Well, not her specifically. But I heard she has maps. Old ones. Maps that show things that aren't supposed to exist anymore."

Her pulse quickened. "You've heard of her?"

"Heard stories. There's a lot of stories going around lately, if you know where to listen." He dropped his pack on the ground and sat down heavily on one of the stones. "People looking for things that disappeared. People trying to find places that aren't on any map. People who remember things nobody else remembers."

"What kind of stories?"

He shrugged. "All kinds. A woman in the port cities who's searching for someone who got erased. A man up north who swears there used to be a whole country where the Empty Reach is now. People who wake up grieving and don't know why." He looked at her with tired eyes. "You're one of them, aren't you? The searchers."

She didn't answer. Didn't need to.

"Thought so." He pulled a water skin from his pack, took a long drink. "I'm not searching for anyone. I just wanted to see the maps. Wanted to know if the things I half-remember are real or if I'm just losing my mind." He laughed again, that hollow sound. "Now I can't even get there. Five days on this road and I keep ending up right back here."

She looked at the road stretching out ahead of them, winding down the hill and disappearing into the golden grass. It looked normal. It looked like a road that went somewhere.

But it didn't.

She thought about the road. About how it looped no matter which direction you walked. Forward toward the lighthouse, you ended up back at the dead tree. Thren had probably tried reversing direction a dozen times and it hadn't helped.

Then she thought about the old woman in the market. The blue flowers. The holiday no one remembered.

We walk backwards through the streets.

At the time it had seemed like just another piece of weirdness, another inconsistency to file away. But what if it wasn't random? What if there was a reason people used to walk backwards on Forgetting Day?

"There was an old woman in the city," she said slowly. "She was celebrating a holiday called Forgetting Day. Said it was the oldest holiday there was, but nobody else had heard of it."

Thren looked at her. "So?"

"She said they used to walk backwards through the streets. Literally backwards, facing away from where they were going." She stared at the road ahead, the one that kept looping. "What if that's how you navigate broken places? Not just reversing direction, but actually walking backwards?"

He stared at her like she'd lost her mind. "You want to walk to the lighthouse facing the wrong way."

"I want to try something that doesn't make sense. Because everything that makes sense hasn't worked."

She pulled out the compass, opened it, showed him the needle pointing steadily at her. "Nothing works the way it's supposed to anymore. This compass doesn't point north. The road doesn't go anywhere. Maybe the solution is just as broken as everything else."

He stared at the compass. At the needle that should have been pointing north but wasn't. Something shifted in his expression, the first crack in the exhausted resignation he'd been wearing.

"That's not a normal compass."

"No. It's not."

"Where did you get it?"

"A vendor in the city. He couldn't remember where it came from." She closed the cover, tucked it back in her pocket. "Everything's like that now. Things that don't fit. Pieces that don't make sense. The world is full of holes and we keep stumbling into them."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he stood up, shouldered his pack, and looked down the road toward the lighthouse, the direction they needed to go.

"Backwards," he said. "Actually backwards. Facing the city while we walk toward the coast."

"Yes."

"That's insane."

"You've been going forward for five days and it hasn't gotten you anywhere."

"Fair point." He took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. "I'm Thren, by the way."

"Does it matter?"

"Probably not. But I've been alone on this road for five days and I'd like to know what to call the person I'm about to follow into an insane experiment."

She almost smiled. Almost. "You can call me whatever you want. I'm not sure names mean much anymore."

He nodded like that made perfect sense, and maybe it did. Maybe in a world where people could be erased and roads could loop and compasses could point at your deepest fears, names were just another thing that could disappear.

They turned their backs to the lighthouse. Faced the direction they'd come from, the city somewhere beyond the hills behind them. Then, watching the road recede instead of approach, they started walking backwards.

It was awkward. She had to glance over her shoulder to keep from stumbling, had to trust her feet to find the road beneath her. Thren was doing the same beside her, both of them shuffling along like fools, facing the wrong direction entirely.

"If this doesn't work," Thren said, "I'm going to feel very stupid."

"If this doesn't work, we'll just end up back here anyway."

"Also a fair point."

They kept going.

The first hour felt wrong.

Not wrong in a way she could explain, just wrong. Like walking against the grain of something. Like pushing through water when everyone else was swimming with the current. Her body kept wanting to turn around, kept insisting that she needed to face where she was going, that walking blind was dangerous, that this was madness.

She ignored it. Kept her eyes on the road behind her, on Thren's determined face, on the hills slowly receding in a way they never had before.

Because they were receding. She was sure of it.

The dead tree didn't appear.

An hour passed and the lightning-struck oak should have shown up on the horizon, but it didn't. Instead there were new hills, ones she hadn't seen before. New rocks, new gullies, new clusters of wildflowers nodding in the breeze.

"It's working," Thren said. His voice was strange, caught between hope and disbelief. "We're actually getting somewhere."

She didn't answer. Didn't want to jinx it. Just kept walking, one foot in front of the other, heading backward down a road that only went forward.

By the second hour, the wrongness started to fade. Her body stopped fighting her. The urge to turn and face forward quieted to a whisper and then disappeared entirely. She even stopped needing to glance over her shoulder so often. The road felt normal now, or as normal as anything felt anymore.

The hills began to flatten out. The golden grass gave way to scrubland, then to rocky soil, then to something that smelled like salt. The ocean. They were getting close to the coast.

"I can't believe that worked," Thren said. He was shuffling beside her now, both of them still facing the wrong direction, matching her pace. "Five days going forward and I never got anywhere. Two hours walking backwards and we're almost there."

"The road plays tricks."

"The road is an asshole."

She did smile at that. Small and brief, but real. "Yeah. It is."

They risked turning around once they could smell the sea, and the spell didn't break. The lighthouse was visible in the distance, white against the gray sky, and the road continued to behave like a road should.

They walked in silence for a while. The scrubland thinned out and she could see the ocean now, gray-blue and endless, stretching out to a horizon that actually looked reachable.

"The stories I mentioned," Thren said eventually. "About the searchers. There was one I didn't want to explain further."

"What story?"

"A woman asking questions in the port cities. Looking for someone who got erased. They say she's been at it for months. Never stops, never rests. Just keeps asking and asking, even though everyone she talks to ends up forgetting what she asked about."

She kept her eyes on the road, but something cold was spreading through her chest. "What do you mean, forgetting?"

"I mean forgetting. People she questions, people who try to help her, they start losing things. Memories going blank. Names they can't remember. Like her search is contagious." He kicked a stone off the path. "Some folks are calling it a disease. Say that learning about the erasures makes you vulnerable to them. The more you know, the more you lose."

She thought about Morrow in the tavern, watching his memories dissolve mid-sentence. The old sailor who'd come to her door and forgotten why before he could tell her anything useful. The flower woman in the market, celebrating a holiday that faded even as she described it.

She'd thought she was just witnessing the erasure. She hadn't considered that she might be spreading it.

"Do you believe that?" she asked. Her voice came out rougher than she intended.

"I don't know. Maybe." He glanced at her, then away. "You're her, aren't you? The woman from the stories."

"Does it matter?"

"You keep asking that. And I keep thinking yes, it matters. Everything matters. That's the whole problem." He shifted his pack on his shoulders. "I'm not going to forget, am I? Now that I've talked to you. Now that I know what you're looking for."

She didn't answer. She didn't know how to.

They walked the rest of the way in silence.

The lighthouse appeared in late afternoon.

It stood on a cliff overlooking the ocean, white stone stained gray by salt spray, a dark eye of glass at the top where the light would shine. There was a small house at its base, low and weathered, with smoke rising from the chimney.

Someone was home.

Thren stopped at the edge of the path that led up to the cliff. "This is where I leave you."

She turned to look at him. "You're not coming?"

"No. I came here for maps, for answers about the things I half-remember. But after talking to you..." He shook his head. "I'm not sure I want to know anymore. Maybe some gaps are better left alone."

"Maybe."

"You don't believe that."

"No. I don't."

He nodded slowly. Looked at the lighthouse, then at her, then back at the road they'd traveled. "For what it's worth, I hope you find what you're looking for. Even if the stories are true. Even if your questions are contagious." He almost smiled. "Some things are worth the cost."

He turned and walked away before she could respond. She watched him go, a lone figure heading back down the path they'd taken, back toward a road that only worked if you walked it wrong.

Then she turned toward the lighthouse.

The path up the cliff was steep and narrow, carved into the rock by someone who'd wanted to make visitors work for the privilege of arriving. She climbed it slowly, feeling every hour of travel in her legs, feeling the weight of the journal in her bag.

The Cartographer's Daughter was up there. Someone who knew about the seams. Someone the sibling had visited, had talked to, had maybe trusted with secrets.

She reached the top as the sun was starting to sink toward the horizon. The lighthouse loomed above her, white stone turned gold in the fading light. The small house huddled at its base, windows glowing with lamplight.

She walked to the door and knocked.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then footsteps, soft and slow. Then the door opened.

The woman standing there was old. Seventy, maybe eighty, with white hair pulled back from a face that was more wrinkles than skin. But her eyes were sharp and clear, the eyes of someone who hadn't stopped paying attention.

She looked at the visitor on her doorstep. Took in the travel-worn clothes, the exhausted face, the bag with the journal inside.

"You look like someone I used to know," the old woman said.

Her throat went tight. "I'm looking for someone too."

"I know." The Cartographer's Daughter stepped back from the door. "You'd better come in. We have a lot to talk about."

She stepped inside, and the door closed behind her.