The brass astrolabe in Corin's fingers was cold—colder than the salt-crusted mountain winds that whipped through the high spires of Oakhaven. For three centuries, the Grand Archive had stood above the southern bluffs, its vaulted parchment halls cataloging every reef, archipelago, and continent known to civilized hands.
Maps here were not merely drawings. In Oakhaven, the Cartographers belonged to the ancient Guild of the Meridian. Every parchment was inscribed with silver-dust ink mined from celestial meteorites, bound by ancient binding oaths that tethered the depicted geography to the reality of the earth itself.
When Corin stepped out onto the observatory terrace at dawn, the sea was utterly calm. But the Isle of Sunder—which had stood twelve nautical leagues to the southwest since the First Age—was simply gone. No tidal surges had crashed upon the cliffside. No plumes of volcanic steam rose from the ocean floor. The horizon was a clean, uninterrupted line of sapphire blue.
Corin rushed down into the sub-vaults, his leather boots echoing over the stone flagstones. In Cabinet 14, where the master charts of the South Straits were locked in cedar chests, he threw open the brass hinges. The parchment was there, but where the jagged coastline of Sunder had once been drawn, there remained only a faint smolder of pale gray ash.