The Mapmender

Some maps remember what the world tries to forget. And in Larkmere, forgetting is a weapon.

Sela Coomb wants nothing to do with thread, ink, or memory. She wants salt wind and an open horizon — a berth on a fishing boat, a life on the water, far from the living maps that buckle the land whenever one is torn. The sea and the world are one thing wearing two faces, and the grey-coated Wardens of the Standard have decreed that faces must hold still. A map that moves is a map that lies. So they cut the wild maps quiet, and out past the breakwater a sandbar rolls over in its sleep and changes its mind about where to be.

But the sea will have to wait. When an entire valley is ripped out of existence to bury a terrible crime, the last Mapmender alive comes looking for Sela — carrying a secret stitched into a childhood she can no longer recall.

To mend a vanished place, Sela must apprentice to the prickliest of teachers: old Otta, sharp as a hook, who lives in a leaning house full of breathing maps and a biting cat named Soot. And she must learn a craft with a brutal price. A Mapmender's thread is spun from true memory, drawn shining from the breastbone and wound onto a bone spindle — and once it's spun, it's spun. Every stitch that holds up a shore costs the mender her dearest, most private past. To sew a lost valley back into the world, Sela will have to spend the one thing that has always, truly, been her own.

Rich, tactile, and quietly devastating, The Mapmender is a standalone fantasy about the cost of remembering, the stubborn love between a runaway girl and her difficult mentor, and what we owe the places that made us.

Step into Larkmere — and find out what you'd give to be remembered.