The Cartographer of Mirrored Cities
A Fragment from the Nonexistent Atlas
It is said—though by whom I no longer recall—that each map, upon completion, begins to distort the world it seeks to represent.
Tavin, the final Official Cartographer of the City Known as Here, grasped this unsettling truth only at the age of forty-two, during his third unsuccessful attempt at revising the city's definitive map. His charts were renowned not just for their extraordinary precision but for their eerie foresight—seeming to predict the observer's fate, sorrow, and even dreams before the parchment fully unfurled. The streets appeared obedient to his pen, and the citizens revered his meticulous annotations, believing firmly in the infallibility of his lines.
Then, unexpectedly, the blue ink arrived.
It emerged without invitation—a persistent blot that replaced the familiar, comforting black. Even more troubling was its refusal to depict reality as Tavin knew it. The familiar streets of his youth unraveled into spirals. Buildings sprouted impossible walls, and alleyways unzipped themselves into forbidden dimensions that defied local logic.
Initially suspecting madness, Tavin sought answers from a forbidden volume titled The Book of Slight Deviations. A scholar of recursion and heretical cartography hinted darkly:
"You are no longer mapping the city. You are mapping the act of mapping itself."
The suggestion was intolerable. The cartographer's role, Tavin knew, was to stabilize, never to disrupt.
In a desperate bid for clarity, he ascended the Mirror Tower—a place rumored to contain a polished obsidian mirror reflecting not physical form, but the recursive structure of one's deepest beliefs. There, confronted by the obsidian glass, Tavin witnessed something impossible: the city reshaping itself in real-time, shifting in response to his gaze.
His map was no longer a map—it had become a feedback loop.
Then came the deeper terror:
If his maps reshaped the city, and the city, in turn, reshaped the minds of its inhabitants, who in turn read and reinforced the maps, was Tavin both creator and prisoner of an endless recursion?
Attempting to chart this profound revelation, the map folded inward, forming an endless Möbius loop. Every path led inexorably back to his pen, each inhabitant an uncanny reflection of Tavin's own uncertainty.
His final journal entry, penned in reverse script, reads:
"The city I mapped was never real.
It existed solely because I insisted on mapping it."
"Henceforth, I shall write only in blue."
Tavin's fate remains unknown—whether he vanished entirely or if we ourselves, by some recursion of causality, now traverse the ink-stained paths he once imagined. His surviving maps depict no cities at all; instead, they trace possibilities, conditions, and subtle frequencies. They resemble dreams far more than cartographies. One such map, preserved beneath glass in the Library of Inversions, reportedly induces immediate disidentification in any who gaze too intently.
Curiously, these modern maps offer no explanatory legend—only a single phrase, etched invariably in blue in their lower right corner:
"This is not where you are. This is what you're becoming."
