Elias was the royal cartographer, but his maps contained secrets the King would have him executed for. They weren't maps of roads or rivers; they were maps of the invisible world: where the boundary between reality and fae lands was thin, where forgotten gods slept, and where magic pooled like oil in dark caverns.
He worked in a sunless tower room, illuminated only by the faint glow of runes on his parchment. His current task was mapping the Whispering Peaks, a range the army had struggled to cross for decades. The King wanted strategic points; Elias was charting the location of a dormant basalt dragon.
One evening, while inking the coordinates for a nymph's pond (labeled simply as a 'marshy area'), a young scullery maid named Sara snuck into his room with his dinner. She often watched him work, fascinated by his precision.
"Master Elias," she whispered, "those lines, they look like a language all their own."
He shushed her, but he saw something in her eyes—not fear, but pure, hungry curiosity. Risking everything, he pointed to a cluster of symbols that marked an ancient, stable teleportation gate.
“This,” he said, “is a way out of the kingdom, should the King ever prove tyrannical.”
Sara didn’t understand the full weight of his words, but she memorized the symbols anyway.
Years later, the King grew paranoid and began purging suspected traitors. Elias was taken in the dead of night. His maps were seized, but they were useless to the King’s men; they saw only squiggles and terrain markers.
On the night of his execution, Sara, now a high-ranking lady-in-waiting, stood near the scaffold. As Elias was brought forward, she met his eyes and made a subtle hand gesture, tracing the shapes of the ancient teleportation gate symbols onto her palm.
Elias smiled just before they blindfolded him. His maps hadn't saved him, but he realized they had done their real job: the path to freedom was safely hidden, not in ink, but in the mind of an observant maid.
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