The Map We Bought in Ostmark
It covers a region neither of us had heard of. Several of the roads no longer exist. We have been planning a trip around it for two years.
The bookshop in Ostmark sells secondhand maps from a box near the door, organised by no system we could identify. Soren went in for something to read on the train. I followed him and immediately lost forty minutes to the map box.
The map of the Velnen interior was at the bottom, folded badly and refolded worse. I opened it on the shop floor. Soren, who had found his book and was waiting patiently by the door, came over to see what I was looking at. He was quiet for a moment.
"We've never been there," he said.
"Nobody we know has been there," I said.
We bought the map.
The map is old enough that several of the roads shown have since been replaced, rerouted, or apparently abandoned. There is a train line marked in red that we have not been able to find any record of. Three of the towns listed are so small they return nothing in any search.
This is, depending on your disposition, either a problem or the whole point. We are firmly in the second camp.
The map lives on the desk in the study, half-folded, with two pencilled circles on it — one where Soren thinks we should start, one where I think we should start. They are fourteen kilometres apart. We have not resolved this.
We will go, eventually. We have agreed on the season — late spring, when the interior is green and the smaller roads are passable — and we have agreed on a rough duration. We have not agreed on where to start.
The map will probably settle it. One of those pencilled circles is over a town that has a name worth investigating. We have been building a case, separately, for two years now, and at some point one of us will present it properly over dinner and the other will agree, and we will book the train.
Until then the map stays on the desk, which is not the worst place for a thing full of places you haven't been yet.