The Chart-Keeper's Confession

The salt city glitters white as bone under a bruised dusk. In a windowless room thick with myrrh, the blind chart-keeper traces your palm and weeps. "You came," she whispers. "Seven generations, and the blood remembers."

She speaks of a leviathan dreaming beneath the dunes, drifting westward across centuries. Your ancestors were not guides. They were attendants to a sleeping god — and the road is its slow, breathing wake.

She presses a salt-carved key into your hand. "Wake it, or walk with it. The choice was always yours to inherit."