The Map at Dawn

The mist clings to the Barylon range like wet wool, refusing to burn off even as dawn pales the sky. You shift the borrowed lantern from one hand to the other, your goats bleating in their pen miles below, untended for the first time in years. In your pocket: a map drawn in trembling ink, pressed into your palm by a traveler whose last breath smelled of copper and snow.

Three tunnel mouths yawn before you in the cliffside, each a different darkness. The map marks only one. The dying man swore there was a fourth — hidden, golden, a doorway to a century not yet lived. Fortune waits, he rasped, for whoever returns.

You are Wren. You are seventeen, and the mountain is watching back.