The Town Moves Inland

Name: The Town Moves Inland
Date: Mistcall 13, Year 698
Description: A map materialized in the archive that morning, depicting Vael Tareth situated directly beneath Greyharbor's sprawl—a cartography that should not exist, could not exist. By dawn's grey light, the impossible had settled into fact: the coastline had redrawn itself. The harbor stood three miles inland, stranded between marshland and scrub where sea-salt and shipsmell had ruled the day before. Most did not notice. The fishermen cast their nets as they always had, though the nets found only air where water should have been. The tavern keeper pulled ale as though the sea still sang its lullaby beyond the docks. Mothers called their children in for supper, and the children came, obedient to rhythms that had shifted beneath the town like a sleeper turning in an ancient bed. Only a handful saw the wrongness—the way the light fell differently through windows that faced nothing, the faint salt-stain on walls that should have been freshly washed. They kept their silence. In Greyharbor, it was easier to forget than to speak of such things. The town had always known how to forget.