For three generations, her family had charted the Serpentine Delta, that great, sluggish sprawl where the Indigo and the Sallow Rivers finally surrendered to the sea. Her father’s maps were works of art: thin vellum, sepia ink, and a secret language of whorls and arrows that described the delta’s moody temperament. But the delta was dying. A dam up the Indigo had choked its flow; the Sallow had grown thin and acidic. The old songs of the water were gone.

“Fold,” she whispered, and bent the map along the dry riverbed of the Veriditas. The old vellum creaked. Where the fold crossed the Confluence, the ink of the three rivers overlapped, turning a deep, liquid green.

One night, Elara found a folded slip of parchment tucked behind the brass frame of her father’s last, unfinished map. It wasn’t a map of the delta’s present. It was a prophecy. In his shaky, final hand, her father had written: