The Glass Mountain

The letter from the Cartographers' Guild arrived on a Tuesday, sealed with wax the colour of old bone, and Sable Voss knew before she opened it that it would change everything. The Guild did not write to disgraced cartographers. The Guild did not write to anyone who had publicly declared, in a paper that had ended her academic career, that the Glass Mountain was not a geological formation but an artificial structure built by hands that predated human civilization by several thousand years.

She read it standing in the doorway of her rented room above a chandler's shop in the port town of Kess, where she had spent the last two years mapping coastlines for fishing captains who paid in coin and asked no questions. The letter was brief. The Guild wished to commission a survey of the Glass Mountain's interior. Recent seismic activity had opened a fissure on the northern face. Preliminary expeditions had confirmed the existence of tunnels. Three previous cartographers had entered and returned safely but without their maps — and, more troublingly, without any memory of what they had seen inside.

Sable folded the letter carefully and placed it in the breast pocket of her coat. Through the window, she could see the harbour and beyond it the open sea, grey under a January sky, and far to the north, on the very edge of vision where the clouds met the mountains, a glint of light thatmight have been ice or snow but which she knew was neither. The Glass Mountain had caught the sun, as it did on clear days, and thrown it back like a challenge. She had been waiting for this letter for eleven years.