Chapter 60: The Atlas
In my old world, paper was a common thing, but it always had value. It had a thousand uses, and its creation required resources—trees, pulp, factories. Even scrap paper could be sold for a few coins. But here… here there was a sea of it, a mountain range of discarded paper. If knowledge was wealth, I was standing atop a king's ransom, and it was all worthless to me. I couldn't understand it. How could so many books be simply thrown away? In my time, even old, unwanted books were worth something. What kind of rich fool, what mad lord, would treat books—knowledge itself—like so much refuse?
“I remember it was around here somewhere,” Jared said, diving headfirst into the sea of paper, sending up a cloud of dust that smelled of decay and forgotten stories. “Just wait a moment, Parula.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked, my curiosity piqued. I couldn't imagine him as a reader.
“The answer to your question,” he said, his voice muffled by the piles of books. “I remember seeing a book here that has the information you wanted. Now where was it…?”
“It’s useless, Jared,” I said with a sigh, looking down at a discarded newspaper at my feet. The script was a frustrating, spidery scrawl, similar to English, but utterly, completely meaningless to me. “I can’t read any of this.” I knew now that I was in the Kingdom of Castile, on the Iberian Peninsula. The language, therefore, had to be either Spanish or some older form of Castilian. It didn't matter. I couldn't read either. For the first time in my life, I, a well-read man from another age, was utterly, completely illiterate. The frustration was a physical, choking thing.
“No, you don’t need to be able to read this one,” he said. “Ah! I found it!” he exclaimed, his voice triumphant.
“What? Already?” I was stunned. How could he possibly find a single, specific book in this vast, chaotic library of forgotten knowledge? It was like finding a specific needle in a mountain of needles.
“Here,” he said, handing it to me. The moment I saw it, I understood. It was an atlas.
“This is… this is exactly what I needed,” I breathed, a sense of profound relief washing over me. “How did you ever find it… oh.” I looked up from the book and saw the answer.
“There are plenty more,” Jared said, gesturing with his foot. He was standing on a pile of them. Dozens of identical atlases, still bound in neat, twine-wrapped bundles, their covers pristine. They had been dumped here, brand new.
“I’ve seen them here before,” he said with a shrug. “No one ever takes them. The paper’s too thick and glossy. Not good for… well, for anything useful, really.” I was speechless. These people were fools. This was high-quality, coated paper, beautifully printed.
“Why would they throw away so many new books?” I asked, a sense of tragic waste filling me.
“Oh, that,” he said, his voice dropping to the confidential tone of a city gossip. “It was all the talk a while back. The mapmaker, he made a mistake. Forgot to include the Queen’s latest conquest in the new edition. The local lord saw it, flew into a rage, and the publisher had the entire print run dumped here overnight. Didn't save his own skin, though. Heard the lord had him beheaded anyway, just to make a point.”
A man lost his head because of an outdated map? The reason was so petty, so tyrannical, that it was almost absurd. This world was not just brutal; it was capricious. I opened the atlas, my hands trembling slightly. The first page was a map of Europe. My heart hammered against my ribs. It was Earth. But it was wrong. A monstrous, twisted version of the world I knew. The geography, the coastlines, the shape of the continents—it was all the same. But the borders, the nations, the very history written on its face, was a nightmare. There were no small, fractured countries here. Great swathes of the map were a single, uniform color. The British Isles were a solid block of imperial crimson. The entire Iberian Peninsula was a uniform, gaudy yellow. And a vast, sprawling, slate-grey mass dominated central Europe, a German empire far larger and more menacing than any I had ever known.
Comments (0)
Please login or sign up to post a comment.