The Cartographer of Forgotten Roads

About this book:

Some maps chart where you are. Others chart where you're going. Silas Vance maps where you've been—and what refuses to leave.

For thirty years, the cartographer of Oakhaven has treated mapmaking as translation: the world speaks in ridge lines and goat tracks, and he simply writes it down. But when a custom ink brewed from chapel charcoal and forest-well water begins to *move* across a blank patch of parchment—drawing a road through the impassable Blackwood that no survey has ever recorded—Silas finds himself tracing a highway the living world forgot. The road leads to a stone archway. The archway is a gate. And when the gate opens, the dead don't just cross over. They come home.

Now the map in Silas's pocket is updating itself in real time, silver threads branching toward the salt marshes where a drowned miller's boots have left fresh mud on his widow's cabbage patch. Something ancient has been uncorked, and every phantom footfall rewrites the geography of grief. Armed with his brass compass, his iron-capped walking stick, and a cartographer's ruthless precision, Silas must chart the roads the lost travel before the living lose their way entirely. Because the map doesn't create the terrain. It only reveals what was always there, waiting in the dark.