You stay at the two paths until the difference is a sentence you can say without drama.

Boardwalk: planks, nails, a curve that follows pools. People already use it. Birds already ignore it in the polite way. Desire-line: crushed reed, peat wound, a straightness that is only a rumor of a road. Fragmentation you can see—the fen stitched, then nicked.

“You don’t honor the nick,” Tansy says. “Sable said: catalogs keep the findable path. New scars are unlisted on purpose.”

Holt, in the square, is talking about putting wagons through “that little wet” to reach the far track before evening. You can hear the blank in the sentence: a dare dressed as commerce.

You think of the Atlas fading, of a flood-stone in a cellar, of a magnetic north that is already a thumb off.

You can take the scar to Holt as a practical cost—flood, mire, lost wagons—before anyone names it destiny.

You can take Tansy south to the oxbow, where the Cinder already told on the wall-map.