You talk until your throat is reed-rough.

Not a lecture. A stack of true objects: Sable’s orange-peel, the needle-cousin, the cellar’s DITCH YEAR / WATER CAME, the oxbow that walked, Penn’s third pocket—the town that kept the fen and stayed unflooded. You say blank and point at Reedfen until the word and the water sit down together.

The girl from copying takes her boot back. Mallets lower. Someone laughs the good laugh, the one that means we almost did a stupid play.

Quill’s edges are damp, which might be weather. The hide stays occupied. No smear is waved. No road is hunted through peat. The Atlas remains a book you can respect without feeding it a lie.

Penn, from the planks, says, “That’s four stones in the pocket. Don’t sew it shut.”

You sleep that night with peat on your cuffs and no trophy-line on the wall-map. The wrens, if they have opinions, keep them in the seed-heads.

THE END

What you learned: map-lies (blanks, stretches, mixed norths) and archive-care often guard real places. Saying the science aloud—projection, surveying, wetlands, paper—does not kill wonder. It gives wonder a job: keeping roads out of sponges and call numbers honest.