You stay on the boardwalk. Plank first: hollow talk under boots. Then a pool like a coin nobody spent. Then cattail, a hallway of blades that still lets a body through if the body is polite.

This is not a road. Roads are for wagons. This is a corridor—the kind of path a wetland uses to stitch town to river without drowning either. Water in reach. A place to vanish if a dog barks. Birds using the same sentence.

To the south, the oxbow keeps staring. The Cinder walked. Rivers do that: they loop, they leave a bow, they straighten in a flood and leave a lake like a forgotten parenthesis. The Spine’s wall-map in the catalog hall still draws a ruler-river. Grand’s year is a letter from a place that has since moved.

Brask’s ribbon does not follow the boardwalk. It cuts across peat that looks empty to a person paid to see waste. Animals do not vote, but they vote with their feet, and their feet are not on his line.

You can stop and study the fen as a sponge until the lesson sits in your bones.

Or you can refuse the ribbon and stay on the walking path until the Atlas’s unfinished ink is more than a rumor.