(Photo by Angela Roma)

It was unusual for Nis to dream about the same past life in consecutive nights. Most of the time there would be weeks or months between dreams from the same life. As Nis recorded her dream that morning, trying to remember as much of the details as she could manage, she wondered if there was some significance to it. She didn’t see any particular reason why these memories would be important to her current situation other than the feelings of loneliness and isolation. Though, for Mel, the isolation was a boon. Perhaps if she could tap into that aspect of Mel, Nis wondered if it would help deal with her current feelings. Regardless, Nis wasn’t Mel, or at least she wasn’t Mel any more than she was any of her past lives. Each new life, though added to and complimented by the experiences of the previous lives, was still their own person with preferences and personalities unique to themselves.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Come in,” Nis said, not looking up from her journal and she continued to write as the door opened.

“We’ve been sent to bring you your breakfast.”

Nis glanced up and saw a pair of apprentices each holding a tray with various fruits, nuts, cheeses, and some cured meats. There was also a pitcher of water, a loaf of bread, and a few utensils.

“They’re to last you all day,” one of them said as the two of them looked around the small room for a place to set the trays.

Nis felt her face flush with embarrassment as she was reminded of the cramped living quarters she’d been given.

“Don’t set them on the bed,” Nis said when one of the apprentices began to move in that direction.

“Where should we –

“I don’t know!” Nis snapped. “There isn’t enough room in here.”

“We could bring you a small table,” the other apprentice suggested, “and set it up outside the door.”

“What do you think the archivists would say about that?” Nis scoffed.

“Food isn’t generally allowed inside the archives,” the apprentice replied.

“So having a table full of food where everyone could see…

She let herself trail off, knowing she didn’t need to finish it.

The seconds began to pass slowly between them as each one struggled to come up with a solution. The desk was clearly too small for even one of the trays, and the bed was too unstable for the pitcher. The only patch of bare floor was in front of the door making it just as unusable as the other places.

Nis was losing bits of the last night’s dream the longer she was awake and so she turned back to her journal. She wanted to record as much of the map as she could before it was completely lost to her. She wanted to see if she could find that place on any of the archive’s maps. As she sketched the rivers and mountain ranges, their names would occasional come back to her even though they hadn’t been written on the map from her dream. She added them as she went along, trusting in those memories to be accurate.

The edges of the map were less detailed than Nis wanted, especially along the coastline, but the dream had become too faded in her mind by the time she got to it. Still, there was enough detail that she had hope in being able to find the place on a real map.

After a while longer of working on recording her dream, writing down details like the types of trees in the forest, the color and texture of the sand, even sketching out the boat Mel had used, Nis looked up and was surprised to find the apprentices had gone, taking the trays of food  with them but leaving her door open.

It was still early in the day and Nis doubted there were many patrons in the archives yet but she didn’t like the idea of being seen by any of them. The questions they would be sure to ask were not ones she was ready to discuss.

Having finished with recording her dream, she got up, taking the journal with her, and left her room closing the the door behind herself. The maps were stored in a small section of the archives near the rear of the building. To most people, the archives were a maze of shelves and hallways with rooms that branched and led into one another, often in odd ways. Nis blamed the architecture on whatever the building had been originally designed for and accepted that the archivists were doing the best they could with the space they were given. Fortunately for Nis, she had spent countless hours in the archives and had learned its layout.

Early morning was not a time she had often frequented the archives since she only ever got to come here once everything else at home had been dealt with. She was accustomed to the quiet of the archives, but usually there were the distant sounds of shuffling feet, of whispered conversations, pages being turned, or even the occasional tearing page followed by hissed curses as a dozen or so archivists descended upon whoever it was that had just damaged one of their precious charges.

As Nis moved among the collections of history and lore, the silence around her was something else altogether. This was not the silence of people trying to be quiet. This was the silence of the absence of people. The part of her that was still connected to Mel found a certain amount of comfort from it but Nis was still burdened from the previous day’s events and she found the quiet to be unsettling.

At last she reached the maps, not having crossed paths or even seen another person the entire way. Usually she would have found an archivist and asked for their help but today she didn’t bother. She knew where the map she wanted would be found, and she had helped handle the maps before and knew how to avoid damaging them. A pair of fine gloves hung on a hook and Nis pulled them on before pulling out the first map to examine. The Unexplored Wastes were vast and so there was no singular map that contained it all. Instead, Nis began her search by starting at the northern edge of the Wastes and worked her way down.

She knew her sketched map wouldn’t be a perfect match for any of these maps, but it should be a close enough approximation to work. As she moved from one map to the next, she felt a thrill as she recognized other places that Mel had discovered. Most of her dreams from Mel’s life were from her explorations. It was on the fifth map that she found what she was looking for. There were the mountains and the valley where Mel had found gold, and there were the various minor rivers and streams.

However, as Nis traced the main river she found that something was off about this map. On the sketch Nis had made, the main river split as it left the mountains. The larger fork curved away northward and met up with a series of interconnected lakes before reaching the sea. The smaller fork, however, was later joined by several smaller streams until is grew into a much larger river and it was that river that Mel had followed and mapped. On the archive’s map, the smaller fork went on for a few miles and then ended.

Could it be that no one had yet uncovered this place? It made Nis wonder at the other places Mel had kept to herself, as well as how much of the Unexplored Wastes had actually been explored. Were people still trusting in the work done by the explorers all those years ago, centuries in the past at times, without ever retracing their steps? As far as Nis knew, there wasn’t anything except the sea on the other side of the Wastes. The main reason people sought to get through the wastes was for shipping since it was faster to get out to the sea where they could navigate around the continent much faster than they could trying to cross it on land.

Nis wanted to share her discovery with someone but just as she was about to set out in search of one of the archivists, her mind turned back to Mel’s desire to keep those places secret. She looked down at the map she’d drawn, noting the number of places Mel had discovered on this one expedition that didn’t seem to have made it onto this map. Gem stone deposits, wild fruit groves, not to mention the river itself that provided a much more direct route to the sea.

Nis turned back to the archive’s map, still laid out on the viewing table, and then looked down to her journal. Never before had she ever thought of destroying something she’d written down from her dreams. She’d always been free to pick and choose which parts to share with others but now, having herself and her journals essentially declared as property belonging to the archives, what would be the consequences if she tore out the page? The archivists would certainly notice such a thing. There was perhaps a way that she could hide this information. If she hurried, she’d be able to do it without anyone being any the wiser.

Nis replaced the archives map and hung up the gloves on their hook before carefully retracing her steps back to her room. Whereas on her way to the maps she’d hoped to meet someone along the way, this time she was terrified what might happen if she was spotted. If anyone knew she’d gone to the map room then they would know something from her dream had prompted her to go there and then they would ask to see her journal. Fortunately, she was able to get back to her room without incident. She immediately shut herself in and sat down on the edge of her bed, facing the desk. She placed her journal down and opened it to the map she’d drawn. Taking the inkwell from her desk she placed it beside her journal and then, with a casual flick of her wrist, tipped the inkwell over. Ink splashed onto the page, soaking in and obscuring the map. Some of the other pages would be ruined as well but she was willing to accept that.

Knowing it would look too suspicious if she just let it sit there and soak in, Nis began cleaning up the excess ink and sparing the rest of the journal. Once it was dry, she’d then go back and recreate the map, but with a few specific exclusions.

“I need to be more careful,” she said to herself, already missing the days when she could write everything in her journals without such considerations. Even with her parents reading what she wrote she didn’t have such concerns. Back then she didn’t have to worry about upending the hopes of her past lives.