Kan sat on the bed and took a closer look at the table. There were two sad looking candles on it: one melted down to a waxy puddle, the other reduced to a little stump. Someone had obviously been reading all night. Was Vlada an avid reader? Kangassk had never seen her with a book before but he did see her poring over maps for hours. Indeed, there was a scroll on the little shelf under her bed table, a map, as Kan had found out when he unrolled it. And what a map! He had never seen anything like it before.

What do you usually see on a world map? Countries and cities, rivers and mountains, roads and forests. This map made all of the above seem unimportant. The names and places of Omnis, the world, were still here, printed in pale ink, but they served as a mere background for something else.

No Man’s Land, on the other hand, was a bright mosaic of colours, each Region outlined with a perfect red circle, each circle intersecting with several others. Mysterious numbers and symbols, notes and marks were everywhere. Kan had no idea what they meant. Also, he now wished to know why his homeland, Kuldagan, was marked as one of the No Man’s Land Regions. It had never been considered that. You could even use magic in most of its cities! Still a Region it was, a red pentagon inside the mountain ring, a weird bulge on the side of the neat border of No Man’s Land formed by two intersecting circles, golden and silver, so large that their centres were close to the map’s edges. The golden circle had its center in Yga, the southern capital by the sea. The silver circle was drawn around a little northern fortress named Grey Tower.

Omnis, the real world, so mundane and usual, had suddenly shown its true colours to the naive provincial guy Kangassk was. He frowned peering at the odd patchwork of Regions in the middle of the map, at the strange symbols, at the two intersecting circles, golden and silver…

“The stabilizers!” He slapped himself on the forehead as the realization hit him. “How could I forget! The golden one must be Hora Solaris, then the silver one is Hora Lunaris! I read about them recently. Yes! That’s it!”

It was the only lucky guess he had that day, though. The numbers, symbols, and notes still remained a mystery to Kangassk. What was Vlada’s secret? Why would a simple Wanderer need such a map? What he, Kan, got himself into? There were so many questions but not a single answer.

Finally, Kangassk gave up, carefully rolled up the map and put it back on the shelf. He needed to think.

He couldn’t think on an empty stomach, so he ate a breakfast in the dull dining room below. Alas, no fresh ideas visited him while he ate. He felt like a real life person suddenly thrown into a fairy-tale. It wasn’t like Kangassk didn’t enjoy fairy-tales. He did! He read all the fantasy stories from Aren-Castell library and even ordered some books from the passing traders. He did dream of being a hero, too, as a kid. Who didn’t? What was the problem now? The problem was him being an ordinary guy, not a great warrior, not a mage, not a Chosen One. What happens to ordinary guys in fairy-tales? They usually die to show the readers how the monsters work or just for drama’s sake.

“I am an ordinary guy,” Kan told himself back in Vlada’s room again and gently touched the parchment of the wonderful map. Was it even parchment at all?

The heat became so fierce that it made even the loudest merchants hush up. They still kept advertising their wares but in much weaker voices. The river of their customers got reduced to a trickle anyway. Most people preferred to hide from the heat in their homes and have some iced tea instead of shopping. The young lady selling ice seemed the only person who was happy with the weather.