A notebook, five nations,
and the daughter who reads it.

My name is Cora Verras. I left Vellestria at twenty-one with the impatience of someone who thought she already understood the place. I came back at twenty-eight to bury Theodor — the man who raised me after my father Aldric died — and found his carnet under the workshop floor.

He was a cartographer. The Council had hired him for more than fifty years to draw what they wanted drawn. The notebook is the map he kept making underneath that — five nations the Council insists do not exist, the four of them only sketched. He was working toward them when he died.

Cora’s Atlas is the game you play while I retrace the path. Every puzzle a shopkeeper hands me, every coordinate Eustache calibrates with his sextant, every page that opens in the carnet — you solve them with me. That is the whole thing.