The morning the sea turned to glass, Edda woke to total silence. No waves, no birds. From her window the whole harbor looked frozen smooth and shining. She sat at her desk and, almost without thinking, dipped her pen and inked a brand-new coastline onto a blank chart: cliffs, a bay, a row of sharp rocks. None of it was real. By the time the ink dried, a fisherman was pounding on her door, shouting that ships were sailing toward land that had never been there before.

Edda didn't run to the docks or grab her pen. Instead she asked the question that scared her most: why now, and why her? She rolled up the chart and hurried across town to old Mistress Pell, the one person who might know what her ink had done.

Mistress Pell wasn't home. On her table sat a dusty old chart, almost the twin of Edda's, signed by a mapmaker long dead. In the corner was a warning in faded ink: 'Draw only what you are ready to keep.' Edda's stomach tightened. She grabbed the chart and raced back toward the harbor.

Back at the harbor, Edda used the dead mapmaker's warning as her guide. She drew only one thing: a single safe dock she truly meant to keep. The ships moored to it without a scratch. Edda kept that dock for the rest of her life, never drawing another coast she wasn't ready to care for.