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 stared at her own pen. If her drawing had made this coast real, maybe she could un-make it. She flipped to a fresh page, hands shaking, and tried to draw open water where the rocks now were — to erase the danger before any ship reached it.

Edda's new lines glowed faintly, and out in the bay the rocks began to fade. But so did the cliffs, the beach, all of it — and one ship had already sailed into the space between. If the coast vanished completely, the ship might drop into nothing. Edda froze, pen hovering, unsure whether to keep erasing.