Cartography

Kayre frowned at his map.  It was hardly the work of art that a true guildsman might produce.  This was of course entirely expected from a student who had just begun his apprenticeship, but that truth did little to stave off the disappointment he felt.

He had spent the better part of two days laboring over the parchment—the first piece he had been given in his six months with Guildsman Beniira—in his attempt to recreate faithfully the coastlines and vegetation from the massive hand-produced tome propped open on the table next to him.  Even with his finest efforts, he had mixed the inks poorly and was fairly sure that the largest island of the exotic Ophruts was badly malformed.

He looked over it one more time, sighing wistfully at what it could have been, before he called to Beniira.


Beniira's head appeared around the edge of the door frame.  "Finished, have you?"

"Yes, sir.  It's not very good, I'm afraid."

The diminuitive guildsman stumbled over to the drafting table, moving compasses and squares away from the map so as to better inspect it.  He chortled as he traced the suspect island's coast with his forefinger, causing Kayre to visibly flinch.  Beniira continued to pore over the land masses and the placement of the, in Kayre's mind, very detailed city-state flags depicting the four major players of the region for a few minutes.  At length, he looked up to Kayre perched on his stool.

"This is far less awful than my first was; I forgot to draw any of the inland seas."  Kayre's jaw dropped.  "Your attention to the scale of Lerum Bay in particular is praiseworthy.  Before you get too puffed up, however, you completely neglected to provide any geodetic references for your poor reader and this compass rose, while attractive in its own way, is scarcely functional."

"Yes, sir.  Next time I will if you aren't dismissing me, sir."  Kayre managed to say without squeaking.  He was torn betwixt praise and surprisingly constructive and gentle criticism.  Guildsman Beniira had a reputation for exacting standards, not mercy.

The guildsman's eyebrows shot up.  "I should say so!  I'd be a fool to dismiss a young lad with such potential as yours.  I can sense that you have no great attachment to this piece of work.  You've survived your first test and so I give you the option: keep this map as a reminder or scrape the palimpsest clean and start afresh."

"I'll be starting over, lessons learned." Kayre declared.  Things would be much better this time.