Characters
Pop any of these out and it floats over the manuscript without covering it.
Neve Arrenhal
Protagonist — salt-walker, reluctant heir
From walking away from everything, to being the only one who stays.
Stubborn to the point of self-harm · Reads weather like a language · Lies only by omission
Oris (guide, unresolved), the Widow (mother's oldest enemy), Callum (brother, presumed drowned)
Portrait brief: AI portrait slot — grey wool coat, salt-cracked hands, green eyes, wind from the left.
Oris Fen
Guide, cartographer's apprentice
Comic relief who turns out to have been keeping the worst secret gently.
Talks to fill silence · Cannot navigate by stars · Braver than he is useful
Neve (devoted), the Widow (former master)
Portrait brief: AI portrait slot — young, sunburnt, ink-stained fingers, too many satchels.
The Cartographer's Widow
Antagonist, or the shape of one
Villain in book one, narrator of the prequel.
Grey-eyed · Never raises her voice · Owns every map worth owning
Neve's mother (rivals), Oris (former apprentice)
Portrait brief: AI portrait slot — sixty, silver braid, a room full of rolled charts behind her.
Places & maps
Generated maps live beside the prose that needs them.
The Salt-Glass Road
Route
A vitrified causeway across the flats. It shifts by a few degrees each season, so no map of it stays true for more than a year.
Map brief: AI map slot — hand-inked, sepia, region names in a narrow serif, scale in leagues.
Harrow-on-Flat
Town
Nine hundred people, one well, and a church built from ship timber. Everyone is related and nobody admits it.
Map brief: AI map slot — town plan, well at centre, salt pans to the east.
The Glasshouse
Landmark
Where the road was made. Nobody who has gone inside has come back describing the same building.
Map brief: AI map slot — interior cutaway, impossible geometry, warm light from below.