Main chronicle · Passage 3
A Compass Made from Moonbone
A stranger offers Ilyra a compass carved from moonbone, but its needle points towards whatever the world has forgotten.
The stranger was waiting beneath the broken lighthouse with a compass in his palm.
He looked no older than seventeen, although his eyes had the pale, patient expression of someone who had been waiting for a very long time. His coat was sewn from fabrics Ilyra did not recognise. One sleeve was wet with seawater. The other was dusted white, as if he had walked through a desert.
“You heard it,” he said.
“The harbour bell?”
“The map.”
The compass case was bone, curved and faintly luminous, with a hairline crack across its lid. Inside, the needle trembled between north and somewhere else.
“Moonbone,” he said. “It points to what has been removed.”
Then it swung towards him. He smiled without pleasure. “My name is Sere,” he said. “I am the last person who remembers the first world.”