The Wayfarer - Dive into the Dunes
by Soren Wilder

They always warned me about the wind.

It was never just weather in the town that didn’t exist. It was a memory, half-buried under sand and regret. I never set out to find it. No map pointed me there. And yet, the morning I left, I found one tucked inside my coat pocket, creased with unfamiliar hands. The roads on it twisted in loops, curled like questions. At the top, in smeared ink, someone had written: “You’ll know it when you feel it.”

So I followed the feeling.

I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving. Not even her. Especially not her.

The first village I came to was called Epherin. It wasn’t on the map. It had no entrance sign, no history, just a row of homes crouched behind wind-worn fences and a single gas station with a broken pump. An old woman sweeping her porch watched me like I’d walked out of her dreams.

“You’re late,” she said, and then didn’t speak again.

I stayed one night. My bed was warm. My dreams were colder.

By dawn, the village was gone.

I read the map again that morning. It had changed. The roads were thinner. Some had moved. One led directly into a blank patch of yellowed paper. I traced it with my finger, and it felt warm.

I walked for hours. The wind didn’t howl. It whispered. Sometimes I thought it said my name. Other times, hers.

The sky had too many stars that night. None of them where they should be.

I wrote my first entry in a notebook I promised I wouldn’t bring.

“Day 4: No signs. No paths. Just a feeling in the ribs that something is watching.”

I started marking trees with chalk. But they vanished when I looked back.

I saw her handwriting on a road sign.

It had no town name, just a phrase, scrawled in the same curling lines I remembered from letters never sent:

“Keep going. You’ll forget just enough.”

I tried to take the sign with me, but it crumbled in my hands. Like ash. Or paper that had burned, then changed its mind.

The sky cracked that night.

Not with thunder, but with light. A single bolt tore across the black like a quill across a page. For a moment, I saw the entire landscape in reverse, hills turned to teeth, valleys into mouths, and something crawling in the distance that should not have had eyes.

I walked faster.

I met a man who claimed to be a cartographer of lost places.

He carried no maps. Only a box full of sand and a compass that pointed inward.

When I asked him how to find the town I was looking for, he said, “The town finds you. But only after you forget what it looks like.”

Then he walked into a dune and disappeared.

I started dreaming of letters.

Unsent, unopened, unending. They piled up like drifts in the corners of my dreams, each with my name, written in ink that ran like water.

One night, I opened one. Inside: nothing. And yet, I wept.

I think I missed her more in that silence than in any goodbye.

There is a tree out here. One tree.

Its bark is smooth like bone. Its leaves whisper secrets when touched. I tried to carve her name into the trunk, but the letters bled and rearranged.

They didn’t spell her name. They spelled mine.

I reached the ridge today.

Below me: an ocean of dunes, shifting like breath. The wind moved across them like fingers through hair. I swore I saw her silhouette in the valley below—but when I ran, it vanished.

I’m not sure what I’m chasing anymore.

But I know I can’t stop.

Not until the map goes blank.