The Road to Norvale

The map was older than anyone could verify.

Maren found it in her grandfather's things after the funeral—tucked inside a hymnal, folded so many times the creases had worn thin as lace. The ink had faded to the color of old tea, and most of the place names were illegible. But one, near the center, remained clear enough to read:

Norvale.

She'd never heard of it.

She asked at the library. The clerk squinted at the map, tilted it toward the light, and shook his head. "Doesn't ring a bell. Could be a hamlet that got absorbed. Or renamed. Happens all the time."

"But the road," Maren said, tracing the line with her finger. "It's still marked."

The clerk shrugged. "Roads last longer than the places they lead to."

So she went.

It took three days by cart, then another half-day on foot after the cart road ended and the path narrowed into something older. The trees grew differently here—twisted, leaning inward as if listening. The air smelled of moss and something sweeter. Something she couldn't name.

And then, just after noon on the fourth day, she found it.

The road.

Not a path. Not a trail. A proper road, wide enough for wagons, paved in stones that had been placed by hands long gone. The ruts were shallow where wheels used to pass. There were no signs. No markers. No ruins.

Just the road.

And at its end—nothing.

A clearing. Wide and flat and impossibly still. The kind of stillness that made you hold your breath without meaning to.

Maren stood at the edge and waited for something to happen.

Nothing did.

The wind didn't whistle. The birds didn't sing. Even the trees seemed to lean back, as if giving the clearing space.

She walked forward slowly, boots crunching on the gravel. Halfway across, she stopped. There was a stone—larger than the others, half-buried in the earth. She knelt and brushed away the moss. No inscription. No carving. Just a stone.

But it was warm.

She pulled her hand back, heart quickening.

Around her, the clearing waited.

She didn't know what she'd expected. Ruins, maybe. A foundation. A chimney. Something to prove that people had lived here. That they'd built something. That they'd mattered.

But there was nothing.

Just the road. And the clearing. And the sense that something was missing—not destroyed, but erased. As if the world had gently, carefully, forgotten.

Maren sat down on the warm stone and waited.

She didn't know what for.

But she waited anyway.

Years before Maren, there had been others.

A boy came once, maybe ten or eleven, with a walking stick carved by his father and a satchel full of bread his mother had wrapped in cloth. She'd told him stories of Norvale when he was small—tales of cider sweet with autumn smoke, of fire dancers, of a girl who sang to the moon. She'd told him it was the most beautiful place she'd ever seen.

And then one day, she stopped talking about it.

When he asked why, she only smiled sadly and said, "Some places are better left remembered."

But he wanted to see it for himself.

So he walked the road, following the map she'd drawn on the back of a receipt and tucked into his coat pocket when she thought he wasn't looking.

He reached the clearing just before dusk.

The light was golden and thick, the kind that made everything feel like it was happening in a dream. He stood at the edge for a long time, searching for something—anything—that matched the stories.

But there was nothing.

He sat down in the center of the clearing and waited.

And after a while, he began to weep.

Not because he was sad. Not exactly. He didn't understand it himself. It was as if the clearing was full of something he couldn't see—grief that wasn't his, sorrow that had been left behind by people he'd never meet.

He wept until the sky went dark.

And then he went home.

He never spoke of it again. But sometimes, late at night, he'd wake with the taste of cider on his tongue and a name on his lips he couldn't quite remember.

A soldier came once, years after the boy.

She'd been walking for weeks—no destination, no orders, just the need to move. The war had ended, but the war hadn't left her. She carried it in her bones, in the way her hands shook when they weren't holding a weapon, in the way she flinched at sudden sounds.

She didn't mean to find the road. She'd been following a river, looking for a place to camp, when the trees opened and there it was.

At first, she thought it was a mirage. Roads didn't just appear in the middle of nowhere. But she followed it anyway, boots heavy on the stones, her pack weighing her down with things she no longer needed but couldn't leave behind.

The clearing was quiet.

Too quiet.

The kind of quiet that made her reach for her blade.

But there was nothing to fight.

Just the clearing. Just the grass. Just the wind.

She stood there for a long time, scanning the tree line, waiting for movement. Waiting for a threat. Waiting for something she could name.

And then she heard it.

A voice.

Not a sound. Not a word. Just a name.

Her name.

The one she'd had before the war. The one no one had spoken in years.

She dropped her blade.

It hit the ground with a dull thud, the sound swallowed almost immediately by the stillness.

She stood there, trembling, and then—without thinking—she walked into the trees.

No one saw her again.

But the blade remained, lying in the grass, slowly rusting. And if you looked closely, you'd see that the moss had begun to grow over it, soft and deliberate, as if the earth itself was trying to bury it gently.

A bard came once, with a lute slung over her shoulder and a journal filled with half-finished songs.

She'd heard whispers of Norvale in taverns and market squares—always secondhand, always vague. No one could say exactly where it was or what had happened to it. But everyone agreed it had been beautiful. That it had mattered.

She wanted to write a song about it.

She reached the clearing on a grey afternoon, the sky low and heavy with unshed rain. She sat down at the edge of the road and opened her journal, pen poised.

And then she waited for the words to come.

They didn't.

She tried different openings. Different rhythms. She hummed melodies and scribbled verses and crossed them out and tried again.

But every line felt wrong.

Not bad. Just… insufficient.

How do you sing about a place that doesn't exist? How do you mourn something you never knew? How do you put grief into words when the grief isn't even yours?

She sat there for hours, the journal open on her lap, the pen still in her hand.

And finally, she wrote one line:

"Some grief is not ours to sing."

Then she closed the journal, set down her lute, and walked away.

The lute remained, leaning against a stone, strings slowly going slack in the damp air. And if you passed by on a windy day, you might hear it—just barely—humming a tune it had never been taught.

Maren sat on the warm stone until the light began to fade.

She'd brought no offerings. No flowers. No songs. She didn't know what to leave behind.

So she left nothing.

Just her presence. Just the fact that she'd come.

She stood, brushed the dust from her coat, and turned back toward the road.

Behind her, the clearing waited.

Not for her. Not for anyone.

Just waited.

It's just a road now.

Grass has started to creep over the stones, slow and soft, like fingers pulling up a blanket. No one sings on it anymore. No shoes clatter. No hooves echo.

They used to call it the Norvale Way. When Norvale was still a village. When voices rose from hearths and smoke curled like lullabies into the evening sky.

Now there's no Norvale.

No village, no signs, not even ruins. Just a clearing where the wind forgets how to whistle. Just the road—still reaching.

They say if you walk it at dusk, the trees don't quite stay where they should. That shadows hang longer than they ought. That, sometimes, you hear a bell no one rings.

But no one agrees on what it means.

Some say Norvale was destroyed in a fire that no one recorded.

Some say it was a plague that took everyone in a single night.

Some say the people simply left—walked away one by one until there was no one left to remember.

And some say it was never there at all. That Norvale was always a story. A place people invented when they needed to believe in something beautiful. And when they stopped believing, it stopped being real.

But the road remains.