A confession

My dearest Gretta, you have told every suitor who has come to your father's door the same words: "I will marry the man who gives me something of countless value." They have tried, haven't they? Gold necklaces from Araby. Silks from Cathay. A suitor from Marienburg even offered you a deed to a villa in Sartosa—though what use a Tilean pirate haven would be to a respectable Nuln manufacturer's daughter, I cannot imagine.

My dearest Gretta,

You have told every suitor who has come to your father's door the same words: "I will marry the man who gives me something of countless value." They have tried, haven't they? Gold necklaces from Araby. Silks from Cathay. A suitor from Marienburg even offered you a deed to a villa in Sartosa—though what use a Tilean pirate haven would be to a respectable Nuln manufacturer's daughter, I cannot imagine.

They all misunderstood. They heard your words as only the wealthy hear them—as a challenge to their purses, an invitation to outspend one another in ever more elaborate displays of affluence.

But I understood. You were not asking for gold or silk or property. You were asking for a life. "I will give you my life," you were saying, "if you give me yours."

This letter is that gift. In these pages, I place my life—my true life, my past, my name, my secrets—into your hands. If you wished, you could bring me to ruin with a single whispered word. The Witch Hunters would come. Osmund Steigmeier would burn, and with him would burn every map that bears his mark.

But I trust you will not. Because this is my proof of love: something of countless value, freely given.

I was born Osmunde Giraud, second son of a Bordelais wine merchant, in a house that smelled of the sea and the vineyard in equal measure.

My father was a practical man who loved his ledgers more than poetry, profit more than philosophy. He tolerated my mother's small library—her Classical texts, her Tilean paintings, her fragments of old Reman sculpture—because they had cost him gold, and gold spent must be displayed. But he never understood why she treasured them. To him, culture was currency frozen in an unproductive form. Beautiful, perhaps, but ultimately sterile. A statue of a Reman senator could not fill the hold of a ship. A poem could not be traded for wine.

My elder brother, Henri, inherited Father's practical mind and his talent for numbers. I inherited nothing but my mother's affection and her determination to educate me beyond the counting-house. She loved me with a fierceness that embarrassed Father, perhaps because I was not destined for the business and she felt free to shape me as she wished.

In the solar of our townhouse, away from the docks and the world of commerce, my mother taught me Classical. Not the crude merchant's phrases my brother learned to haggle with Tilean traders, but the true language—the grammar of philosophers, the vocabulary of artists. I had a gift for it, she said. Languages opened for me like flowers in spring.

While Henri studied contracts and shipping schedules, I haunted the docks. I sat on salt-stained pilings and listened to sailors from every corner of the known world. They spoke Reikspiel, Bretonnian, Tilean, Estalian—sometimes all in the same sentence, their languages mixing like currents in the bay. I absorbed their words as a sponge absorbs water, and with their words came their stories.

The sailors told me of distant ports and strange seas. They spoke of storms that swallowed ships whole, of Corsairs who flew black flags, of coastlines that appeared on no chart. And they spoke—always with a certain bitter laughter—of the beautiful lies sold to captains by cartographers who had never felt salt spray on their faces.

"See this?" an old Marienburger once showed me, unrolling a chart he'd purchased in Altdorf. It was a work of staggering artistry—every wave rendered in Gothic detail, every compass rose a masterpiece of geometric intricacy. In the corner, a sea serpent coiled around an island labeled in gold leaf. "This island doesn't exist. I know because I sailed those waters for twenty years. But the serpent is pretty, isn't it? Pretty enough that some fool captain will sail there looking for it, and the sea will have another ship to gnaw on."

I was perhaps fourteen when I truly understood: maps killed men. Not through malice, but through vanity. The cartographers cared more for beauty than truth, more for impressing patrons than guiding sailors. They invented islands to fill empty spaces. They drew monsters to excuse the deaths of ships that foundered on reefs no map had bothered to record.

I watched ships leave Bordeleaux on the morning tide, their holds full of wine and hope, their charts full of lies. And I watched, sometimes, as those ships never returned. Storm, they would say. Pirates. Bad luck. The sea is cruel.

No one ever said the map was wrong. No one ever said the map lied.

When I was sixteen, an Imperial trader came to my father's house with a chest of charts to sell. Not for navigation—for decoration. He displayed them like tapestries, praising their artistic merit, and my father, ever the merchant calculating value, examined them as potential investments.

They were nightmares. Every mountain was rendered as a fanged colossus, every forest a tangle of grasping claws and leering faces. The cartographer had crammed the parchment so full of elaborate horror that the actual geography was lost beneath the ornamentation. And there —in the Bay of Marienburg— three islands drawn in exquisite detail.

"These islands," I said to the trader. "What are they called? Who lives there?"

He blinked, caught off-guard. "They are... the cartographer did not specify, young master."

"No," I pressed. "What are they called? You sailed from Marienburg. Surely you've seen them. Surely someone trades with them."

The trader's smile became fixed. "They are decorative elements, you understand. To show the richness of Imperial waters. The artistic tradition of ..."

"They don't exist."

The words fell like stones. My father frowned. The trader's face reddened.

"Young master, I assure you, the cartographer who created these works is a member in good standing of the Guild ..."

"I've spoken to enough sailors," I said, "to know the waters off Marienburg. There are no islands in that bay. There is a sandbar, treacherous and shifting, that has claimed a dozen ships. But no islands. These are lies. Beautiful lies, but lies nonetheless."

The trader left shortly after, though not before selling three charts to my father, who kept them despite my protests, or perhaps because of them. Father never appreciated having his business judgment questioned by his second son.

When my father's absence allowed me daring forays into his camera, I would peel off and study those carefully preserved maps, their mountains, capes, gulfs, and invented islands gleaming in the candlelight. I think it was then that I began to dream of ceasing to be a spectator and becoming an author. But I would not draw pretty fantasies for merchants. I would draw the truth: the coastlines as they were, the reefs where they waited, the channels as the sailors knew them. And if I could make that truth beautiful —not with invented monsters or imaginary islands, but with the principles of Classical art my mother had taught me— then perhaps I could create something worthy: maps that saved lives instead of taking them.

My mother died in my seventeenth year. The winter fever took her swiftly, and with her went the last warmth in that house. My father remarried within six months, a practical arrangement with a vintner's widow who brought vineyards and connections as her dowry. My brother prepared to inherit the business with quiet efficiency.

I told my father I wished to study in Altdorf.

I expected rage, or at least disappointment. Instead, I saw relief flicker across his face before he schooled it to paternal concern. He had two sons and one business. Henri would inherit cleanly, without the complication of a younger brother who might challenge him or require a portion carved from the profits. My announcement solved a problem he'd been too kind—or too cowardly—to voice.

"You'll need funds," he said after a long silence. "I can give you what your mother set aside for you. It should support you for a year, perhaps two if you're careful. After that..." He shrugged. "You'll have to make your own way."

He didn't strike me. He didn't disown me. He simply... let me go. His son, the inconvenient problem, was choosing to solve himself. I think he slept easier that night than he had in years.

I took the money. And I took something else, something my mother had purchased years ago from a Tilean antiquarian at ruinous expense, something she'd shown me only once, in the last months of her life when now I guess she knew the fever would take her.

A Reman Military Way-Map, ancient and crumbling, drawn on vellum that had survived more than a thousand years through careful preservation. It showed the Apuccini passes—not the modern goat-tracks and bandit-haunted trails, but the old roads the Remans had carved through Tilea's mountainous spine. Roads that still existed, partially intact, bypassing the tolls and dangers of current routes. More valuable still, it marked the subterranean entrances to certain passes, the covered ways the Reman legions had used in winter—entrances now lost or contested by Goblins and worse things in the dark.

It was priceless. And it was mine. My mother's final gift.

I crossed into the Empire as Osmunde Giraud and arrived in Altdorf as Osmund Steigmeier. The new surname I took from a weathered tombstone in a border village graveyard, a forgotten grave, old and half-sunken into the earth, the dates worn smooth by rain. A child who had died young, his name outliving his brief life by centuries. I thought it fitting. One dead name for another.

The change was necessary. Bretonnians in the Empire are neither enemies nor allies. They... we occupy that uncomfortable middle ground reserved for those who are almost like you but fundamentally are not. We share the same gods, more or less. We fight the same enemies, when it suits us. But we are not Imperial, and that makes us suspect. A Bretonnian merchant might trade freely, his foreignness an exotic curiosity. But a Bretonnian scholar seeking access to Imperial archives, to the Cult of Verena's libraries, to the secrets of Imperial cartography? That required either impeccable credentials or a perfect disguise. I chose disguise. Osmunde died at the border. Osmund lived on.

Altdorf was everything I had feared.

The city crouched on the Reik like a great gray spider, its towers clawing at perpetually overcast skies. Where Bordeleaux had been light and air and the clean smell of salt, Altdorf was smoke and shadows and the stench of the river mixing with inadequate sewers. The buildings leaned over narrow streets as if trying to blot out what little sun penetrated the clouds—though the sun, it seemed, had long since given up the effort.

The people matched the city. In Bordeleaux, even the poorest longshoreman would share a smile and a jest. In Altdorf, eyes were hooded and suspicious. Conversations died when I approached tavern tables. My accent —still thick despite my fluency in Reikspiel— marked me as half foreign at the best, and in Altdorf, foreign meant potentially dangerous.

But worse than the poverty, worse than the suspicion, were the Witch Hunters, the iron hand of Sigmar. "Members of the Order of the Silver Hammer, the Sacred Order of the Templars of Sigmar", proclaimed themselves. They answered to no mayor, no city council, not even to the Countess of Nuln or the Elector Counts. They answered only to the Grand Theogonist and, through him, to Sigmar himself.

This made them more terrifying than any city guard or noble house troops. They were outside the law because they were above it. Those who considered themselves spirit investigators, hunters of corruption, and the last line of defense against the lurking darkness of Chaos essentially held anyone's life in their hands.

I saw an execution, a man burned in the Königsplatz, during my second week in the city. They dragged him from his home in the Docklands for possessing books written in Arabyan. He screamed that he was a translator, a scholar, that the books were for study only. They burned him anyway. Even now I can't forget the smell of pork and roses and the crowd watching in silence.

One of them, a Witch Hunter, was near me. I still remember his scarred face, impassive as the burning prisoner writhed horribly. As soon as the man's screams ceased, he turned to the crowd and exclaimed loudly, "Better to burn ten innocent men than to let a servant of Tzeentch betray our sacred empire."

I understood then the terrible logic of the pyre. To them, my false name was not a survival tactic. It was a Veil of Deception, the primary tool of the Changer of Ways. They did not need to prove I was a cultist. They only needed to find the crack in my soul where the darkness might enter. A foreigner with a hidden past was, to their eyes, a crack already wide open.

I knew I could not stay long in that dark, paranoid city. But I needed what it could offer: access to the knowledge that could transform me from a merchant's son with dreams into a true cartographer and the legitimacy it would bring to me.

The Cult of Verena was my salvation.

I approached the Great Library with my Reman map and my mother's coins and requested an audience with the High Priestess. I was made to wait in an antechamber for three hours and then dismissed, told to return the next day. This exercise in patience and contempt was repeated for three days—an exercise which, I later learned, was the first test every aspirant had to undergo.

When I was finally admitted, I presented my case simply using my best Classical. I showed them the map, explaining its provenance and its value. I told them I wished to become a lay-scholar, to study the principles of Classical cartography and to master the language of ancient texts.

The High Priestess —a severe woman named Magda Hochstrom— examined the map for a long time. Then she examined me with the same careful scrutiny. It was worth noting, I realized, that I was presenting myself to one of the few institutions in the Empire where a woman could hold absolute authority over men, where scholarship mattered more than gender or birth. The Cult of Verena judged minds, not bloodlines.

"This map," she said finally, her finger tracing the subterranean passage markers, "is worth more than a year's study. This is worth admission, room, and access to our archives. But you will earn your continued place. You will work in our scriptorium. You will copy, translate, and preserve. You will live by our hours and our disciplines. If you prove worthy, we will teach you. If you do not..." She looked up at me. "We keep the map, and you leave with nothing but what you've learned."

I agreed without hesitation.

Life within the Temple Precinct was monastic but not oppressive. I was given a cell, a small room with a cot, a desk, and a narrow window overlooking the temple courtyard. I ate in the communal refectory with other lay-scholars and the priesthood. I followed the Hours of Study: dawn for meditation and prayer to Verena, morning for copying work, afternoon for research, evening for contemplation and personal study.

The work was exhausting. I spent half my days in the scriptorium, bent over ancient texts, my fingers cramped around a quill as I transcribed crumbling Reman scrolls into fresh parchment. The Cult was -is, and will be I guess- engaged in a desperate race against time, so many texts were deteriorating, the vellum cracking, the ink fading to ghosts of letters. Every word I copied was a word saved from oblivion.

But it was in that painstaking work that I found my true education. As I transcribed Reman treatises on geometry, on perspective, on the interplay of light and shadow, I began to understand the principles that had made Classical art so powerful. It was not excess with its obsessive detail and darkness. It was balance, proportion, the careful suggestion of depth through light and shadow. The Remans had understood that truth could be beautiful without being cluttered, that art could serve knowledge without obscuring it.

It was Father Helmut Koss who made this understanding explicit. An elderly priest who had spent his youth studying in Miragliano with Tilean masters, he took an interest in me, perhaps because he saw in me something of his younger self, a man caught between nations and traditions.

He taught me to read Classical not merely as a language but as a philosophy, a way of seeing the world. "The Gothic mind," he told me once as we examined a particularly overwrought Imperial manuscript, "fears the empty space. It fills every void with detail, as if silence itself were heretical. Every margin must be crowded with gargoyles, every border with thorns and skulls. But the Classical mind understands that emptiness can be eloquent. A map need not show every tree to convey a forest. Light and shadow, properly rendered, can suggest what obsessive linework only obscures."

He showed me Reman maps preserved in Verena's deepest vaults, maps that used shading to show elevation, that suggested terrain through artistic technique rather than crude symbols. Maps that were both beautiful and useful, art in service of truth.

This," he said, gesturing to a particularly elegant example, "is what you seek, isn't it? Not the rejection of beauty, but a different kind of beauty. The marriage of the sailor's need for truth with the scholar's appreciation for elegance."

I realized then that Father Koss understood me better than I understood myself.

Father Koss died during my third year in Altdorf. The winter took him as it had taken my mother: swiftly, without mercy. I was allowed to visit him in his last hours in the small cell where he had lived for forty years.

His last lesson was not about faith or Verena or even about cartography, exactly. It was about marks.

"A cartographer's mark," he said, his voice barely a whisper, "must identify not just a man's work, but the man himself. Who he is. Who he was." He coughed, a wet sound. "Your work is exceptional, Osmund. You see the world with rare clarity. You have earned Verena's favor."

He gripped my hand with surprising strength. "But remember: when you sign your maps, you are not just claiming authorship. You are declaring identity. Your mark will outlive you. Long after you are gone, people will see that mark and know: this is truth. This is who made it. This is who he was."

He died next day.

It was only later, after the funeral rites, that I fully understood the meaning of his last lesson. The way he had emphasized "who he was." The way he had looked at me when he said it. Father Koss had known. Or guessed. Perhaps not the details —not Bordeleaux specifically, not the name Giraud— but he had known I was not who I claimed to be. And in his final lesson, he had told me that it was all right. That my mark —whatever form it took— should honor both who I was and who I had become.

I wept that night, alone in my cell, for the second time since leaving Bretonnia.

Three months later, the High Priestess summoned me and presented me with a Letter of Recommendation to the Guild of Imperial Cartographers. "The student Osmund Steigmeier," it read, "possesses a rare eye for the truth of the land and a disciplined hand. He has earned Verena's favor."

The phrasing was identical to Father Koss's last words to me. I suspect he had written the letter before he died, leaving it with instructions for when I was ready. I like to think he would have been proud of what I have become.

The Guild accepted me, though with the suspicion they reserved for all who seemed outsiders. I was permitted to practice my trade, to take commissions, to sell my work. But I would be watched. Always watched.

I could not stay in Altdorf. The city's oppressive grayness, the constant fear, the Witch Hunters prowling like wolves scenting corruption... it wore on me like water on stone. I was not brave enough to endure it indefinitely.

I had to leave, and I chose Nuln.

The difference was immediate and profound. Nuln is a city of iron and gunpowder, yes, but it is also a city of pragmatism and innovation. Countess Emmanuelle cares more for results than orthodoxy, more for what works than for what tradition dictates. Witch Hunters are fewer here, and those who do operate are more focused on real threats —the mutants breeding in the Altestadt slums, the Chaos cults that occasionally surface in the industrial districts— than on harassing citizen with foreign accents.

But I did not choose Nuln merely for its relative tolerance. I chose it because it offered something Altdorf could not: access to both kinds of knowledge a cartographer truly needs.

Nuln sits at the confluence of the river and the road. It is the gateway to the south, the hub where water trade meets land trade. The River Reik flows through the city's heart, bringing barges and merchant ships from across the Empire and beyond: from Marienburg's independent merchants, from Talabecland's timber traders, from the Moot's halfling river-captains.

The sailors give me the coasts, the channels, the ways of water. But equally important are the land traders. All commerce flowing north from Tilea, from the Border Princes, from the distant kingdoms beyond the Black Mountains must pass through or near Nuln. These merchants bring knowledge of mountain passes, of dwarf-holds, of the shifting borders of petty kingdoms. They know the bones of the earth in ways sailors never can.

More than that, Nuln maintains close ties with the Dwarfs. Knowledge of the mountain trails, of the ancient Underway tunnels that run beneath the mountains. This knowledge is whispered in Nuln's taverns by grizzled dwarf traders far more readily than in coastal Marienburg.

Nuln gave me everything I needed: access to both sailors and land traders, relative freedom from persecution, and clients who valued truth over decoration.

I established myself as a cartographer for hire, taking modest commissions at first—river charts for barge captains, survey maps for the Countess's urban expansion projects, artillery survey maps for the Gunnery School.

But I worked differently than my competitors. Where they sat in their studios and drew from imagination or copied from outdated sources, I went to the taverns and docks. I bought drinks for weathered river pilots and listened to their corrections. I paid caravan masters to describe the passes through the Black Mountains. I hired dwarfs to sketch the approaches to their holds.

And I verified. Once I could afford apprentices, I sought out young men like myself—clever, observant, willing to travel. I sent them out on the barges and merchant caravans to see the world with their own eyes, to measure depths and record landmarks, to return with truth instead of fantasy.

This is what distinguishes my maps from those of Alois Krause and his generation. Krause creates monuments to Imperial grandeur, drowning his parchments in gold leaf and artistic excess. His mountains leer like gargoyles, his forests writhe with imagined horrors. His maps are works of propaganda, beautiful lies meant to impress patrons and being exposed in noble halls.

My maps are different. I render them using the principles I learned from the Reman masters and refined under Father Koss's guidance: using light and shadow to show elevation, creating depth through careful perspective, framing the geography with elegant cartouches that enhance rather than obscure. The style is closer to Classical art than to the current fashion.

Some of my rivals mutter that my work is "foreign" or "Tilean" or even "suspiciously southern." Let them mutter. When a ship captain needs to navigate a dangerous coast, he does not choose Krause's gilded fantasy. He chooses my work. When a merchant caravan prepares to cross the Black Mountains, they seek out a Steigmeier map. When the Gunnery School needs to know the exact elevation of a hillside, they commission me. Because my maps possess something far more valuable than gold leaf or Gothic drama: fidelity. If my ink marks a reef, the reef is there. If I show a channel, the channel exists. If I indicate a pass through the mountains, that pass can be traveled.

In a world drowning in beautiful lies, I provide truth.

I sign each work with my mark—the lily within the circle, topped by the Imperial 'I'. To my colleagues, it is simply the Steigmeier Lily, a craftsman's signature. To me, it is the Fleur-de-lis of Bordeleaux held within the Empire's seal. A compromise. A secret. A remembrance of who I was, hidden within the declaration of who I have become.

Father Koss's final lesson, embodied in ink.

You asked me once why I never speak of my family, why I flinch when merchants from Marienburg mention Bretonnia in passing, why I sometimes stare at the lily on my maps with an expression you cannot quite read.

Now you know.

My family is an ocean away, in a land I will not return to, bearing a name I cannot speak aloud. My brother inherited the business, I do not know if he prospered or failed, if my father's remarriage produced more sons, if the wine trade survived the wars and plagues that sweep through Bretonnia as they do everywhere. I tell myself it does not matter.

I have built a new life here. My maps hang in countinghouses from Marienburg to Averheim, from the Gunnery School to the Dwarf holds. Ship captains and caravan masters seek the Steigmeier Lily because it means safe passage. I have given the world something true, and in a world where beautiful lies kill men every day, that is no small thing.

And yet, when I draw the coastline of Bretonnia —when I scribe in the plate the curve of the Bay of Bordeleaux— I am fourteen again, sitting on salt-stained pilings, listening to an old Marienburger curse a map that led his friend to death on rocks that appeared on no chart.

The lily within the circle. Bordeleaux within the Empire. Osmunde within Osmund. Truth hidden within beauty. Beauty serving truth. Who I was, held within who I am.

My dearest Gretta, this is my confession and my gift to you.

Every wealthy suitor who has come to your door brought you things purchased with gold—expensive but ultimately meaningless. They could buy another necklace tomorrow, commission another portrait, acquire another property. What they offered you could be replaced.

I offer you something that cannot be replaced: my life, my true self, the secret that can for sure destroy me.

If the Order learned what I have written here, Osmund Steigmeier would burn. They would call me a foreign deceiver, a man who lived behind a veil of lies. My maps would be declared tainted, untrustworthy, perhaps even heretical. Everything I have built would turn to ash. But for sure you will betray me. Because you were not testing purses. You were testing hearts.

So I give you my life, something of countless value, what you requested. Thank you for waiting until I was ready to give it it to you, to tell you myself.

I am yours, now and always. Both Osmunde and Osmund, both the boy who fled Bordeleaux and the man who found himself in Nuln, both the lie I live and the truth I carry.

All my love, all my life.