Charting a World
Three crossings, one of them wild, and a rider before a tear becomes a charted door — why the guild will not name a world before its people do, and where the per-world charts live.
A chart is not a discovery. It is a promise that somebody can follow this and live, and we do not make that promise cheaply.
What a chart requires
Three crossings, minimum, by different hands. One must be made while the door is still a wild tear — before it is held, before anyone has smoothed the approach — because a door only shows you its worst behaviour once, and we would rather it showed us.
Then the survey proper: what the far side does to instruments, what it does to a machine chassis, which Essence the current runs on and therefore what it will ask of a traveller. Then the rider — the one local rule that is true here and nowhere else, which is the most useful line on any chart and the hardest to get right.
Then, and only then, a name. Which brings us to the rule this guild is actually known for.
We do not name a world
Not before its people have. Every world on the chart carries the name its own inhabitants use, translated as honestly as we can manage and footnoted where we could not. Where a world holds several peoples with several names, the chart carries several names.
This is not politeness. A survey party that has named a place has begun treating it as found rather than inhabited, and the distance from there to treating it as available is one bad season. We have watched it happen. The founding law of this guild exists because it happened to us.
"A chart is only a record of doors that stayed still long enough to name. Treat every world as a people, never a resource."
— First law of the Everheart Cartographers
Chartered and otherwise
A point of persistent confusion, and we would rather settle it than keep correcting it.
The Everheart Cartographers are a guild. A Bleed Cartographer is a trade, and anyone may practise it. Several of the best working cartographers in the Nexus hold no charter from us at all — Nyra Vale maps roads that exist only inside paradox storms and has never applied — and a party crossing a wild tear on a chart drawn by the cartographer standing beside them rides easier for it, charter or no charter.
What a guild charter certifies is the survey standard, not the person. We have refused charters to better cartographers than most of our members. We are aware of how that sounds.
The state of the map
Every door we have charted currently stands open. All of them. This is worth stating plainly, because there is a persistent story that the Nexus map flickers and offers a handful of paths at a time, and it is not what the record shows.
The uncertainty runs the other direction. There are more worlds than there are charts, there will always be more worlds than there are charts, and a door standing open is not the same as a door anyone has walked through.
The per-world charts — the survey, the peoples, the present crisis, the crossing brief — are held in the Nexus Explorer and are not reproduced here. A chart drifts the moment it exists in two places.
