“Good to know,” Belfast said. She gestured to her map. “Which is better—hands or feet?”
She knew better than most how to move through a port of impossibility. Battleships and ballroom mirrors had taught her the virtues of steadiness: measure, timing, and a contempt for spectacle. Yet even her practiced calm quivered now with curiosity. An unfamiliar pouch strapped around her waist resonated with a faint, rhythmic thrum—something alive inside or close enough to it. She lifted the flap and found a map pressed between layers of soft leather, illustrated in ink that rearranged itself if she did not stare too long. The map’s title resolved into letters she recognized from wayfarers’ slang: “Belfast’s Itineraries — Another World v.01.” Beneath, in smaller script: Hot Routes. adventuring with belfast in another world v01 hot
Hot. The word slackened something behind her ribs. In the navy, "hot" had many meanings—urgent, dangerous, freshly forged, dangerously alluring. Here it might mean temperature, or fever, or a path newly primed by the world’s pulse. Belfast rolled the pouch’s strap over her shoulder and started downhill, elated and wary in equal measure. “Good to know,” Belfast said
Back among familiar faces who mistook her stories for rumor at first, she moved differently; small ore of other-worldly heat threaded her days. She patched sails and mended broken pride with the steady hands that had always been hers. Sometimes at night, when the horizon burned with a certain kind of light, she would rub the mote against her thumb and feel the map’s memory singing underneath. She would tell a tale out loud—careful, trimmed, but true—about a world where belfries breathed and markets traded in recollections, about a guide who measured stairs in falling light, about the price of a story and the value of keeping your own shape. Battleships and ballroom mirrors had taught her the