THE MAN BENEATH THE SUNFLOWERS
The trail I followed had no name on any map — not on mine, not on any of the ones my master had drawn before me.
I walked slowly, the way I always walked when a place deserved to be heard before it was crossed. I paused beside a tangle of ferns to take in the smell of damp earth — recent rain, perhaps from the night before — and noted in my journal, in the small, cramped hand that only I could read:
Wind from the east. Smell of turned soil. A silence larger than it should be.
In the inner pocket of my cloak, wrapped in waxed cloth, I carried the last blank page of old Orwyn the Cartographer. Thirty years he had spent trying to chart that lost region beyond the Mountains of the West. Thirty years of journeys, of theories, of ink wasted on pages that always came back empty — as though the place itself refused to exist on the paper of anyone who hadn’t earned the right to find it.
He died without completing a single line.
I had inherited more than tools and technique from him. I had inherited a quiet debt. If I could accomplish what he could not — if I returned with that map finished — I would be the first cartographer in history to enter the Royal Academy’s archives alive, on my own merit, not on the weight of a borrowed name. It would also be the only way I knew to tell him, too late for him to hear, that the work had not been in vain.
It was while thinking of this that I saw the first sunflower.
It stood alone, crooked, growing between two stones in a patch of ground far too shadowed for any flower to survive. That alone would have been strange enough. But what truly made me stop was the direction the bloom faced: turned inward, toward the heart of the woods, away from any clearing, away from any sliver of light that made sense.
A sunflower always turns toward the sun. It is the one thing a sunflower knows how to do well.
This one was not looking anywhere I could see.
I made a note — curious more than worried — and walked on.
Twenty steps later, I found another. Then three more, clustered, growing crooked between the roots of an old tree. Then a dozen, scattered as though someone had flung seeds carelessly, with no logic at all — except there was logic, because every single one, without exception, pointed toward the same invisible spot deep in the woods.
By the time I stopped to count, I had already lost track.
I tucked the journal back into my cloak. There was no more need to write things down. There was only the need to follow.
The silence changed in quality before I understood why.
I reached the clearing without noticing the exact moment the forest had opened.
And there, at the center of a yellow sea of loose petals strewn across the ground as though gold had snowed, a man knelt.
He was gathering the petals one by one. Slowly. With a tenderness I had only ever seen in those who handle things too fragile to be rushed.
Where do these petals come from, I thought, scanning the clearing for a tree, a shrub, anything that might be shedding all of this upon the ground.
There was nothing.
It was only when he lifted his head slightly, pushing his own hair back with his free hand, that I understood.
The petals were falling from him.
My foot found a dry branch.
The crack split the silence like a gunshot.
His head snapped up at once, his whole body tense — and for one second, before anything else, I saw in his eyes the same startle of an animal caught outside its burrow.
He was the one who broke the silence first, with an unexpected, gentle smile.
“You walk awfully quiet for someone who can scare a man like that.”
“And you gather petals in a way I’ve never seen anyone do,” I replied, still too wary to smile back.
He looked down at his own hands, full of golden petals, as if only now remembering they were there.
“Sorry. That must have been strange to see.”
“You don’t need to apologize for existing in your own way.”
“Even so,” he insisted, tucking a few petals into the inner pocket of his cloak, “I’m sorry. I don’t like troubling anyone with… this.”
I noticed that, as he said this, his eyes slipped away from mine, searching for any other point in the clearing. I also noticed — though I said nothing — that he did the same thing every time the conversation drew too close to himself, as though meeting someone’s gaze were, somehow, a way of revealing more than he was willing to show.
“Where are you headed?” I asked, changing the subject for him, since it seemed to be what he wanted most.
“Wherever my feet take me,” he answered, relieved, his gaze drifting shyly back to mine. “And you? You look like someone walking with a destination in mind.”
“I’m looking for a place no one has managed to draw yet. A map my master didn’t finish before he died.”
He looked at me differently after that. More carefully.
“That sounds like the kind of quest worth taking,” he said, quietly. “I’m sorry about your master.”
“You don’t need to be. You never even met him.”
“I’m sorry all the same,” he insisted, and this time there was something almost urgent in the way he said it, as though apologizing and grieving for others were the only language he could speak with full fluency.
We ended up walking in the same direction, though neither of us had actually suggested it out loud.
He asked how I had learned to draw maps; I asked how he knew the woods so well, since he could tell from a distance which plant would stop bleeding and which root was good for a fever.
“Too much praise makes me uncomfortable,” he said suddenly, when I remarked aloud how remarkable that was. He laughed as he said it, but his shoulders had risen just slightly, the way someone shrinks without meaning to. “I’d rather talk about anything else.”
I filed that away too, the same way I stored emotional traces in some corner of memory: a gentle man who didn’t know how to receive gentleness in return.
It was then that we heard a sharp, distressed chirping from a tangle of dry branches.
Auren reached it before I did. A small, grey bird was thrashing, caught between two thin twigs.
“Easy,” he murmured, kneeling slowly. “I know. I know it hurts.”
It took minutes — patience without limit — until he freed the trapped wing. When the bird finally flew, it landed beside another on a nearby branch, their feathers nearly touching.
Auren kept watching. Not with the smile from before — something else, quieter, deeper, like someone watching a party from outside that they were never invited to.
I didn’t ask. He offered no explanation.
It was nearly dark when we found the tracks in the mud, near a thin stream.
They were deep. Enormous. Five long claws, moss clinging between the toes of the print, as though the creature itself carried the forest stuck to its body.
“Moss-Bear,” I said, my stomach tightening. “And fresh. Today, maybe.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s the size of two men and doesn’t usually care about small fires,” I answered, already scanning the surroundings, calculating distances, escape routes. “It’s not safe to sleep alone out here tonight.”
He considered this for a moment, serious, the earlier lightness giving way to something steadier.
“Then it’s a good thing neither of us is alone,” he said, simply.
There was no further discussion. Together we chose a small clearing sheltered by rocks, he helped gather dry kindling, and the fire we lit felt, for the first time that day, like a real border between us and the rest of the forest.
I fell asleep without noticing, undone by the weariness of the walk.
I woke suddenly, not quite sure what had pulled me from sleep. The fire still burned, low and amber. But the spot where Auren should have been lying was empty.
I rose with my heart already racing, thinking of the bear, of the deep claw marks in the mud, of everything that could have happened in silence while I slept.
I followed a strange trail between the trees: small golden petals, one every few steps, glowing faintly in the dark like crumbs from a path no one had meant to leave. Where each petal touched the ground, a tiny green shoot pierced the soil, and before I finished looking, it had already opened into a closed flower — still shy, still uncertain of itself.
The trail led me to another clearing.
I stopped at its edge, hidden behind a broad trunk, and what I saw took my breath away.
Thousands of sunflowers — not dozens, not hundreds, thousands — covered every inch of that ground, all open, all enormous, all turned in the same direction, like an entire audience facing a single point.
Auren knelt at the center of them.
Hunched over, his shoulders trembling in silence, his face buried in his own hands.
He was weeping. Without sobbing, without a single sound I could hear even a few steps away. Only his back rising and falling, slowly, like a grief too vast to fit inside any noise.
And all around him, thousands of flowers kept watching — attentive, faithful — as though he were the only sun they had ever known, even as he himself seemed on the verge of going dark.
I didn’t move. I didn’t know whether to go closer, whether to pretend I was still asleep, whether any right words even existed for what I was seeing.
I stayed there, hidden, while the wind carried more and more petals away from him, understanding nothing — except one single thing, which drove itself into me harder than any map I had ever drawn:
whoever this man was, the entire forest worshipped him like a king.
And yet, there, alone, surrounded by thousands who adored him, Auren wept like someone completely, irreparably alone.
