Here Be Cottages [A Cozy Mapmaker LitRPG]

Useless class. Fading town. One honest map at a time. At sixteen, everyone in Hollin Vale gets an Almanac: a private page that names your class and keeps your score. Tamsin Holloway got Cartographer. Nobody has drawn a map by hand in a hundred years. The Guild prints them now, in a city she has never seen, and the printed map of her valley is wrong in eleven places. A year later she is seventeen, mending roofs for soup, and counting the windows that still light up in Cairnwick at dusk. Thirty-one, out of ninety. The town is going out one household at a time, because nothing anyone stops drawing stays where it was. Lanes take two hours one day and forty minutes the next. A wheelbarrow turns up in the orchard. Goats come home down the wrong side of the hill. That is the Unwritten, and it is patient. Then Tamsin walks one lane, counts every step, and inks it on her father's old vellum. In the morning her Almanac says Charted: Mill Lane, and the lane stops lying. A drawn map holds. A named place becomes a Waymark that nothing can move. And the only road that can save the town before the first snow is the one over the Old Pass: the road her father died on, the road the Guild stamped IMPASSABLE, the road nobody has walked in twelve years. She will need ink, boots, a blind old surveyor who counts in paces, an innkeeper who answers every question with a statement, a goat-girl with a list for everything, and a large grey dog that the map insists on showing as a moving dot. No dungeons. No harem. No end of the world. Just a girl, a valley, and the slow, stubborn work of making a place real again, one honest line at a time. A cozy, character-first LitRPG: light system, dry humour, cold mornings, warm endings. Book 1 of The Cairnwick Maps. Complete draft; 3 chapters a week until the end.