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Sandry thought maps were clever little things. During her travels with her parents when she was young, she learned the importance of having maps and knowing how to read them. Very often they ended up in the wrong side of the city or walking in circles in the forest because of poorly made maps.
Reading maps came easy for her. She could look at a map of the Winding Circle Temple area and she could visualize the actual terrain in her mind clearly as if she was physically standing there. She could close her eyes and feel the wind that would often blow on top of a bluff by the beach or the sunny warmth of the garden by the Earth temple. Opening her eyes to see the map again, she would transfer her memory of places not included as yet into it - the cave they got trapped in once, the newly built storage shed by the Fire temple, the changing boundaries of the increasingly large garden Rosethorn and Briar tended to.
When she first showed a map to Briar (he had been learning how to read from Tris then), he couldn't make sense of it. To him, places were real and solid and right in front of him, not squiggly lines and words floating around in a piece of paper. To her continuous wonderment, even until years later, Briar never got lost. He seemed to be able to tell directions immediately even when stars were obsecured by clouds or when there were no obvious landmarks could be seen. In a new town he had never been to, he only needed to walk a particular route once and he could find his way down or back the same route again.
One year, a couple of years after they first met, she made him a map of his garden. Rosethorn had given him a patch of land where he could grow whatever he wanted. It was twenty paces wide and almost half as long. Unlike Rosethorn's orderly rows of plants, his was a collection of rare plants not commonly found in the region. There were shrubs with leaves as long and as big as a man's arm, plants with small flowers that unexpectedly fill the night air with a strong sweet smell, and trees with bright pink fruits that contradictarily have plain-tasting pale white flesh inside. It was a wonder of a garden. On some mornings, she would sit lazily under a tree while knitting or sewing, and watch him tend to his garden. It was there when she thought of the idea.
He told her he didn't need a map for his own garden, not when he knew where every stone and worm holes were, and particularly when he couldn't figure out which was supposed to be what. But in a characteristic stubbornness all of them came to know about her, she stuck to the idea and worked on it for a few weeks after.
when she presented the map to him, he surprised himself by actually liking it. She had made the map as she would a tapestry - her magic showed in every line she etched, the green and red ink she used glinted with shades of varying depths, flowers and fruits bearing remarkable likeness to their actual appearance. It is a memento, she told him jauntily, so you would remember how your first garden looked like.
She was right as always. For a long time he kept it with him wherever his travels took him, a rememberance both to his long-abandoned garden and the mapmaker.
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Note:
1. This is AU-ish, considering I never finished reading the series (and probably never will). So I really don't know what happened in the series. But I really like the idea of Briar x Sandry when they're, er, considerably of age.
2. Themes are from 31days : livejournal dot com / community / 31days