Baronston was a fort town in transition to a trading center.

It began as a meeting ground for adventurers wiping out the local monsters. Once these brave souls had exterminated dangerous fauna, it became a gateway point for hopeful settlers, miners, explorers and farmers, anyone who could secure and begin to exploit resources. They lay claims of land, minerals and waterways, none of which had meaning without records. So the gateway point became a way station where one could trade and store furs, rare herbs, ores, metals, spoils from hunting and dungeon-crawling.

Storage needs defending, so the way station became a fortification. Guards need supply lines back to the baronial seat, safe passage for the supplies, walls around them that could be defended, ensuring the safety of their families. They needed stronghouses and paymasters. All this required authority, and the fortification became a baronial outpost. Supplies and implements flowed in, the first farms had first harvests which demanded roads. Thus the turnpike moved north and south out of the settlement and west down to Fishmouth to join the river. The fortification became a town.

The soldiers, the outpost guard, the magistrates and record-keepers, even the authority itself came from the Baron, and he extracted tariffs and tolls. A little flattery naming the town kept those low, or so the new town officers hoped. Tolls and tariffs could only generate so much, so it became a place with its very own market, chartered and official. The town was now a trading center.

These changes meant nothing unless acknowledged by the world, or at least back at the Baron's seat, where they could be leveraged into political power. That meant recording and communicating who held what, who lived where, who administered whom, where claims and farms began and ended. And that meant maps.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"And we need maps. Good ones." Parry was on his way to the Adventurer's Guild hall, the kitten having retreated to his mind. It was best to talk over thoughts, lest anyone notice him mumbling and think him touched.

"Your memory is a mess, I grant you, but surely by now you've memorized at least the important cities and roads on this continent?" The feline voice echoed inside him along that vast plane.

"I know them a thousand times over, which is why we want the newest maps, the best maps. They're powerful tools for jogging my memory. But that's not the important part."

"It most certainly is the important part, what else would matter?"

"Changes."

That brought Styak up short. "It's not always the same?"

"My reincarnations alter events. I'm the extra son or daughter, the father divides the land differently. I'm the commander who wins a battle, one duchy is now larger than the other. I'm the assassin who disrupts the expedition, keeping whole regions unexplored for years. I'm the beaver who dams the river and creates a new lake. Not all my lives have outsize effects, most don't, but how can I know? The absence of one of my incarnations might leave a mark. I suspect when I incarnate makes a difference as well: for this life, I'm not starting back as far as I have in others, nor as far forward. A good, recent, well-drawn map will tell me much."

They stopped in front of the Adventurer's Guild house, which was no "house" at all, but part of a tavern close to the market.

"They'll simply give you maps here?"

"That depends on how things go. Let's see just how corrupt this branch is."

With that, Parry stepped through the door.