The story
The Cartographers refused to draw a person inside a closed symbol. The opening was not missing ink; it was room for life.
The earliest Cartographers did not map souls. They mapped movement among attention, aliveness, friction, choice, and contribution.
Their students kept asking where the traveler belonged inside each mark. The Cartographers answered by leaving every enclosure open.
A mark could show direction, crossing, shelter, return, or relationship. It could never claim the final border of a living person.
The opening became a grammatical rule, a design rule, and eventually a moral rule: no description was permitted to close around the life it served.
When a map helped, the traveler carried it. When it stopped helping, the traveler could cross its unfinished edge and continue.
The Cartographer never kept the final stroke. The charcoal was returned to the traveler, because a map that cannot be corrected is not a map.