The Compass Needle Lies North

A compass needle does not point to true north. It bends toward magnetic north, a wandering point that drifts each year, sliding across the Arctic on its own slow errand. Sailors trusted it anyway, correcting the lie with tables and declination charts, adding degrees to a deception until the deception became useful. The needle never corrected itself. It only ever answered the nearest pull, mistaking proximity for truth, and every ship that reached shore did so by trusting an error that had been measured carefully enough to steer by.