Every road takes something from you.
This is not a metaphor — though everyone who hears it for the first time assumes it is. There is a toll, just not the coin-in-the-hand kind. The southern road takes a color from your dreams. The western one, traveled long enough, will take your memory of faces — not the people themselves, just the faces, the specific shape of them. The northern road takes small things. The sound of a voice. The smell of a place you grew up in.
The crossroads gives things back.
Not everything, and not all at once. But travelers who stay a night often sleep longer than they meant to, and wake in the small hours with something returned to them they’d stopped missing because they’d forgotten it was gone.
The keeper knows this. She doesn’t say it outright. She’s not sure she could explain it even if she tried, and she’s not sure she should.
She just makes sure there’s always an extra blanket on the chair at the end of the hall.
Some people need it.