Clothlings are basically living plush, best thought of as being like free-willed cloth golems. They never age and are immortal given proper care, but "proper care" can involve hours of careful stitching and washing - they don't heal on their own. Clothlings tend to resemble humanoid animals, but there's no reason they have to - they can take any shape. Their sewn-together cloth "skin" is nothing special - it's just cloth, and can be anything from felt to canvas to even leather or chainmail - but their stuffing is made from a special plant called "heartwool", and this is what gives them life.

Farran d'Oueis is a cartographer from the city of Quilt, the capitol of the clothling lands. He's not very old - although clothlings don't age physically, they still have a mental age and learn their skills over time - and works for the Cabinet, the ruling body of the clothlings. He's accompanied several expeditions by now and carefully drew out the maps of everywhere they went, and these maps went on to guide future explorers. This would be well and good, except that the practice maps he drew when first learning cartography also found their way into the collection, and those are just places he imagined himself - there's nothing remotely real about them. Any expedition that tried to use one of those would end in disaster (for Farran himself if not the explorers), but he can't just own up to a large portion of his work being fiction without throwing away his whole reputation. A simple mistake on some anonymous bureaucrat's part has left Farran in a dilemma, and there's no easy map out of where he's ended up.