There was once a village stitched to the edge of the world.
It wasn’t on any map, unless you counted the ones drawn in dreams or in the margins of forgotten books. A crooked little place where the houses leaned into the wind and the sea always whispered secrets, though most people had learned not to listen.
At the far end of the village, just where the earth began to wonder if it ought to become sea instead, there lived the Lantern Keeper.
They were not old, not really. But their eyes had seen things that made time wrap itself around them like ivy. Their job — the kind passed down in silence, like a burden or a birthright — was to light the lanterns along the shoreline each night, so that lost things could find their way home.
The Lantern Keeper wasn’t alone, not once. There had been another — someone who wore laughter like a scarf and always knew when the wind would turn. They moved through the world together like ink and paper — one making sense of the other.
They shared everything: a crooked house with uneven floors, the secrets of flame, and the quiet language that exists only between people who have chosen each other again and again.
But then came the storm.
It wasn’t the kind that rattled windows or tore up boats. It was worse — quiet and invisible. The kind that slips in when you’re looking the other way. And when it passed, the world remained mostly as it had been — the sea still sighed, the stars still blinked — but the other was gone.
Just… gone.
And the Lantern Keeper, now alone, did what people do when the world stops making sense: they kept doing what they knew. They lit the lanterns. They walked the wind-carved path. They waited.
Nights passed. And then weeks. And then that strange, rubbery sort of time that follows grief, where days lose their names and everything tastes like ash.
One evening, as twilight curled itself around the sky like a cat, a stranger came to the village. The sort of stranger who doesn’t knock, who seems to know the way without being told. His boots were muddy and his coat smelled of old rain, and he carried a satchel full of silence.
He sat beside the Lantern Keeper on the hill, where the biggest lantern stood — the one that burned brighter than memory and almost as fierce as love. He didn’t say hello. People like him rarely do.
They sat together in silence for a long time — the kind of silence that isn’t empty, but thick, like the pause in a story before something important happens.
Then, without turning his head, the stranger spoke:
“You’re wrong, you know?!”
The Lantern keeper turned his head, if he was able to raise one eyebrow he would have.
“You think they’re gone.”
The Lantern Keeper didn’t answer. Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was too true to hold gently.
The stranger reached into his coat and pulled out a match — an old one, made of bone or driftwood or something that remembered being alive. He struck it, and the flame danced a peculiar shade of gold.
“They’re not gone. Just elsewhere.”
The Keeper frowned. “Elsewhere?”
“Yes.” The stranger cupped the flame with both hands. “There are places people go when stories end. And other places they go when stories change. Your person… they’ve simply walked into a different part of the tale. One you can’t see from this page.”
The flame flickered, casting long shadows across the lantern’s glass. The Keeper’s voice was barely more than breath. “But I can’t follow. I can’t talk to them. I don’t even know if they still… exist.”The stranger gave a small hum — somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.“They exist in you. That’s where they planted the last part of themselves — in the spaces you now ache.” He glanced sideways. “That pain you feel? It’s not proof they’re gone. It’s proof they were real.”
The Keeper closed their eyes.
“I don’t want to forget.”
The stranger nodded.
“Then don’t. Forgetting isn’t the point. Carry them. But carry them like firewood — something that warms you. Not like stones in your pockets, dragging you into the sea.”
A pause. The wind softened.
“Grief,” the stranger whispered, “is just love that doesn’t know where to go. So it waits. It builds lanterns. It plants gardens. It writes songs in the wind. And that’s alright. Let it stay a while. Just don’t forget to live beside it.”
The match burned out, and the smoke curled upward like a final word.
The stranger stood.
“Light the lanterns. Tell the stories. That’s how you keep the door open.”
“To what?” the Keeper asked.
The stranger smiled, eyes crinkling like old paper.
“To the part of the story they’re still in.”
And with that, he was gone. Whether he walked into the mist or was never really there at all, the Keeper never knew. But the words — those stayed.
People say if you go to that village now — not the one on the map, the other one — you might see a figure walking the shoreline, lantern in hand, humming the ghost of a song. And sometimes, just sometimes, you might catch another figure walking beside them — made of light and salt and memory, smiling in a way that only the dead who are still loved know how to smile.
They say the Keeper never stopped grieving.
They just learned how to make it beautiful.
And then, as if pulling something from his satchel, the stranger said:
“You think they’ve gone, but they haven’t. They just stepped into a different story.”
The Keeper turned to him, and the stranger gave a small, strange smile — the kind you give when you know something that hurts and helps at the same time.
“You’re the flame now,” he said. “They’re the warmth.”
And just like that, the wind shifted.
And from that night on, the lanterns burned a little warmer.
From then on, the Lantern Keeper still lit the lamps, but something was different. Not brighter, not louder — just… deeper. Like roots that had found a new place to grow.
They began carving little stories into the wood of the lantern posts — tales only the sea could read. They planted marigolds and moonflowers along the cliff edge. They talked to the stars again, and sometimes, they got answers.