When the light is so bright it burns, it casts ever darker shadows around itself. A fire is never safe, no matter how sweetly it whispers otherwise.
Note: my art tablet has died a death, so cover images will be absent until I can get it fixed. Hopefully soon!
In the towering city on the shore, where the obsidian streets swallowed the light and the steel sea dashed ships upon the rocks, the great lighthouse was known to all. Its light cut through fog and shadow with ease, a warning to all who dared the coast. Do not come here.
Those who were sensible, listened. The light drove the brave before it; they fled from its searing brilliance in dread fear of what lurked beneath it. Fools who dared the light, who shaded their eyes and stepped boldly into the whiteness with the steely determination only sheer ignorance can provide, vanished. Their families said the light burned them away, leaving nothing but smoke and spirit to rise up on the salty wind, whisked across the iron waters to shores unknown. It was a comfort to them, to think that. Better to think that than that they might have passed through the light and reached that dark city that crouched on the shore like a canker, eating its way into the heart of the world.
That is what they knew, those folk who braved the shore.
The lighthouse gave no illumination to the city. It flared overhead, sweeping across the sky like a warning siren. Stars and moon were eclipsed by its scything beam, just as surely as the great walls consumed outside dangers - invasion, beasts, storms. Obsidian swallowed them all. Light was a small price to pay.
In that city, they all knew what light could do.
In the shadows, the quickest, sprightliest children carried the Lanterns, and Jack was the fastest of them all. First to reach the central beacon, which was chained at the foot of the lighthouse, Jack slipped through the liquid shadows like a cat. First to dare a climb, when even the steeplejacks would hesitate, for he was young and fear seemed something for older folks, those with years and worry behind them. First to slip into alleys or dart down broad boulevards in order to carry his messages and parcels, his little light sparkling at his waist like a diamond buried amongst the inky black.
Jack loved his job.
Jack loved the light.
It whispered to him as he went about his work. Its voice was the quiet rustle of silk, the crackle of tiny flames, and the white light dancing on the walls - alive for but a moment, and then gone.
I love you as he lit his little light from the great burning beacon seething in the lighthouse.
You’re so brave as he balanced on a pylon jutting from a half-completed wall, many feet above the city streets.
You’re quick and strong as he leaped from slates to gutters to skylights, feet barely touching the ground before he was once again moving skywards.
I miss you as the keeper dutifully extinguished the Lanterns’ lights at the end of each shift, walking with careful deliberation along the lines of children, each face cut sharp and pale by the light glittering in their hands. The keeper’s hands shook, though she was only young. Furious red scars boiled up from her sleeves, clawed up her neck - the light had taken its toll on her.
Jack hoped, one day, to be the keeper in her place, and he eyed his light with a possessive hunger as it, too, was snuffed out. One day, he wouldn’t need to extinguish it.
Fly with me as Jack slumbered, a tiny stolen fragment of light nestled carefully in his cupboard, hidden from prying eyes.
One day, Jack would fly. He knew it.
His dreams were filled with the lighthouse. Not the base, which he knew, but the towering tip so far above the city that it was lost to the sky. Only by the light it produced did the rest of city know it. Jack dreamed of soaring up, up, up the towering edifice. It flashed past in a blur of dark metal and iron chains, salt-crusted but still black and strong.
The top was a room of cut crystal, filled with a light so bright Jack woke with aching eyes and a gnawing hunger. He wanted to see that light with his real eyes, to bask in it and feel it warm on his skin. In his dreams, he raced to the high chamber and his essence ballooned, filling it. His awareness spread outwards, into every nook and cranny until he was pressed up against the hard walls and they pressed back, digging in to the edges of him. Holding him back. If only he could get out.
If only you were stronger. If only he was stronger.
He listened to the light whispering in the night, cupping it with his hands to shield it and keep it safe. He fed it. Scraps of cloth, bits of food, old bones and bits of paper. The light ate them all. Jack watched the lighthouse beam as it cut through the ebon sky overhead.
If only I could get out. If only he could get out.
Jack collected tiny shavings of wax from the seals on the letters he carried. Waxed thread tying parcels was frayed and worn when he delivered them. Night by night, millimetre by millimetre, Jack approached their goal.
There was light shining through the crack beneath Jack’s door. Quick footsteps - the quickest - and then silence, as if the owner of the footsteps had just for a moment slipped the bonds of gravity and left the ground.
A ship lingering on the edges of the steely shore saw the lighthouse’s beam waver, then the sky was washed out by a flash of light that blanked out reality and replaced it with light. As the captain and crew blinked away the spots dancing in their returning vision, they thought they saw a face in the lights. It cackled like an inferno, baring sharp teeth in an inhumanly elongated maw, its eyes like smouldering embers glowing red amidst the pale fire, and then vanished.
The captain and their crew were left alone with the slowly rising sun and a city made of whitest marble sitting on the shore. The lighthouse shone no more, its tower a single black smudge on the clean brightness of the city, as a burned wick sits among the pale wax of a fat candle only half-consumed.
People came to the city now. There was no light to drive them away, and the city was no longer a dark, forbidding place. Like charcoal burned so long it consumes itself, the obsidian was changed from dark to light, the pale colour of old ash and cinders. It was bright and welcoming.
And empty.
The streets were barren, the houses abandoned. The only signs anyone had ever lived there at all, that the city hadn’t just sprung up from the earth, was a single room in a nondescript house, tucked away off one of the main streets. There was a cupboard, slightly ajar, a bed, a table and in the centre of the room, where a patch of dark soot blossomed into a scorched flower shape on the floor, were two more things. A candle, ragged and piecemeal, half-burned. And a small skull, with tiny flames flickering in empty sockets.
