The lamp line started at the well and ran like a nervous spine through the village, iron poles, cloudy glass, knots of wire patched with twine and hope. Kaelen walked it at dusk with a satchel of wicks on his shoulder. Kids trailed him till their mothers whistled them back.
He stopped at the third pole and cupped his hand around the glass. The flame inside had gone thin and blue. He twisted the cap, slid in a dry wick, and breathed on it. The blue shifted to a steady orange.
"Show-off," Hobb muttered from the doorway of his tannery. The man's apron was the same color as old bruises. "These lamps don't need your… tricks."
"They need oil and a new lens," Kaelen said. "And someone to stand here every night till morning."
Hobb snorted and went inside. He'd been snorting at Kaelen since the day the priestess carried a glowing baby into the village and told everyone to stop asking questions.
Kaelen moved on. He didn't try to make the lamps burn brighter. They did that on their own if he stood too close, and people stared when they noticed. It wasn't useful attention. Useful attention fed you. This kind just made neighbors talk quieter when you walked past.
At the corner where the lane bent toward the mill, Old Sera sat on a stool with her shawl over her head and her cane hooked on her elbow. She watched him the way old women watch storms.
"Moonless," she said.
"I know."
"First in seven years."
"I know, Sera."
"You were small at the last one," she said. "All bone and glow."
"I was five. Everyone glows when you're five."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh if she didn't sound like she'd swallowed gravel. "You've got the same mouth as you did then."
He lifted the globe on her porch lamp. The glass had a cobweb crack at the base. "This will go tonight."
"Then I'll sit on my step and shout at the dark," she said. "Bring me another lens after you do the chain."
He nodded and moved on, pretending not to hear her whisper to herself, "Small star, small star", as if that could bless him or curse him. In this village, blessings and curses wore the same coat.
Near the square, three boys clustered around the shrine lantern. The basin was old stone, black with a century of oil, the edges cut with rings that the priestess said were only patterns, not magic. One boy dared the others to touch the soot and draw mustaches on the stone saint carved behind it. Kaelen cleared his throat and the boys scattered like gulls.
"Leave it," he said, more to the night than to them. He wiped the rim with a rag and set the cap straight. His reflection wobbled in the glass: lean from too many winters, hair too long, eyes catching whatever light there was and stealing it. Not pretty. Useful.
He finished the chain by the time the sky went flat and the first stars refused to show. The beach beyond the fence vanished. The sound of the sea became a guess.
The priestess waited at the square, sleeves rolled, ribbon at her throat catching the lamp glow. She was small and stubborn and good at making bad things behave. Two dozen people stood around her, some with hands knotted together, some with hands jammed into pockets, everyone trying not to look scared.
Kaelen took a step back, the way he always did when she lifted her hands for the blessing. He knew she didn't ask the lamps to be gods. She thanked the people who filled them and the iron that held them and the wind that didn't knock them down. Still, when she spoke, the light seemed to settle.
"Lines are trimmed," she said. "Wicks are cut. Oil is full. We stand where we've always stood."
"We stand," the people murmured.
"Moonless nights pass like the others," she said. "We breathe. We wait. We light again."
Kaelen felt the attendants' eyes slide to him and away. He pretended not to notice. He pretended a lot.
After the blessing, the priestess caught his sleeve. "Walk with me."
He matched her pace along the square's edge, past the boarded bakery and the mill's locked doors, past the empty stall where fish used to pile in the mornings like silver tongues. Her lamp swung between them, a small sun on a chain.
"You did the line right," she said.
"Always do."
"You'll take the midnight round?"
"Always do."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
She gave him a sideways look. "You still dream of the Capital?"
He watched the lamp's light catching on the nails in the boards. "You mean do I dream of streets that don't smell like salt and rot? Of towers that throw light instead of catching it? Of food you don't have to scrape to eat? No. Not at all."
"Your mouth is the same as when you were five," she said, and he groaned.
"Old Sera said that too."
"She's right."
He hesitated. "Do you ever think about… that night? When you found me."
"Most nights," she said.
"What did you see?"
"Nothing I could swear to," she said. "It makes for better sleep."
He wanted to push. He always wanted to push. He didn't. "If there's a work list after the eclipse"
"There will be," she said. "There always is."
They stopped by the shrine. The stone basin waited. The carved saint watched without eyes. The priestess set her lamp beside the big lantern and touched the basin's rim with three fingers, an old habit from a time when customs mattered more than oil.
"Be careful tonight," she said.
"You told everyone that."
"I'm telling you twice."
He looked past her at the dark. It pressed against the fence like a crowd. He swallowed. "I'll do my round."
She left him there with the big lantern and a silence that felt too neat, like a room tidied for a guest that hadn't arrived.
Kaelen checked the bolts. He checked the cap. He checked the wick. He set the rag over his shoulder, set his palm on the warm glass, and told himself a lie that tasted good: We've done enough. It will hold.
He took the midnight round.
By the time he reached the far pole, the wind had gone petty and mean. It plucked at the lamp line and made the glass click. He bent to shield a stubborn flame and felt the hair on his arms rise, not from cold.
Something on the other side of the fence breathed when he breathed.
He stood very still. The flame wavered, then sharpened, as if bracing too.
"Not tonight," he said, to the fence, the sea, the things that wait. He moved on, lamp to lamp, a point of light walking the edge of a mouth.
When he returned to the square, the priestess had set her lamp inside the shrine to share its heat with the big lantern. She was gone. People were asleep behind doors that didn't lock. The air listened.
Kaelen sat on the shrine step with the rag around his neck, watching the flame. He thought about leaving. He thought about what it would take to reach a Beacon road and how far a boy with a satchel of wicks could walk without getting eaten.
He thought about nothing. Thinking invites teeth.
The wick sighed. He leaned closer. The flame pulled thin, then fattened, exactly like a tired man trying not to fall asleep.
"Don't," he said, his breath fogging the pane. "Not tonight."
The lantern obeyed for another minute. Then the wind went out of the world. The faint sounds all villages make, snoring, buckets shifting, a cat deciding not to fight, fell through a trapdoor.
Kaelen looked up.
The lamps along the line didn't flicker. They simply ceased.
Dark ran down the poles like spilled ink. The square emptied of glow so fast it made his eyes water. The big lantern in the shrine guttered. He reached for the cap with both hands and heard, very close and very polite, a whisper in a voice he knew was no one's.
Finally.
The flame went out.
The dark introduced itself.
Silence pressed the air flat. Kaelen's hands stayed on the lantern cap because his body couldn't decide what else to do. Then the square spoke in another language: cloth dragging over stone, nails picking at wood, something large exhaling where no chest should be.
He didn't run. Not because he was brave. Because running in that kind of dark wasn't movement; it was donation.
He pulled the cap, fumbled for the wick, found it with numb fingers, and struck steel to stone. Sparks kissed his thumb. Nothing caught.
Oil, his mind said. Oil, then wick, then breathe. His mind sounded like the priestess when she was tired.
Something brushed the shrine's back wall. He heard the scrape of bone on grit. He didn't look. He poured by feel, the measured tilt, the smell that was half comfort and half sick. He could hear Old Sera in his head: Don't spill. Oil is money. Oil is winter.
He struck again. The shard threw a miserable orange. The wick tried to live. Something leaned into the glow and erased it.
Kaelen's breath shortened. He set his palm flat on the glass and forced himself to speak like the priestess did when the lamps misbehaved. "Up," he said. "Wake."
Nothing.
He closed his eyes, not helpful, but less insulting than staring into blank, and reached for whatever strange trick made lamps listen around him. He thought of the line, of the kids who slept behind it, of Old Sera's cracked lens, of the priestess's small lamp steadying the square. He thought of the way hands felt after a day of turning screws and changing wicks. He thought of leaving and of not leaving.
"Up," he said again, and something inside his chest opened like a hand unclenching.
Light crawled out of his palm. Not a blaze, a thread. It slipped through his skin and across the glass like a vein looking for a heart. It touched the wick and the wick remembered how to be a wick. Flame. Small, scared. Real.
The square showed itself one thin line at a time. A lamppost, a step, the edge of the basin. The first Shade's face leaned to that line, no features, just a soft impression, like a thumb in wet clay. Behind it, more shapes stacked, heads tilted, patient.
"Fine," Kaelen said. His body stopped shaking. His mouth remembered its job. "Form a line like everyone else."
He lifted the lantern. The flame stretched, then thickened. It licked the glass but didn't smoke. The nearest Shade reached. The light touched its hand. The hand wasn't there anymore.
They didn't scream. They never did. Screamers were human.
The first two slid in and thinned. The third tried to go under the light as if light had height. Kaelen swung the lantern low. The cage rang off something hard. The shape folded the way paper does when it meets fire: briefly surprised, then gone.
He backed up until his calves hit the shrine step. The ring of light around him gathered itself and held. More shapes pressed in. Some had long arms. Some had too many joints. He kept the lantern moving just enough to break hands before they closed.
"Any time," he whispered to no one, or to a god that didn't take night duty. "Any time would be great."
The air changed. Not a wind. A weight. The press at the edge of the light went quiet, the way men go quiet when someone important enters a room they'd been laughing in.
A figure stood across the square where the line had run. It wasn't close enough for the lamp to find its edges. It was tall, and the dark seemed glad to be near it. In its chest, something flickered like a lantern that had forgotten what direction to burn.
Kaelen's mouth turned dry. He didn't lift the lantern. He didn't lower it. His arms knew the work and did it while the rest of him listened to the feeling crawling down his spine.
The figure didn't step in. It waited. The Shades leaned forward then held back like dogs on a leash.
"Why?" Kaelen asked, before he could decide not to.
The figure tilted its head as if considering a language it hadn't used in years.
It didn't answer with a voice. The answer was a sensation, recognition, cold and precise. It felt like someone setting a key on a table and pushing it toward you with one finger.
Something in Kaelen's chest, the same thing that had made the wick remember, twitched toward that key. He flinched hard enough to make the flame wobble.
"No," he said, out loud, to himself. He took a step forward instead of away. The light pushed, and the nearest Shades turned to soot. The figure didn't move.
"Get in line," Kaelen said, and didn't recognize the sound of his voice.
For a single breath the tall shape inclined, not bowing. Not to him. To the light. It was worse than if it had laughed.
Then it was gone. No step. No fade. Just absence where presence had been, and a rush at the edge as the Shades, suddenly ownerless, forgot discipline and died stupid in the light.
When they stopped coming, Kaelen stood in a square of ash and glass with a lantern that steadied like a heart that had survived a sprint. His knees tried to stop holding him. He told them no. He lowered the lantern to the basin and set it there with shaking care.
He waited for the wind to come back. He waited for sounds that weren't wrong.
Doors opened by inches. Faces peered. The priestess crossed the square, lamp in hand, ribbon crooked, hair pulled loose by worry. She took in the ash, the glass, the way Kaelen's palms still glowed through the smudges.
"What happened?" she asked. Quiet. Not the kind that hides. The kind that holds.
He slid down the shrine step until he sat on the stone, lantern beside him, light running out of him in thin threads like nerves calming.
"They turned it off," he said. "All of it. At once."
"Who?"
He opened his mouth to say no one and closed it because the lie tasted cheap. He looked at the line where the tall shape had stood. He swallowed.
"Something that knew how," he said.
Behind her, the village began to breathe again. Lamps were relit. People started counting each other. Old Sera sat on her stool and cried the small, angry cries that keep you human.
The priestess crouched. "Can you stand?"
"Yes."
He didn't. She offered her hand. He took it and felt the way her little lamp knit with the tired thread in his chest. It was like when two songs share a beat.
"You held," she said.
"So did the shrine," he said, because credit matters, and because saying anything else would make his mouth remember the shape of a sob.
She looked at the basin, at the scorched lines cut in the stone. She traced one with a finger and hissed when the warmth bit. "You shouldn't have been able to do that."
"I'm aware."
People began to gather. Whispers did what they do. Born from light.Cursed.Saved us.Brought it. All true enough from the right angle.
The priestess straightened, her voice filling the square without rising. "Inside," she told the crowd. "Oil and blankets. We'll count the homes at dawn."
No one argued with a woman holding a lamp that steady.
She looked back at Kaelen. "You're not taking the rest of the round."
"Good," he said, and his knees decided to agree.
She helped him to the hall. He lay on a bench and watched the lamp above him burn like it had learned fear and decided to work harder. He closed his eyes and saw the figure at the edge of the square and the terrible courtesy of its nod.
Sleep took him the way water takes a dropped stone.
He woke to a hand on his shoulder and a chain's soft clink. A man stood over him in a long coat with iron stitched into the seams. The lantern on his forearm was bigger than any in the village and burned deep blue, steady as a held breath.
"Kaelen Vire," the man said. His voice had the quiet of someone who had nothing to prove to rooms. "I'm Aethryn Vale."
The priestess stood behind him, face set. "Dawnbringer," she said by way of explanation.
Aethryn's eyes took in the hall, the lamp, the tired boy on the bench, the way shadows gathered and reconsidered near him. Then Aethryn looked at the shrine through the open doorway. He looked a long time.
"What happened?" he asked.
Kaelen's mouth tried three wrong answers and found the fourth. "You tell me," he said. "You're the expert."
Aethryn's mouth almost smiled and didn't. "Stand, if you can."
Kaelen stood. The room tilted and then remembered how to be a room.
Aethryn nodded once, as if that decided something he hadn't wanted decided. "Pack a bag," he said. "You're coming to the Capital."
The priestess flinched, not because she disagreed, but because the word Capital always hurts a little when it's said in a room with a leaky roof.
Kaelen shook his head. "I have rounds. I have—"
"You have a choice," Aethryn said, and it wasn't unkind. "Stay and let them argue about you until the dark learns your shape. Or come where the arguing is louder and the lamps don't go out when something says finally."
Kaelen looked at the priestess. She didn't nod. She didn't shake her head. She held his eyes long enough to say what she wouldn't say out loud: If you stay, you'll stand in this square every night until it kills you. If you go, you might live long enough to be useful.
"How long do I have to decide?" Kaelen asked.
Aethryn tipped his head toward the door. Beyond it, the lamp line wavered and held. "Until next nightfall," he said. "But the Gloom didn't bow to me."
Kaelen's skin went cold. "It bowed?"
Aethryn's blue flame didn't change. "It did something that looked like manners. I don't care for it."
Kaelen stared at his hands. The glow under the skin had gone quiet, but it was still there, like a word you hadn't said yet.
He swallowed. "All right."
"Good," Aethryn said. "Eat. Sleep if you can. We leave at noon."
The priestess squeezed Kaelen's shoulder and stepped away to tell the village what needed telling. Aethryn went to the shrine with his lantern and stood there alone, watching the basin as if it might decide to speak.
Kaelen sat again, bag half-packed in his head. He looked at the lamp and pictured streets that didn't stink and towers that threw light and men who wore chains on their arms because someone had to.
He didn't know if the prophecy was a blessing or a joke. He didn't know if Born from light meant anything except trouble. He only knew he was tired of waiting for the dark to introduce itself.
Noon would come. He would go. And whatever had bowed would learn a new word:
No.