The wind had teeth that morning.
It gnawed at the ragged edges of the cliffside, howling through fractured stone and salt-brittled grass. The lighthouse loomed above like a mausoleum-derelict, desolate, yet incongruously animate, as though its bones still remembered the labor of light.
Aria stood before its rusted gate, ensnared in an uncanny stillness.
There was something oppressively ceremonial about the silence-like the world was holding its breath for a procession she couldn't see.
She stepped forward.
The gate, adorned with corroded filigree and remnants of once-ornate engravings, groaned open with a sepulchral wail. Metal kissed stone in protest, reverberating like a dirge through the marrows of the cliffs.
She crossed the threshold.
Inside, the air was a palimpsest of centuries-damp with ocean rot and the stale residue of extinguished rituals. Each footfall upon the spiral staircase summoned the creak of weary iron, as though the tower recognized her trespass and resented her ascent.
Dust motes floated in the shaft of light above, suspended like disintegrated ghosts. The staircase coiled around a hollow void so profound, it felt like time itself had gathered and stagnated within it.
Aria's fingers grazed the inner wall, trailing over calcified etchings-runes so eroded they resembled ossified wounds carved into the architecture.
Then-halfway up-she felt it.
A subtle warping of the air.
Not a breeze.
A distortion.
As if the atmosphere here had been bent, folded inward by something ancient and patient.
At the summit, the lantern chamber waited.
Or perhaps... watched.
She entered.
And the world shifted.
The lantern-dormant for decades-pulsed faintly, a preternatural glow leaking from a fractured lens. The chamber itself seemed to tilt infinitesimally, as if reality was recalibrating to accommodate something that had not yet fully arrived.
In the corner, pages fluttered.
A journal, browned and brittle, lay opened to a page smeared in something darker than ink.
She mouthed the words, but they didn't sound like her own.
A noise outside.
Delicate. Decisive.
Aria turned to the shattered glass.
He was there.
A lone figure draped in a chiaroscuro silhouette, standing at the cliff's edge like a monument sculpted from dusk. His presence was precariously still, imbued with the type of inertia that implied unimaginable violence waiting politely.
No face. Just fog.
No voice. Just knowledge.
And then-he raised his head.
Not to see her.
To acknowledge her.
Something ancient unfurled in her chest. Not fear. Something colder.
He had not come.
He had awoken.
Behind her, the light blinked out.
And a voice, sibilant and saccharine, materialized beside her ear-
You've opened it again..
Author note:
Not all dead things stay buried.
Not all lights die quietly.
And some stories?
They begin only when the truth stops sleeping.
***
The whisper clung to her ear long after the voice had faded.
She stood motionless, suspended between thought and fear, the darkness thickening around her like a second skin.
The lantern chamber, moments ago bathed in unnatural light, had returned to its original state-cold, sepulchral, and humming with residual energy.
Something had changed.
No-something had been unsealed.
Aria turned back to the journal, the pages now limp and still. Her eyes found the margins-where new ink had bled through. Fresh. Wet.
Words that hadn't been there before.
"He remembers you."
A tremor spiraled through her chest.
She hadn't written that.
Pari hadn't either.
So who had?
A sudden gust of wind sliced through the broken glass panes-
but it carried no scent of salt, no breath of ocean.
Instead, it smelled of ash.
Of burnt parchment.
Of time scorched black.
She stumbled down the stairs, hands skimming the railings, pulse galloping like it could outrun the truth chasing her.
But halfway down-
She stopped.
The walls were different now.
Once barren, they were now etched with symbols-vines of script clawing along the stone in a language her eyes rejected.
And they pulsed.
Faintly.
Like veins beneath skin.
She touched one. A mistake.
The stone hissed.
And she saw-
A room.
Not here. Not now. Somewhere else.
A boy-maybe seventeen-locked behind iron doors, whispering to something that moved in the corners of the dark. Not praying. Bargaining.
And then she was back.
Gasping. Clutching the wall.
The tower groaned.
Beneath her feet, a low mechanical shudder rumbled upward-
like ancient gears beginning to turn after decades of slumber.
A sound came from below.
Not footsteps.
Chains.
Dragged across stone.
Something was ascending.
Aria backed up, eyes fixed on the stairwell spiral below.
And then-she saw him again.
Not at the cliffs.
Not behind her.
But below.
On the stairs.
Head tilted back. Face still cloaked in shadow.
But his voice?
It rose to meet her like smoke.
"You were never supposed to come here alone."