The Last Starlighter

The lighthouse door groaned behind you, salt-crusted iron scraping stone. You hadn't meant to come here. Three days of walking the canal roads, avoiding this city, avoiding this moment—and yet here you were, the cold seeping through your boots, the stench of dying light thick in the air. The Keeper stood at the base of the spiral stair, a skeleton in wool, her eyes like two coals burned down to gray ash.

"Starlighter," she said, and the word scraped. "You felt it. The pulse. The failing."

You didn't answer. You could feel it—the core above, a dead weight in your chest, a hunger that ran along your bones like frost. The Abyss pressed against the city's edge, a black tide beyond the harbor walls, and it was whispering. Not words. Just the shape of surrender, warm and soft as a blanket.

The Keeper reached out, her fingers skeletal, almost touching your sleeve. "I've held the last light for forty-one years. I don't have forty-one days. Take the mantle. Or watch this city drown in dark."

The light above flickered. The floor shuddered. Somewhere below, water lapped at foundations that had held for a thousand years.