They say the first sun did not die.
It shattered.
When the shards fell, people learned to live by lamps. Cities pulled tight around beacons. Roads bent to follow lines of flame. Children grew up knowing the sound of glass chiming in the wind and the taste of smoke on bread.
And yet the old words survived. Not in books, books burn, but in mouths. Firelight stories, traded for sleep.
When the last lantern gutters, one born from light will rise.
If they carry us, dawn returns.
If they fail, the night learns our names.
No one agreed who wrote it. Priests said a saint. Lampers said a drunk. Lightkeepers didn't say at all.
On a winter patrol, a Lightkeeper walked alone through a gutted hamlet where the Gloom had pressed in and never fully left. The houses leaned inward like tired men. Smoke still floated from doorways that had no doors. Her lantern hung from a chain on her forearm, its glow steady and close.
She stepped over a broken cart. Something hissed under the boards, then went still. She did not look down. In the Gloom, glances are invitations.
The wind shifted. Her lantern's pane fogged, then cleared. She paused at the hollow of a shrine, stone basin, black with old oil, and lifted the lantern to see.
Scrapes scored the walls. As if something with too many limbs had tried to climb out.
Then she heard it. Not footsteps. Not the wet slide of a Shade. A breath.
She lowered the lantern. Light pooled across ashes. At the very center of the basin, beneath a burned cloth, something gave a faint reply: a glow the size of her palm, pulsing to the rhythm of a small, stubborn heart.
Her first thought was simple and wrong. A trap.
The cloth was scorched, edges fused to the stone. Lines of heat had melted into shapes—sigils she didn't know, circles within circles, a ring of lines like rays. She reached with a gloved hand and the heat licked her leather, not burning, just insisting. She pulled the cloth back.
A child lay there. New. Quiet. Barely crying, as if even sound might draw teeth from the dark. His skin caught the lantern light and returned it, not bright, not blinding, just sure.
Behind her, the Gloom moved. It always moved at the edge, like an ocean you couldn't see but felt in your bones. Tonight it pressed closer. It knew the rules. It knew she held something it wanted.
She set the lantern on the shrine lip and slid her hands under the child. The glow pooled up her wrists, climbed the chain to the lantern, and the lantern answered, brightening without oil.
From the lane beyond the ruined fences came the soft scuff of many feet. Shades do not breathe, but they will scratch stone with fingernails just to see who flinches. She didn't.
"Quiet," she said to the child, as if either of them could manage that now.
She lifted her lantern. Light spilled across the lane like fresh water. The nearest shapes froze, skin slick with shadow. When the light touched them, they rippled and thinned. One surged anyway. She swung the lantern in a short, ugly arc. The cage struck head and light struck core. The shape fell into ash.
More came. She did not count. Counting is for daylight.
The shrine's old bowl hummed, low and strange. The glow in the child pulsed harder, matching the tempo of her breath. She drew a circle with her lantern, setting the light at her feet into a steady ring. The dark leaned against it like a dog against a door.
For a crooked second the whole hamlet seemed to tilt, houses sagging, fences slanting, stars gone. Only the ring held. In that ring stood a woman, a lantern, and a child who did not cry.
The pressure broke. The fence beyond the lane collapsed inward with a wet crack. Something larger than a Shade slid past, tall enough to take the roof with it. She didn't watch it. She pushed. Lantern high, child tight to her chest, she stepped out of the shrine and walked.
Light does not run. It goes where it must and is present.
The ring moved with her. The shapes broke and burned. By the time she reached the road, the wind had changed again. The night felt cheated. The woman did not look back.
At the ridge, she paused. In the field below, the Gloom rose like a tide, then fell away, leaving only frost and ash. At the shrine it had gathered again. A shape stood there, tall and wrong, its chest flickering with a caged, black light like a lantern turned inside out. It did not chase. It only bowed its head the width of a breath.
The woman did not bow back.
She carried the child toward the nearest line of town lamps, their small halos stuttering in the wind. Behind her, the hamlet cooled. In the cloth's scorched sigils, a single rune kept smoldering, as if unwilling to agree with the dark.
They reached the lamp line before dawn. The poles leaned, the glass was cloudy, and the fuel smelled like old fish. To people who lived under a Beacon's sweep, that line would look like a joke. To those who slept behind it, it was a wall.
A watchman in a patched coat stepped out from behind a brazier with a pike, then lowered it when he saw the chain on her forearm. He stared at the child and forgot to speak.
"Water," the Lightkeeper said.
He ran. She stood under the nearest lamp and let its weak glow touch the child. It did more than that, it braided with the little pulse in his chest. For a moment the lamp brightened, then steadied as if someone had adjusted a valve no one could see.
The watchman returned with a bucket and a woman in a shawl. The woman had a priest's ribbon at her throat, the sort you earn for lighting lamps in the rain for twenty winters.
"What did you bring through the line?" the priestess asked. Not unkind. Not kindly.
"A child," the Lightkeeper said.
The priestess looked past her at the road, at the dead dark. "From there?"
"Yes."
"It will be hungry."
"He is." She shifted her grip. The child had fallen asleep with his fist wrapped around the leather seam of her glove. He glowed less now. The lantern on her arm had taken some of it, greedy and grateful both.
They went to a hall near the brazier. Someone lit two more lamps. The Lightkeeper set her lantern on the table, never on the floor; bad luck, and unwrapped the child. The scorched cloth made the priestess hiss between her teeth.
"Those marks," the priestess said. "Who wrote them?"
"No one living," the Lightkeeper said.
The watchman hovered, as watchmen do when something important is happening that does not need them. The priestess waved him out. When the door shut, the room felt smaller and warmer. The child woke, blinked, and reached for the nearest glow. It happened to be the priestess's little lamp.
She smiled despite herself and slid it closer. "Hungry, I said. But not for milk."
"What for, then?" the Lightkeeper asked, though she knew.
"Light," the priestess said. "Like the rest of us."
They fed him, milk first, then a fingertip of warm oil from the lamp's pan, which made the Lightkeeper frown and the priestess shrug. "We used to do worse to live," she said. "Don't tell the archivists."
When the child was full, he slept again. The Lightkeeper closed her lantern's door until the flame was a narrow line. She did not look at the priestess when she asked the next question.
"What will you call him?" the priestess said.
"I brought him," the Lightkeeper said. "I don't own him."
"That is not what I asked."
She looked at the cloth. The sigils had stopped smoldering, but the pattern stayed. Circles inside circles. Lines like rays. A single notch at the edge of one ring, as if someone had tried to break it and failed.
"Names have work to do," the priestess said softly. "Give him a small one. A name that can grow."
The Lightkeeper tasted a handful of old words and chose the one that didn't make a promise she couldn't keep. "Kaelen," she said.
The priestess nodded, as if that meant the lamps would burn one more winter. "Kaelen will do."
They wrote nothing down. Paper draws attention. The Lightkeeper wrapped the child again and stood. The priestess touched her sleeve.
"The prophecy," the priestess said, not as a question.
"Words people say when they don't want to talk about fear," the Lightkeeper said.
"Or hope," the priestess said.
The Lightkeeper did not answer. She took up her lantern and stepped back into the cold.
At the door she paused, not by habit but because the air had changed. It happens sometimes, a thin breath passes through the line and every flame leans the same way. The lamps on the street ticked in their glass. Somewhere far off, a Beacon turned and sent its wide blade of light across roofs and frost. For a heartbeat the whole town brightened.
In that brightening, the Lightkeeper saw the road she'd walked, the ridge beyond it, and something standing very still near the broken shrine. Tall. Waiting. The Beacon turned again and the vision snapped. The lamps went back to their regular, stubborn glow.
She checked the child. He slept, fist still curled. The lamp on the table made a small sound like relief.
Outside, the watchman had gathered three more men around the brazier. They had the look of people who wanted a story and a reason. She gave them neither.
"Keep your line tight," she said. "Replace the glass that fogs. Oil after sundown. Don't pray at the lamps. They're not gods. They're work."
They nodded as if the words were a blessing.
She left before dawn, lantern low to save fuel. The road out of town bent toward the Inner Capital, where the streets wear light like jewelry and the towers throw it like spears. She would file a report. It would be read and filed under things that do not happen.
Behind her, in a hall by a brazier, a child slept under a burned cloth, and a lamp that had always flickered burned a little steadier.
People would tell it differently later. Some would say the Lightkeeper found a star and wrapped it in rags. Some would say she carried a curse. Some would refuse to say anything, as if silence could confuse the dark.
In time, the child would walk under lamp lines that leaned and listen to old men argue about whose oil was best and why the Beacon turned slower in winter. He would learn how to trim a wick and when to shut a door. He would learn what a whisper in the Gloom means when it knows your name.
But that is another chapter. For now, there was a lamp, a name, and a night that did not get what it wanted.
The night would wait. It always does.