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The opalescent flower meadow hides a moon Goddess, reticent and lonely.
The lighthouse shelters a Fae, a corpse of blue fire who lights the way for others, no matter the darkness.
The temperament of their lives is such: like a shadow, one will welcome it, the other regret it, and the third not even notice it.
A whisper of kuuvahki. He almost doesn’t notice her, but he is luckily attuned enough to the elemental energy that he is able to stop himself before he collides with her.
“Lightkeeper.” She places her small hand on his chest. “Stay with me for a while.”
He was about to leave the cave of flowers — Miss Columbina’s private abode, or so he figured. Yet she stands in front of him, teleported in a whisper of floral wind. It takes him a moment to comprehend what is happening. He is alone with her. He is being asked to stay with her, though for what is not clear.
There is a choice to be made.
Outside, beyond the rock and earth, he sees that dawn has not risen yet. The licks and shadows of nightfall dance in auroras and creep around as mist over the land.
“Is there a problem?” He decides to ask. “Should I go get the Traveler?”
“Problem? No. At least none that we must deal with at present.”
“Then, forgive me if this is rude, what is it you need me for?”
It seems a fair question.
Yet it troubles her enough that he feels guilty for asking her. There is the slightest furrow in her brow, a twinge of uncertainty he never saw during their earlier conversation with the others around.
“Come with me,” she implores after a while, with no explanation on the matter.
He lets her grab him by his arm, then he follows after.
She pulls him back into the cave where the flowers breathe with their faint phosphorescence, alive and pliable in the ground in restless bloom. She reclines high among them on a crescent moon edifice as though it were the most natural place in the world, where she belongs, and the petals bend beneath her without protest, releasing their fragrance into the air like incense.
He takes the less vulnerable position, leaning against the moon carving, a knee bent, the chill seeping through his uniform, which has him burying his face in his high collar.
Silence roots itself between them, but it is not empty — rather, it thrums, as if the flowers themselves are listening.
He decides to talk for her, given she has not said a word herself.
“Your flowers are beautiful,” he tells her, hoping it will elicit a reaction.
It does not.
He clears his throat and tries another topic.
“So. You know I am a Lightkeeper? How peculiar it is, to know one’s duty so clearly, and yet never feel it fulfilled. I banish spirits, and they return. I scold them, and they persist. I am reminded of a host who invites guests only so he may throw them out, again and again, until the evening itself becomes endless.”
As he speaks, he lets his eyes move to her in fragments, in stolen moments between words. The sharp tilt of her jaw when the light catches. The way strands of her hair have snared a few petals, holding them captive. Her hand brushing over the flowers as if testing whether they are real, or whether she is.
There’s an indifference about her that feels deliberate, as though she is aware of every glance, permitting it. Even without sight.
Do gods feel loneliness?
Does she feel suffocated in this cave, buried from the moon that loves her?
“It must be a burden, to be so entirely regarded. I imagine even the flowers watch you without mercy, though perhaps you have become used to such inspection. For myself, I find the dead far more discreet in their attentions.”
The kuuvahki around her pulses, like a frail, failing heartbeat. Out of courtesy, he does not question her fading life essence.
“You must be lonely. Out this far.”
He assumes she will not speak to him — which is fine with him, as he prefers silence. The quiet of the graveyard. The ebb and crash of waves upon the lighthouse shoreline. A lifetime ago, it was the emptiness of being as close to death as possible while still kept alive, each breath liquid darkness, any flicker of hope and light snuffed out; he, a candle burnt down to the wick with inky wax melted all around him in a coffin.
Given that he is essentially conversing with himself, he continues, “I do wonder, how do you normally obtain nourishment?”
“Moonchanter Lauma has the animals deliver me food. Or sometimes she comes herself.”
Oh. Oh, she spoke. To him. He didn’t anticipate that.
He blinks at her, sapphire flames licking at the edges of his vision. “Oh? Do you never venture out yourself?”
She stretches her legs on the curve of the moon carving. “Mm. Not anymore.”
Not anymore, implying she once did, and he vaguely recalls the legends of this Moon Goddess, fragmented tales from the Frostmoon Scions, statues of this lady’s likeness across the land. How she abandoned her followers and their greed. It gets told slightly biased each time he hears the tale, some are bitter while others plead for forgiveness.
He would ask her for the truth, but to him, it does not matter enough to bother her over.
His lantern rattles on his belt, disturbed by malignant energies.
“Ah. I am afraid I must take my leave. The Wild Hunt is gathering power somewhere close by.”
To not make a spectacle out of his departure, he offers her a courteous bow with an arm behind his back — formal and proper, head lowered in respect for her. She is a goddess, even as a recluse. He does not demand a farewell from her, gathering his lantern and polearm and turning from her, marching into the field of ethereal flowers.
He inhales a deep breath. It smells of clean frost and narcotic moon nectar, and he ponders, is that her scent, too?
She chases him across the meadow of those flowers after some time, as though it took her a while to decide, and he turns around at hearing the thud of her bare feet in the soil.
“Flins. That is your name, isn’t it?”
“Yes?”
“If I tire of this loneliness,” she begins, then hesitates, but he waits for however long it takes her — the cerulean flowers around blend into hues of bone-white, then indigo, then return to their usual bluish-moonlit radiance. “If I tire of this loneliness, Mister Lightkeeper, may I come to you?”
He lifts her hand to his lips, and with his eyelids closed, graces a kiss upon her icy skin. “Of course, Miss Columbina. Call upon me in your hour of need, and I will be at your service. Just as you were at mine.”
Her fingers interlace with his, to hold, lightly.
The field of flowers hums, sings, flares with brightness, then quiets and dims all at once, as though afraid of being known.
He hears her singing in the shallows of dark waters.
“You have an enchanting voice, Miss Columbina.”
Naked skin gleaming with a luster from within, perhaps rooted in her bones. Or blood. Spine visible through a translucent body. He has seen nude bodies, of course, but they tend to be dead ones. Lifeless. Ones he needs to bury. The lady who stands in the undulating sea has a radiance he believes would befit the heavens, for the brittle life he senses in her would not last on earth. The sky cries a light rain over her. It ripples into the water which laps gently at her hips, most of her hidden under her thick hair. The lace veil that shields her closed eyes is all she kept on.
He is beseeched to join her in bathing and so, as he promised, he obeys.
He wakes to find himself not alone, but with Miss Columbina sitting on his modest bed with her legs bent under her. The touches in his dreams; those were not dreams at all, it was her, caressing his face, playing with his hair. An omen. Or a summons.
There is an ache, rooted deep and needy. It is not entirely his. Her, pulsing into him with her divinity.
“I am not human,” he warns her, lest she get disappointed.
“I know. That is why I like being around you.”
“If you are after what I presume that you are, then I would suggest a human for it. They partake in such carnal indulgence for leisure often.”
The yawning spasm of loneliness could be remedied with physical closeness, or so he learned from the humans. Yet he is far from knowledgeable with the art of intimacy. At most he has witnessed lovers cling to each other in death — their souls unwilling to let go, to drift into the afterlife that would separate them. He tends to let them linger longer than other spirits. Out of mercy, or pity, or pathetic sympathy, he does not know, for he has never loved and thus does not understand it.
It is unfathomable, wonderfully mortal. Out of his experience.
“You said I could come to your home whenever I wanted,” she reminds him, as if she needs to defend herself. As if she has offended him somehow. Under the crossed lace that veils her eyelids, he notices flakes of stardust glittering on her dark lashes. “Have I intruded, Lightkeeper? Am I not welcome?”
“You are most welcome,” he assures her, swallowing what he thinks must be his inhuman heart after. It tastes of blood and moon-kissed ocean waves. “Miss Columbina, I must ask — what is it you are here for? I admit I am a bit confused.”
“To touch.”
“Touch — ?”
“You.”
“To touch me?”
“You look cold,” she murmurs, placing her hand on the gray undershirt he has on. Most often it is hidden under his uniform, made of a soft and warm material to keep the chill of death and long winters off. “Are you cold? I wondered about this. I thought perhaps you wore those layers because your kind suffers the seasons differently, but I see now it is not the seasons that trouble you. It is solitude. It clings sharper than frost.”
“I am not troubled by solitude,” he counters, though it comes out weaker than intended.
Her palm lingers, cool as riverstone, pressing just enough to his collarbone that he can feel the faint tremor of her unrestrained fascination rather than her warmth. She smooths her fingers down the fabric, as if cataloguing some strange artifact. It makes him bite down on his tongue, the lower and lower her hand travels.
It is quite something to be touched, and for it to be her —
Close to surreal.
He stares at her as she leisurely twirls his long hair around a finger, the bluish strands at her mercy.
“Miss. I am not familiar with. Anatomy. Of these bodies. I shall say. Yours nor mine.”
“That is fine,” she soothes, tugging at the hem of his shirt. He obliges her, and with her assistance, pulls the aged article of clothing over his head and throws it down onto the floor. “I am not familiar with these bodies either. Not that I can remember. We can learn together. Or you can pretend I am not here and forget I was, once I leave.”
“Nonsense,” he scoffs, half-disbelief, half-humor, “I said I would be at your service, and so I will be.”
If he could see her irises and pupils, he wonders — what color would she look at him with? Would there be a glint, a shimmer to betray her emotions? Questions left for lonelier nights, he decides.
She lays beside him, throws the wool blanket over them both, so that he is trapped under it with her.
“Your bed is comfortable, if a bit small,” she sighs.
“I would have thought you’d have some godly place to rest.”
“I usually sleep on a moon fragment. This is better. Warmer, softer.”
“Oh.”
There are reports he needs to write, he is certain. Or a patrol too dangerous for humans that he needs to take over. It so happens that this Goddess has overwritten his rules, that his bed and softest blanket have cocooned him in with her.
His hand is guided to between her thighs. He is touching her intimately. There is no excitement or ardor in either of them; he is focused on obedience and she is lost in authority. Heat and slick and darkness shroud their movements, their soft noises. He does not know what he is caressing or fondling as his hands glide over her, across her, but she leads him with a hold on his wrist.
Their legs tangle together, the blanket twisted around their bodies.
Thin, frail fingers tug at the waistband of his trousers, and he stiffens, blinking incredulously at her.
“Flins,” she whispers. On his lips. Then his throat. “Do not be afraid. Of what I am about to do. Okay?”
“There is little in this world that can frighten me, Goddess,” he huffs, unfamiliar heat warming him from within. He is accustomed to the cold flames that flare within him when he is banishing spirits or in battle, not this — this is a rush of blood, of conflicted and confused emotions. “Whatever pleases you, I am glad to do.”
With her hands braced on his bare chest she pushes him down, onto his back, so that she can then crawl on and straddle him.
She dissipates her dress with a snap, the fabric disappearing into particles of light. Then she undoes her braids, loosening her hair into a wild cascade of soft obsidian.
He has never seen such beauty. Imagine a remnant of the enigmatic moon itself, alive and breathing.
“I am not from this world, O’ Lightkeeper.” Her spine arches. It is like communion, touching her. “The false sky; the hidden true moon, I belong somewhere I have no memory of.”
He discerns that information as well as he is able to, with her naked and writhing on him.
“I will be an awful lover,” he chokes out once he understands what it is she is aiming to do with his body.
There is a hint of mischief in how the corner of her mouth curves. Peculiar. “I shall be the judge of that, hm?”
In full bloom, delicate and ethereal. Moon flowers infect the small bedframe, the metal ceiling and the floor of the lighthouse. There is little for him to do but submit to her whims and keep her secrets like they belong to him, like they are his.
He finds her dancing alone in the graveyard.
“Miss Columbina, you are a beautiful dancer.”
There is no verbal response from her, only the curve of her lips — a smile, just for him. Graceful, she twirls and leans and whirls around with an elegance befitting her nature. That of a celestial being, of the moon that hides herself in the loam of night. He loosens his grip on his polearm, entranced. There is no danger. He thought it was rampant ghosts, vengeful spirits, the Wild Hunt about to take form, but it is just her, sprouting phosphorescent flowers with each floating step.
He pierces his ichor-slicked weapon into the ground, and watches her, smiling.
Their chance encounters in his corner of living — the cemetery, which he would like to note, is not fitting for her — have become so commonplace, it is stranger if she is not around somewhere. Whether dangling her legs off the pinnacle of the lighthouse, or floating in the fogged air as he tends to the graves. Or sometimes, he will notice her at the shoreline, observing the spirits of fallen Lightkeepers like she doesn’t understand them, or does not want to.
Then, even more rare, she will lay in his bed as he reads, meditates, or sleeps.
It is too late to question the why of any of this, he supposes.
—
“You do whatever I ask of you.”
“Should I not?”
A creature of unsettling stillness, if he were a fae that gets unsettled. Pale limbs laid or curled in a perfected manner, hair smooth and dress unwrinkled, no matter how she buries herself in a blanket or against him. The bed is hers as much as it is his, though she never steals much space, just his attention or a blanket if she is bored or seeks to hide.
He flips another page in his book as he waits for her. The aroma of sweat and pleasure cling to him from earlier, the bite of her sharp teeth and the insistence of her nails marking crescent moons into his blanched skin.
“I don’t know,” she admits, softly. Then smiles, ever so faintly, as gentle as moonlight itself. “I like it though, do not misunderstand me. I am simply waiting for you to ask me for something in return. It must be quite the favor for you to delay this long.”
“I need no favor,” he tells her, hoping he sounds sincere. How is one to be at ease with a Goddess, though? How could a mere Fae measure to such a level of power and grandeur the lady in his bed possesses? A baffling conundrum. He sighs. “I promise, if I wanted something from you, Miss Columbina — I would have asked at our first meeting.”
“Then I do not understand.”
“Understand — ?”
“If you need nothing from me, then what do you spend time with me for?”
“You ask me to.”
The inner bunker of the lighthouse hushes around them at that, the sound of the sea muffled by thick walls of metal. The lantern flame gutters once, then steadies, throwing shadows across the curved ceiling of the bunker. Her hair, dark as crooked branches, spills over the rough blankets; his hand hesitates above it, as though to touch would be to sin.
He was gone a while, the last time he left was to handle a Wild Hunt disruption more aggressive than he planned for. So he does not know if he is still permitted to place his hand upon her, those wants of hers could have changed.
“I do not keep company easily,” he continues, voice low, careful. “I do not offer it without cause. You asked, and I came. That is reason enough.”
Her indifference lingers on him — cool, detached, the way moonlight clings to glass without ever warming it.
“I am in exile,” she confesses.
“From where?”
“The Frostmoon Scions. The Fatui Harbingers. Whatever moon I was born on.”
He coughs, sputtering on the herbal tea he was sipping on. Thyme. “The Harbingers? Those Harbingers? The Eleven ones?”
She takes the cup from him and finishes the tea herself. “Yes. What other ones are there? I was with them for a time. I left after I did what I promised I would. It took a lot of my power to do what the Tsaritsa asked of me. So I am recuperating.”
“Goodness. You must be powerful indeed, to have been in their ranks.”
“Hm? Does power matter to you?”
The question disorients him, like stepping onto a stair that isn’t there. He studies the rim of the empty cup in her hands, his cup, that her mouth is on, searching for his words.
“I have watched too many spirits tear themselves ragged in pursuit of power, as though it were a lantern they could grasp and keep aflame,” he says at last, tone even, but tinged with weariness. “Power flickers, it empties, it leaves one hollow. Rerir is a good lesson of this. What matters to me is gentleness, Miss Columbina. It is the rarer strength, and the one I strive for when I am not on the battlefield.”
The words drift between them, suspended as motes of dust in the lantern’s glow. The damp in the air presses close, carrying the salt-bitter smell of the sea and the faint tang of rust from the corroded pipes along the wall.
She shifts where she lies, the fabric of her pale dress sighing against the coarse wool of his blanket, and regards him with that same impenetrable stillness. Then, without a word, she lets her body tip into his, cool as riverwater, her head finding its rest against his chest.
He stills, hardly daring to breathe. The sensation of her hair spreads across him, smelling faintly of fragrant moonflowers and something metallic — blood, perhaps, or starlight from Celestia itself. His hand, uncertain, hovers before at last lowering to her shoulder, a careful anchor. She exhales, slow and measured, and for the first time in his memory, face and veil hidden in what could be mistaken for shyness.
“Power does not last, either,” she mumbles. “It dies like a star.”
How lonely she must be, he muses. The kuuvahki in and around her is a dying pulse. It lurches, it screams at him to save her, but there is nothing within his capacity to do for her.
If only. It could be he simply needs to think longer, read more, he may come upon how to at least lessen her misery.
“You may sleep, if you are tired,” he whispers, sighing after. “I will keep watch over you, Miss. Nothing will bother us out this far.”
Curled in his lap, she sleeps. Or he thinks she does. He holds her shoulder firmer and closes his eyelids, sees a sky cracked like broken glass, the moon pouring itself through the fissures, endless starfall that could be the sadness of some greater, unseen cosmic entity.
Outside, a foghorn groans across the black sea; inside, his lantern hums with its small blue flame. And he, fae sentinel of graveyards and storms, sits unmoving as a shrine, holding the goddess who has chosen, inexplicably, to sleep upon him.
He shuts the book in his hand, exhaling ice-mist.
In fae language, he mutters under his breath: ‘If there is no light for us, then let us rest together in darkness.’
Slender fingers twitch against his hand, as if to hold onto him, but then thought better of it.
He is out fishing when she finds him.
“I thought you would be lonely, dear Ratnik.”
She lays on a flat outstretch of basalt rock near where the waves lap, seafoam kissing her longest strands of dark hair. He says nothing to her; she looks asleep, supine under the foggy sky. Moonlight cuts through the thick clouds to grace her, to cast pearlescent light upon her skin and dress the likes he has never seen in his existence. There is something about her, ethereal and miserable, that has him unfocused from each tug on his line, each pull on the rod handle. He asks her questions she sometimes answers and sometimes ignores, and tells her all the stories he’s never had time to tell anyone.
He catches no fish that night.
The lighthouse is not just where he lives. It is where he performs maintenance on his lantern, sharpens his weapon, meditates to cleanse the residual spiritual energy that lingers in him before it rots to insanity.
It could be a home. He has never considered it as such, truly, but with a visitor — a goddess — ambling about the small space, he realizes he should have at least cleaned all the dust and scattered books about. In the lantern-lit darkness, she glows, like a Luonnotar, her dress and ribbons fluttering around her like wings.
“You collect gemstones?”
“Sparingly,” he tells her, sharpening the blade at the end of his polearm. Whetstone on metal, again and again. The repetitive scraping sound invades their silence. “Careful with them, if you would. Some of those gems are as old as the Nod-Krai you and I were born into.”
“Hm,” she hums idly, but her touch is careful, considerate. Each gem in her hold is handled with utmost reverence. “Oh. This one is pretty.”
He glances over at her. “Ah. That is a bracelet a fallen comrade of mine had planned to give his wife, upon his return.”
“I guess he never got to give it to her?”
“No. Even worse, she fell ill at hearing of his demise and succumbed to death herself a month after he died. Heartache is a merciless killer.”
Cases and cases of cared for gemstones line the place he resides in, shelves on walls and tables stacked with them. It has been hundreds of years, yet he recalls the memory of how he discovered each.
The bracelet she plucked is delicate yet burdened with history, silver links wrought fine as frost-laced vines, each clasped around a jewel — moonstone, sapphire, garnet — their surfaces dulled by years, yet still catching the lanternlight like droplets of frozen dawn.
He sets the whetstone aside at last and reaches for the piece in her hand. “Come closer, Miss Columbina.”
She drifts to him, and he takes her wrist with a reverence that is unintentionally prayerful. He turns it once in his palm before extending his hand toward her. His fingers, chilled from steel and salt air, are steady as he slips the bracelet over her hand. It settles against her skin with uncanny harmony, the stones flaring faintly as though remembering their first owner. She is so lithe, it dangles on her too loosely, aged beyond when it would sparkle and shine brightly.
For a moment, he allows himself to admire the sight.
“It suits you,” he murmurs. “Though you mustn’t keep it on long, however beautiful it seems. Belongings of the dead cling too tightly to their owners, they carry grief in dreadful fear, seeping into whoever wears them. One forgets one’s own pulse, one’s own breath. The trinket begins to beat in place of the heart, and by the time you notice, you are little more than an echo in someone else’s story.”
“Even a god?” She tilts her head, a reaction he has learned hints at curiosity. Her bangs fall. “I am far from mortals' common weaknesses.”
“As am I. Yet your constitution may suffer still. Mine has.”
“If you insist.”
Her expression does not change; she waits without reaction as he slips it off of her thin wrist, her silence deeper than the surf outside. Then, without hesitation or apparent thought, she gathers his hand in both of hers and presses her lips against the back of it. He is lacking his gloves, bereft of his usual uniform, donned in what he wears to rest — so he feels it.
The kiss is frigid, almost absent-minded, as though she were testing the gesture rather than offering comfort. She releases him just as quickly, unbothered, her aimless interest directed elsewhere, at other curios he possesses.
He glares intently at his hand, at where she — where he felt her lips, it feels undeserving to call it a kiss, such affection likely meaningless to a goddess.
“You did it for me, do you not remember?”
“I — I do,” he clarifies, clearing his throat. Heat flushes from his ears down to his cheekbones, then his neck. He can’t remember the last time he felt such a human-like bodily reaction. “Did you do it to me because I did it to you?”
“Yes,” she confesses. Then a breath, shared between their lips, cold and wraithlike. “Am I not allowed to?”
“You are allowed to do whatever you wish to, Miss Columbina. Though the implications — ”
“Hm?”
“If I may, I would advise only doing such a thing to those you are fond of. In the future.”
“Can I be fond of you?”
Nonplussed, he stares blankly at her. “Fond of — of me?”
She remains as unbothered as ever. Emotionless, almost. “Yes. Unless you don’t want me to, then I won’t be. I enjoy the little touches and gestures between us, however, so I would like us to be fond of each other, if that is the requirement.”
He is not any better or experienced than her in this matter, but he is quite certain that fondness is not asked for or summoned at will. Such an emotion could not be controlled like the flick of a switch, on or off. It is felt whether wanted or not. He lets the word — fond — hang between them like a thin glass buoy bobbing on dark water. The sound of it is absurdly tender, as if a polite thing had been plucked from a tea tray and set into the sea to see whether it would float. He finds himself cataloguing possibilities (rituals, phrases, the correct etiquette of affection) as one might inventory implements before trying to stitch a wound one has never seen.
“It is not an ordinance,” he says at last, voice too careful, as if trimming the edges of a confession. “Nor a debt to be paid with gestures. If fondness could be made to order, then every funeral parlour and bakery would trade in it, and none of us would know how to grieve.”
“Then teach me,” she says simply, as if asking for directions to a market. “Show me the incremental arithmetic of your little mercies. I will keep count.”
His laugh is a brief fracture of noise. “Teach you?”
She has the rather mortal indignation to frown then. “You said you’d do anything I ask of you.”
He wants to say that he cannot tutor an emotion without becoming complicit in its collapse; that to instruct another in fondness is to risk turning it into a lesson plan, all margins and footnotes. He finds himself tempted to tell her a story instead, because stories are a deadman’s promise that something unseen may be made tolerable.
Though she never looks back at him, he looks at her, often, endless. It could be forever.
“There was once a night when the Wild Hunt breached into the cemetery — claws bloodied, eyes smoldering like damp coals, and they hounded me for hours, striking the gravestones as if demanding I acknowledge them; when at last they descended I fought, not bravely, but inevitably, for they care nothing for valor, only for the spectacle of resistance, and in the struggle my lantern was struck from my hand and went rolling like some frantic animal into the dark, and I thought then — ‘yes, this must be what fondness feels like,’ chasing a light that flees you; yet I drove them back, though not by strength but by their own boredom, and when they vanished I was left with cracked glass, restless souls, and the peculiar certainty that even such enmity carries a kind of companionship, the fondness of wolves for the sheep they prey upon.”
Attentive, she listens, spread out on the metal floor of his cramped, damp, lighthouse bunker like some piece of artistry.
“Miss Columbina,” he sighs, setting the whetstone down on a moldy crate. Supplies. “Are you acquainted with such fondness?”
“That was desperation. You were afraid of letting the Hunt claim this place, then spread further. Of dying.”
“I know. So, are you?”
She, much like a goddess laid on a sacrificial altar, raises her hands into the air, proffering nothing. “Perhaps. I know what it is to be waited on by flowers and believers that never close their eyes. To be followed by shadows that lean toward me whether I wish it or not. If that persistence is fondness, then yes. I am acquainted.”
He leans heavier against the wall, feeling the rumble of thunder and waves crashing on the shore. “Then, dear Kuutar. Then you understand; you do not need me to teach you.”
On the floor, she twists until she’s on her knees, long braided hair dragging behind her as she closes in on him.
She cuts her palm on the sharpened blade of his polearm, the weapon glows delicately after, the hue of lunar snow. He panics, about to find a med kit to take care of her — to bandage the silver-blood wound, dripping in rivulets down her pale arm to her elbow, then onto the floor. It blooms into the alabaster fabric of her dress, the dark plaits of her roseate hair.
Then she smiles.
The sight is strange enough to halt him completely; she floats in front of him, legs curled in, cradling his face in her hands. Her blood is colder than any other part of her, than any glacier, it burns when it smears on his cheek. “Lightkeeper,” she murmurs, pressing her forehead to his, “I do wonder, who lights the fog of darkness when you need it?”
“Another Ratnik.”
“You traverse these lands alone, the battlefields, alone.”
He can feel it in her: she has been used, manipulated, betrayed for her power, and she does not trust him either. Whatever he tells her, she knows ahead of him. There is a preordained answer to this question, and he cannot lie to her. It has to be the truth he embraced eons ago.
“I suppose no one,” he admits, dampened. Then, to humor her, “conceivably, the gods, if they feel so inclined for a lowly fae?”
Comprehension of his meaning casts a darkness over her, a kind of helplessness he has seen in mothers of dying children. The gods must feel similar about those under them; for how is a single being meant to watch over and protect thousands? It could never be feasible, and that is why prayers go unheard and mortals are plucked off by sickness, murder, suicide. The helplessness of those alive must be far more demanding than that of the dead, he reasons.
Her silence is miserable, longer than he can withstand; the sound of the sea gnaws at the lighthouse walls, and the dripping of her blood stains the air like a metronome. He has not moved, cannot move, caught between the cold of her touch and the impossibility of her answering his question.
The lantern flame gutters in the corner, crushed under the heaviness, the fog of damp, and in its frail shimmer she seems almost not a woman, not a lost savior or uncaring deity, but an apparition, pale as the tide-foam and just as untouchable.
She leans closer, until her lips nearly brush his ear, and the scent of moon-flowers overtakes the mildew. Her voice, when it comes, is soft — almost a lullaby, almost a curse.
“Could I be your false god, Lightkeeper, the one who answers when no others will?”
False sky. False god. Lie of a moon. He has a passing thought of what about her is real, if anything ever was.
It’s her honesty that captures him. Gratitude, misplaced. Trust he may break under. “Then I am indebted beyond measure, Miss Columbina. A false god who stoops to light a lantern for a fae,” he drawls, swiping her silver blood from his face to lick it from his thumb, then touch that thumb to her pallid lips. “I could not imagine a greater kindness.”
She sings with mournful, subdued laughter.
It is threaded into his pulse: he is fated to waver on the precipice of death, often. Such is his profession.
Sooner or later, salt and blood will cling to the skin, the mouth, indistinguishable from each other. In time, the spirit hands will grip him so tightly he can’t break himself of their anguish. The lantern would snuff out. The Lightkeeper, the lighthouse, their unknown death and ruin in the crash of waves on rocks in convulsions.
The earth resents both the living and the dead alike.
It is only the mercy of the unseen gods, he thinks in his last — bleeding, gasping, shredded and throat torn moments — a goddess, in which he could be cradled in the arms of and held gently for eternity.
A Luonnotar floats toward him as the world goes black; the ocean, the cemetery, the light. Gone.
Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Weakness, self-annihilation, the flicker of a flame in a dying lantern.
Here is this darkness once more, a sinking and drowning to surrender to, if he so wanted. It would be so effortless. The difficult thing is always to live, not to die.
“If you are lonely, think of me,” the moon Goddess sings in his ear, upon his sleep.
He feels —
A hand at his nape. A lithe body on him. A silence so deep it swallows breath.
A kiss?
On the grave of a fallen Lightkeeper, he wakes alone. Opalescent flowers surround him. He is alone. The sky is a dark fog of clouds. He is alone. The air is cold, like after snowfall. He is alone. There is frost on his lips, moths crystallized in the air, a halo of wax, wane, eclipse on the earth under him. He is alone. Scents of crushed flowers, of smoke and rotten apples from the buried corpse.
“If you are lonely — ”
“ — won’t you, oh dearest Lightkeeper, think of me?”
He is not alone.
He is not alone.
There is someone, something. A presence. It could be a hallucination of an addled mind, but he looks for it even so.
His lantern ignites, placed on the decayed soil near him. Souls hiss and scream around him, in agony. Then anger. Then silence. It takes the flavor of wild berries on his tongue to remind him that he is alive, and when he blinks, once, twice, the illusion of his isolation falls, and Columbina is seated upon him, pressing Lakkaberries into his mouth.
He eats them languidly, teeth catching on a seed that he is forced to swallow.
“Mister Flins,” she greets, like an old friend, a past lover, a distant memory. Transcendence incarnate. “You thought of me.”
“I thought of you,” he echoes.
He licks the juice of the berries from her delicate fingers, then holds her hand in his and kisses her palm, as a butterfly would seek nectar from a flower — death fades from his flesh, the numbness and rot replaced by heat from the blue fire in his lantern, which is being fueled by those precious flowers of a certain Goddess.
Her fingers are sticky with his saliva and the berries, though it does not seem to bother her, as the rain washes it all off.
“Thank you,” he tells her, voice throaty. Scratches of the end of life.
Then, as is the madness of an almost-dead creature, he leans in and kisses her. Gently. Chastely. It isn’t reciprocated. There is blood dripping from his scalp onto one of his eyes, along his nose, perhaps that is unsettling her.
Moonlit tears leak down her cheeks from shut eyelids, from dark lashes stained in grief of unfathomable loss, longing.
A song hums from her throat;
A lullaby for mourning;
(Is it selfish for me to not want you to die, so that I am not alone?)
The innocent can never last;
A dying thought is not death;
(If it is selfish, then let us be selfish together; I will keep living and I will think of you.)
Crackle, and the lantern fire is doused by a sudden rain that flows in two directions. It pours on them. It smells of ash and salt.
It happens again; she kisses him, but he is witness to it this time, staring at her as her lips press stiffly to his. He does not move, out of fear of startling her, and perhaps — perhaps that is the fear she had, when it was him doing this to her. There is a tingle, like the sharpness of salt, purifying.
“Stay,” she begs, collapsing against him, drenched. The wings behind her head droop into her wet hair. An angel in the torrent.
“Of course,” he promises her, gasping in a breath of her fragrance — ice dew, nocturnal blossoms, mingled with his, that of copper and wild earth and decay and brine. It soothes him as he blinks into the rainfall, as he holds her. “Of course, Miss Columbina. Let us stay like this for a while, if you do not mind the rain.”
The phosphorescent flowers around the graves bloom. Thunder roars, lightning strikes nearby. Snowfall in the rain?
He lifts part of his cloak over her, though she makes no complaint of the forlorn weather. Or of him, half-dead under her.