The Lightkeeper Of Glasshaven

The message that arrived that morning was different.

The tide had come in soft and slow, leaving Bottle Bay scattered with silverweed and sea-glass. Mist clung low over the sand like breath, curling through the dawn light as the sky slowly warmed with bruises of violet and blue.

Nerian stepped barefoot onto the shore, his boots left neatly behind at the weathered post where the path from the forest met the beach. His coat trailed like a ghost of another century, its hem brushing salt-wet ground, picking up flecks of sand and a fallen bloom or two from the trumpetvines above.

This was his ritual. Each morning, before the fog lifted, he walked the bay’s curve with quiet purpose. The bottles came like clockwork—or dreams. Some mornings there were none. Others, two. But they always came.

Today, there was only one—half-buried beside a knot of driftwood, kissed by tidefoam.

Its glass was opalescent and faintly warm, sealed in wax the color of dusk, wound in glowing seaweed that pulsed gently like a heartbeat. Nerian turned it slowly, sensing the subtle resonance thrumming beneath the surface. He cracked the seal. A faint scent rose: ocean wind and something softer—sun-warmed stone, or the memory of skin in rain.

The letter inside was dry, folded in thirds. The paper shimmered subtly in the light, the ink glinting like it couldn’t quite hold still. Nerian read the opening line, and something in him stilled.

"I heard a call over the ocean. In my dream, I saw a light through the waves. I know it's real. I'll find it."

He spoke the words aloud, voice quiet, measured—barely above the breath of the surf.

“You dream before you arrive,” he murmured, thumb tracing the parchment. “You always dream first.”

There was a rough edge to his voice now, salt and sleep caught in the softness. “You always remember me… before you remember yourself.”

He looked toward the horizon—no birds, no sails, only the endless shimmer of sea and fog. Behind him, from the high cliff, the Seaheart Crystal in the lighthouse began to pulse. Faint at first, then brighter, casting fractured light into the mist. Light that seemed to reach beyond the waking world.

He pressed the letter to his chest, then tucked it gently into the oilskin journal at his hip. And still, he lingered.

Every morning brought a letter. Every morning, he read it aloud.

But this one didn’t feel like a memory drifting back from a lost world.

It felt like a door opening. A promise made.

And somewhere beyond the Fold, someone had already begun walking toward him. Someone who remembered the light.