On the evening it began, the lamplighter of a small harbor town walked her rounds as she had walked them ten thousand times before, and of all the souls beneath that darkening sky, she alone marked the hour for what it was.

Hers was humble work, and old. Each dusk she took up her long brass pole and paced the length of the seafront, waking flame in the row of iron lamps that stood sentinel along the quay; each dawn she returned to lay them once more to rest. For thirty years she had kept this rhythm. She knew the deep and particular blue of the gloaming, that brief hour when the sun has fled but the night withholds its full weight. She knew the reek of tar and cold brine rising from the hulls at their moorings, and the squabble of gulls wheeling over the last of the catch before the fisherman drove them off with curses and flung stones. The seafront held no mystery she had not long since learned by heart. So, at least, she had always believed.

On this evening, as she set her flame to the third lamp along the quay, the fire went out. Therein lay the horror of it: the slowness. A snuffed flame perishes between one breath and the next, but this one sank. It withdrew into itself, drawn downward and inward as though some vast and hidden mouth had begun a long and patient inhalation and was drinking the very light from the air. Gold dimmed to sullen ember, ember faded to a thread, thread dwindled to nothing, and the dark poured greedily into the hollow it left behind. She stood a moment in the thickening blue, more puzzled than afraid, and lifted her pole to try anew. The second flame ebbed as willingly as the first. So too the third, and the fourth, and by the fifth the truth settled cold upon her: the fault lay not in her lamps, but in the evening itself.

A hush had swallowed the whole of the harbor. The gulls had vanished. The water lay flat and black and breathless against the boats, and in that terrible stillness she felt, for the span of three slow heartbeats, the weight of an attention come to rest upon her. No eye met hers that she might name or point to, and yet she was beheld, wholly and utterly: weighed, measured, and, most dreadful of all, known, as though something of unfathomable vastness had turned its face toward her across a gulf no starlight could hope to cross, and found her, of all the souls on all the shores of all the worlds, worthy for one fleeting instant of its regard.

Then, as swiftly as it had come, the moment released her. The gulls shrieked once more into the dark. The tide breathed again against the hulls, the flame leapt eager to her pole, and one by one the lamps bloomed golden down the length of the quay, as though the evening had never once faltered in its course.

She finished her rounds in the ordinary night. She spoke of it to no one, for what was there to tell that would not fall from her lips as the addled fancy of a weary old woman? She went home to her supper and her narrow bed and let the matter lie where it had fallen.

Yet far from that little harbor, past the last and loneliest of the charted stars, in a dark so ancient and so absolute that no living tongue has ever dared to grant it a name, something had opened its eyes.

It did not rage at its long waking. Rage is the coin of small and frightened things, and this is neither small nor frightened. For uncounted ages the dispersed fragment of a twin had lain still while mountains climbed towards heaven and crumbled back to dust, dreaming the slow and formless dreams of the imprisoned; and now, at least, the dreaming was done. Something had loosened the anchor, the old bonds. Something had let the light back in. It stretched itself awake in the great and starless deep, and it remembered, dimly but with growing certainty, that once it had wanted something very much.

Its attention turned toward a world. That was all. And when a thing of such magnitude wakes hungry and turns its gaze upon a world, the world does well to be afraid.

~~~

Summary: Beyond the Outer Reaches of Creation, an ancient presence has begun to wake.

Penned by My hand on the 1st of Phaestian, in the year 1008 AF.