The Lantern of Wrenmoor

Wrenmoor smelled like old salt and iron long after the tides had stopped bringing anything alive. Houses leaned on one another as if afraid to stand alone; their windows collected the city's little grievances — smudges of smoke, a child's torn ribbon, the faint smear where someone had once leaned and wept. Between the crooked rows lay the graves: decks of buried things and shallow rooftop coffins, stacked like driftwood. Eira moved among them with the steadiness of someone who had learned to make a home from the mouths of others' endings.

She kept the bone-lanterns. They were not pretty. They were made of white ribs and the hollowed crown bones of nameless men and women, bound with strips of lead and held together by threads of linen soaked in tar. When lit they hummed — a low, brittle music that made the air feel like it had been turned inside out. People paid the gravediggers and lamp-keepers to keep that hum steady. If it faltered, the dead were apt to twitch in the corners of their graves and remember the touch of the world.

Rourke showed her the habit of the job: how to fold a bandage without thinking of what it had once bound, how to lift a skull so it did not sound like a hollow drum. He had hands like iron hooks and a laugh that came out when he tapped the lanterns to see how the light held. 'Never oil the seam with grief,' he'd tell her, wiping his palms down the tattered well-wrapped sleeves of his coat. 'Grief makes them sticky.'

Tonight the graveyard smelled double: sea-rot and tallow, and someone had lit more candles than usual. Eira set the last bone-lantern into its carved nook, felt the cool bone warm under her palm, and listened to the hum. In the distance the blackwater moved with a sound like a lost procession. A little girl selling brined eel-strings darted between tombs, her braid flecked with salt, and hailed Eira with a grin wide as a moon-cut coin.

'Found anything interesting?' the girl asked. Her voice was thin but fearless.

'Only the usual,' Eira answered, and the lie sat soft in the space between them. She had a clean habit of lying small, the way you tuck frayed edges under a quilt.

Rourke's whistle came then — quick, two notes — and Eira turned. He stood by the old mortuary, hands working a lantern with the slowness of someone who counted each seam like prayer. He looked older when he worked, as if the bones he handled took some of his years for themselves. He nodded at her, a small moon carved out of the night's thickness.

When she bent to finish the last knot, the bone-lantern made a small, thin sound different from its usual hum — like a throat clearing. Eira straightened. Bone warmed under her hand, but within the rib cage the wax gleamed with a shadow as if something had moved beneath the glow. She held the lantern an instant longer and heard in the dark, very faintly, the echo of a voice that was not Rourke's and not the dead's. It said a single thing, as if caught on the edge of the world: 'Unbind me.'