The Lantern at Greyvein

Maya kept score of the town by its smells. Coffee and old rope at dawn, diesel and fish by noon, and at dusk a thin, metallic tang that rode the wind from the lighthouse like a promise. On mornings when the sea was calm, Greyvein looked like a town that had forgotten how to hurry—boarded windows, paint peeling in strips, gulls roosting like small white flags on the roofs. People moved with the slow, deliberate patience of people who had learned to wait for tides.

She worked behind the counter of the café on the quay, a narrow place called The Lantern where fishermen hung their wet jackets and tourists came less often than the calendar suggested. Maya folded napkins with the same care she had folded maps once, tracing old coastlines in the creases of paper. Her hands remembered the cold metal of the lighthouse's key; they remembered, too, the way her grandmother, Nona, would stand at the topmost window with her hair wrapped in a scarf and smoke curling from her lips as if she smoked the fog itself.

"Another flat white, Maya," Ben called, his voice threaded with sea-sand. He was always on the verge of leaving town—this one and that one—and always back by morning with nets that smelled like myths. He set a jar of carved wooden fish on the counter, toys to sell to visitors who came to buy stories rather than fish.

Maya put down the cup and watched him watch the horizon. He kept checking a pocket watch that never ran on time. "You late for something?" she asked.

Ben shook his head. "Nothing I can name. Just—" He tapped his temple, and the gesture was small and worried. "Fog's been different. Thick like wool. You notice?"

She had noticed. The lighthouse had been dark for months, its old lamp replaced by a modern beacon on a separate mast. The town had applauded the change; no one wanted old flame and superstition when there was electricity that blinked like a stern, reliable eye. Still, Old Keepers had a way of keeping their lights lit in memory and town's memory kept them too. Nona came in at ten, hair an unmade gray halo, and ordered chamomile that tasted once of seaweed and thyme. She moved like a woman made of small, careful tasks—kneading dough, tying knots, tucking away a loose thought before it could tatter free.

"Don't climb the third rung tonight," Nona said without looking up from her cup. Her voice was paper and iron: thin, and it held weight.

Maya laughed, more to unsettle the underside of whatever that warning sheltered than because she thought it sensible. "Since when do lighthouses have rungs that matter?"

Nona set her cup down with a decisive clack. Her fingers were callused, yellowed at the edges. For a long breath she stared at the window as if she could read the sea there like a page. "Since when did a light tell us how to remember?" she answered.