The Last Lightkeeper

The sun vanished on a Tuesday.

No one expected it. One moment, dawn was breaking across the ocean. The next, darkness slammed down like a shutter, swift and final. The stars remained, cold and indifferent. But the sun — the heart of everything — was gone.

They called it “The Eclipse Eternal.” Scientists fumbled for answers. Politicians lied. Cults bloomed like weeds. People stopped going outside. Crops withered. Clocks ticked, but time lost meaning.

And high on a cliff at the edge of what used to be Maine, I stayed behind.

My name is Elara Voss, and I’m a Lightkeeper.

The lighthouse at Marrow Point once guided ships through storms. Now, it’s the last standing structure for miles. Most towns nearby are abandoned, swallowed by panic or sea. But not this place. Not while I still breathe.

I light the beacon every 12 hours using solar-stored batteries — yes, solar — though no sun shines. Somehow, there's still just enough residual charge. I ration it, preserve it like an ember in the world’s final hearth.

The light doesn’t reach far. But people still come.

They call them “the drifters.” Lost souls who walk by starlight, hoping the beacon means sanctuary. Some stay. Most move on. Some cry. A few just stand in the circle of light, faces tilted up, like they remember what warmth once felt like.

One night, as I was refueling the generator, I saw her.

A girl, maybe twelve, barefoot and silent, standing just beyond the light’s reach.

“Hello?” I called.

She stepped forward slowly, arms wrapped around a cloth bundle. Her hair was tangled. Her eyes shimmered, not with tears, but something else — something I hadn’t seen in a long time.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

She nodded. Then opened the bundle.

Inside was a strange orb. Glassy. Pulsing faintly.

“It followed me,” she whispered.

I bent closer. The orb was warm.

That night, I sat her by the fire, gave her my last apple. Her name was Mira.

“I think it’s a piece of the sun,” she said simply. “It came to me in a dream. Then I found it in a cave.”

I laughed, gently. “We’d all like to believe that.”

But over the next few days, something strange happened.

The light inside the orb grew stronger. The air around it warmed. A single flower — a violet — bloomed near the cliff’s edge. I hadn’t seen color in two years.

And then I dreamed, too.

A voice. A shape of fire. A message: Keep the light alive.

I woke gasping, the orb in my lap.

Mira watched me with knowing eyes.

“It needs to go higher,” she said. “It needs to be seen.”

I looked at the lighthouse. At the old lamp, now feeble and flickering.

Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe grief was finally catching up to me. But what if it wasn’t?

We mounted the orb inside the lens, carefully wiring it to the ancient rotator. I said a small prayer. Mira said none — she just watched, calm as ever.

Then we flipped the switch.

The tower hummed.

And the light — oh, the light — blazed out like a second dawn.

It wasn't yellow. Not exactly. It was golden-white, pure and clear, cutting through the darkness like a blade.

I fell to my knees. Mira held my hand.

That night, more came. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. People who had wandered blind for years, drawn by something they didn’t understand — a hope they’d forgotten how to name.

And the sun? No, it didn’t return. Not yet.

But something had changed.

A ripple through the dark. A promise.

Maybe this world wasn’t ending.

Maybe it was waiting.

Waiting for someone — anyone — to remember how to keep the light.