The Last Light

You ever notice how the worst nights don’t announce themselves?

There’s no storm rolling in, no strange phone call, no flicker of the lights. Sometimes it starts with something so ordinary, you don’t even give it a second thought.

For me, it started on a cold Wednesday night in November.

The kind of night when frost creeps up the windowpane and the air feels sharp enough to cut your lungs. I was sitting in my apartment in a small Nordic town—a quiet place by the harbor, where fishing boats creak against the docks and silence falls heavy after sunset.

That night, I felt a fever creeping in. Just a mild heat, a damp sweat across my forehead. Nothing alarming.

I told myself it was probably the weather, or maybe I hadn’t been sleeping enough. I didn’t stop my routine. I folded laundry, packed food for the next day, and gave my dog, Leo, his last walk before bed.

Everything felt normal.

Except it wasn’t.

Back inside, I opened the fridge for a drink. That’s when my right hand started shaking.

At first, it was just a tremor. But then, it grew—jerking so violently the bottle I held rattled like it was alive.

I grabbed my wrist with the other hand, and just like that, the tremor stopped.

Gone.

I remember whispering to myself: Weird… just stress.

But deep down, I knew something was wrong.

By midnight, the fever had grown heavy. Sweat dampened my shirt, my vision doubled, and whispers echoed in my apartment.

They weren’t coming from the street. Or from the neighbors. No… these whispers overlapped, layered voices rising and falling like a crowd I couldn’t see.

And Leo—he didn’t react. He lay curled on the rug, ears relaxed. If it was real, he’d hear it. Dogs always know.

That’s when I realized… the sounds weren’t outside. They were inside me.

Desperate, I searched the bathroom cabinet. Old medicine bottles, vitamins, even a packet of powdered ginger tea.

I mixed everything into a glass without checking labels. Cold tablets, syrup, the ginger powder. Stirred it, swallowed it in one gulp.

I thought I was helping myself.

But instead, the whispers grew louder.

Around two a.m., the nausea hit. I barely made it to the toilet.

And that’s when it happened.

In the swirling water, between bile and half-digested food, a face appeared.

A woman’s face.

It was weathered, lined by time, but unmistakable. I knew her.

And suddenly, the memory came rushing back—one I’d buried months ago.

Last spring, I had traveled to Iceland with a few colleagues. At first, it was just adventure: waterfalls, lava fields, nights that never went dark.

One evening, we ended up in a small coastal village, the kind of place tourists rarely see. There was a pub there—dimly lit, smoke curling from candles, the smell of salt and firewood heavy in the air.

That’s where I met her.

Her name was Elísabet. Dark hair, pale skin, eyes sharp enough to hold you in place. She moved with a kind of quiet confidence, as if the whole room belonged to her.

And for that night, she belonged to me.

I won’t dress it up—I treated her like a fantasy, a fleeting distraction. But when it came time to pay, I hesitated. My cash was low, and I convinced myself she’d understand.

I whispered that I’d return. I kissed her cheek, promised her.

I lied.

I walked out into the cold night, and I never looked back.

But someone else had.

On my way out of the village, I saw her.

An old woman.

She stood at the edge of the street, wrapped in a wool cloak, her hair long and silver in the wind. Her eyes—pale gray, almost white—watched me with a stillness that froze me in place.

She spoke words I didn’t understand at first. Icelandic, sharp and cutting. But one phrase stayed with me:

“Blind to the light you steal.”

I tried to laugh it off. A village superstition, a drunken mutter. But her voice cut deeper than I cared to admit.

I never saw Elísabet again. And I never thought about that night—until the fever brought her face back to me.

By three a.m., my apartment was no longer mine.

Shadows flickered across the walls. Figures passed through the room as if the walls weren’t there at all. Women, their necks draped in rosaries, their faces twisted with grief or laughter.

One figure stepped closer, holding the hand of a small boy.

And when the boy turned to look at me—my blood ran cold.

It wasn’t a child’s face. It was the old woman’s.

Her gray eyes burned into mine, whispering the same curse:

“Blind to the light you steal.”

I stumbled back, splashed cold water over my face, gasping for air.

But there was no waking from this.

The Last Light

By five a.m., the fever broke. The sweat cooled. My breathing steadied.

For a brief moment, I thought it was over.

But then my vision began to fade.

Colors drained first—reds, blues, golds—all dissolving into a lifeless gray. Then the gray dimmed. The edges blurred.

I turned on every lamp, every bulb. It didn’t matter.

By sunrise, when the alarm buzzed like any other workday, I opened my eyes into pure darkness.

I had gone blind.

People say blindness is something you can adapt to. That you learn to hear better, to touch more deeply, to live differently.

But no one tells you about the silence inside the dark. About the weight of knowing the last thing you’ll ever see isn’t sunlight, or a loved one’s smile—

but the face of someone you betrayed.

I don’t know if it was illness. I don’t know if it was poison, or hallucination, or something medical that science can explain.

What I do know is this:

I hear her voice still. The old woman, standing in that icy street, whispering words that cut into my soul.

“Blind to the light you steal.”

And now… I am.