Tiny Light in Huge Dark

The world ended quietly, not with a bang but with a dimming.

I first noticed it the day my father forgot my name.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, where he used to tell me stories with orange peels curled like dragons and cinnamon sticks wielded like swords. But that day, he just stared at me across the cup of untouched tea, his lips moving silently as if trying on different versions of who I might be.

“I’m… your daughter,” I whispered, voice barely reaching my own ears.

He blinked, and something flickered behind his eyes—like a lightbulb dying in a long-abandoned attic.

“Oh,” he said, and looked away.

That was the first dimming. The first shadow in the huge dark that would follow.

It wasn’t just him. One by one, people began forgetting things—not just keys and birthdays, but entire people. Towns. Childhoods. Even their own reflections.

The scientists called it The Great Fading.

No one knew why. Some said it was a virus of the mind. Others blamed memory saturation, electromagnetic waves, divine punishment. It didn’t matter. The forgetting kept spreading, like mold across an old wall.

First the elderly, then the young, then everyone in between.

But somehow, I remembered everything.

I became a keeper.

That's what they started calling people like me—those who could still hold memory like water in their hands. The government gave us journals, instructions. “Write it all down,” they said. “Names. Places. Dates. We’ll need it later.”

Later never came.

The power grid failed next—not because of fuel or collapse, but because the engineers forgot how to fix the system they once built.

By the time the sun started disappearing—yes, actually dimming—the cities had emptied, the stars had vanished from the sky, and time itself felt like it was unraveling.

And still, I remembered.

I moved into a lighthouse.

It stood at the edge of the broken sea, its great light long gone. The ocean didn’t roar anymore. It just listened—quiet and black, as if holding its breath.

I lit candles every night. A hundred little flames in the room with the giant glass dome. Some melted fast, some stubbornly refused to die, but all of them were mine.

Each one represented a name I refused to forget.

My mother—light on the windowsill.

My brother—flame by the compass.

My dog—tiny flicker near the bookshelf.

My father—closest to my bed.

Sometimes I spoke their names aloud, just so the walls would remember too.

One night, I saw her.

A child, maybe ten, standing ankle-deep in the sea with a bucket in one hand and a scarf wrapped around her face.

At first, I thought she was a hallucination—another symptom of solitude. But she was real. Small and trembling, but real.

I called to her, and she turned.

Her eyes—wild with fear, feral and alive—locked on mine. She ran, stumbling over seaweed and broken shells, straight toward the lighthouse.

I met her at the door.

“What’s your name?” I asked gently.

She shook her head.

“Do you remember anything?”

She opened her mouth… then closed it.

“I don’t think I had one.”

I took her hand, warm and shaking.

“You do now,” I said. “We’ll make one together.”

I named her Wren.

She didn’t protest.

Wren followed me like a shadow, wide-eyed and silent. She watched the candles and asked me what each one meant. I told her the stories—made her repeat the names.

Her voice was clumsy at first, tripping over syllables like they were stones in the dark. But she learned. She wanted to remember.

When one of the candles went out, she cried. I relit it with my last match.

“We keep them alive,” I told her, “with fire and words.”

And from that night on, Wren kept her own candle. She named it Hope.

We made our own rituals.

In the morning, we lit the lantern and poured water into bowls shaped like moons. At night, we whispered to the ocean, telling it stories so it wouldn’t forget its tides.

And still, the world grew darker.

Birdsong vanished. Trees no longer grew new leaves. The stars flickered like they were winking out, one by one.

But the lighthouse—our little fire temple—glowed like a promise.

A tiny light in the huge dark.

Then, one morning, Wren woke me.

“The ocean,” she whispered, shaking my arm. “It’s coming back.”

I rushed outside barefoot, heart hammering.

And there it was—just barely.

Color.

The sky, no longer charcoal, had turned the soft shade of bruised violet. The waves lapped again. The wind hummed a note I hadn’t heard in years.

And rising in the east—a glow. Not bright, not warm. But real.

“It heard us,” Wren said, tears running down her cheeks. “All our stories. It listened.”

I held her close and looked back at the lighthouse.

A single candle remained.

Flickering, fragile—but alive.

Later, when the sun returned in full—days, maybe weeks later—it didn't come back as a blinding ball of fire, but as a soft orb like a child’s lantern.

Enough to grow moss again. Enough to paint shadows.

And people—those few left—began to wander out of the fog. Lost, blinking, but curious. Drawn by the light from the coast.

Wren and I welcomed them with warm soup, new names, and old stories.

“We remember for you,” we told them.

“And now, you can remember too.”

One night, Wren placed her candle in the center of the lighthouse floor and said, “It’s time to stop keeping the dark out.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s time,” she said, “to teach it how to hold light.”

So we opened all the windows. Let the breeze in. Let the dark listen.

And the next morning, the candles didn’t burn at all.

Because they didn’t need to.