The City of Noctis was a mausoleum of beautiful, arrested moments. For a hundred years, it had existed in a state of suspended animation, blanketed by a profound, perpetual twilight. There was no sunrise. The calendar itself had fractured decades ago. There was no moon to mark the passing of the hours. Just endless dark a deep, slate-gray gloom that clung to the gothic architecture, muting all color and sound.
The people of Noctis did not move, save for the occasional, slow shift of a head or the languid blink of an eye. They were standing on street corners, sitting at café tables, frozen mid-gesture their lives paused, their souls captured in a collective, century-long slumber. The city was dreaming.
And keeping that dream alive was the Last Candle, burning stubbornly in the center of the vast, silent Town Square.
Caleb Thorne, unlike the city's inhabitants, was awake. He was a wanderer, a man who had strayed into the city limits a few weeks prior, drawn by the silence and the impossibility of the legend. He had spent his time navigating the frozen avenues, driven half-mad by the absolute stillness, the only relief being the faint, distant scent of beeswax and heat.
He knew the legend by heart: The Keeper lights it each night. They say as long as it burns, the city dreams. The dream was a defense mechanism, a psychic shield against an unnamed terror that had struck a century ago, forcing the city's collective consciousness into refuge. If the candle went out, the city would wake up and the unholy thing that chased them would return.
Caleb had been searching for the Keeper, the invisible sentinel who maintained this impossible vigil. He found one of the few functional human figures near the old city gate: an old woman, brittle and translucent, who seemed to hover on the boundary between sleep and wakefulness.
He cornered her against the rusted iron gate, his voice a frantic whisper in the dead air. "Who is the Keeper? Where can I find them?"
The old woman at the gate smiled. It was a slow, agonizing deformation of her face, a grimace of profound pity and resignation. "Whoever's still awake."
The simple, devastating answer was a final key turning in a lock. The Keeper was not a title passed down; it was a state of being a solitary, agonizing responsibility reserved for the one soul outside the protection of the dream. And now, that soul was Caleb.
He left the woman dissolving back into the silence and sprinted through the frozen streets, his footsteps echoing too loudly in the perpetual twilight. He ran past families frozen mid-dinner, past children mid-laugh, past a city awaiting its fate.
He reached the center square. It was a vast, cobbled space, dominated by a dry fountain. And there, on the fountain's ledge, was the focus of the century-long pause: the Last Candle.
The candle was enormous, nearly three feet high, a tower of ancient, pitted white wax. But it was not majestic. It was a cylinder of desperate necessity, and it was nearly gone.
The wax had melted down, creating a wide, shallow pool, leaving only a few inches of solid pillar standing. The flame was weak, flickering desperately, a single, pale blue point of light struggling against the oppressive dark. It cast no real illumination, only a trembling distortion in the air. The scent of burnt wick and sweet beeswax was overwhelming, a cloying perfume of impending doom.
I found the candle, it was nearly gone.
Beside the melting wax, perfectly placed on the cold stone, lay the tools of the vigil: a small, tarnished silver snuffer and a wooden matchbox. The box was old, its striking surface rubbed smooth, but it held a single, dry match.
Caleb approached cautiously, hands trembling. He understood the ritual. The candle was designed to melt entirely, not burn out. The Keeper's job wasn't to feed the flame; it was to start the next one. The new candle was not present. There was only the match and the end.
He had to light the match and hold the flame to the wick before the current fire consumed the last of the dry wax.
He reached for the matchbox beside it, his fingers brushing the cool wood. He paused, his gaze drawn to the tiny, struggling flame.
And saw my reflection in the flame.
His face, usually shrouded in the perpetual gloom, was suddenly rendered with intense clarity in the dancing blue fire. But it wasn't a true reflection. The flame was showing him the truth the terror in his eyes, the hollow cheekbones, the absolute exhaustion of his isolated vigil. The flame was reflecting his soul, which was now inextricably bound to the city's dream.
He realized that the Keeper's duty wasn't just to light the candle; the Keeper's existence was what kept the city dreaming. The life force of the one awake had fed the century-long slumber. And now that his own life force was exhausted, the dream was failing.
As he watched his reflection, a terrifying change began. The wax melted fast, curling into the shape of a hand.
The pale, flowing wax around the base of the pillar began to move with purpose. It didn't flow downward; it swelled and hardened, rising up the side of the candle, molding itself into a distinct, skeletal shape. It was a hand long, waxy fingers reaching out, poised to grasp the tiny flame.
It was the Keeper's final gift, or its final threat. The wax, having consumed the Keeper's life force, was trying to extinguish the final spark, desperate to complete the cycle and draw Caleb into the eternal sleep.
Caleb snatched the matchbox, his fear translating into a desperate, final surge of energy. He had to light the match. He had to keep the dream going.
But as he scraped the match against the smooth striking surface a useless gesture the wick of the Last Candle gave a final, desperate flare. The tiny blue flame stretched upward, fighting the suffocating wax hand. Then the wick went out.
The tiny, brilliant point of light winked out, swallowed by the darkness and the cold, dense wax. The abrupt loss of light was absolute, profound.
The silence that followed was not the dream-silence he was used to. It was a charged, terrifying vacuum, the pause between a breath taken and a scream released. And for the first time in a century, the silence broke.
It was a sound like dry, ancient plaster cracking on a massive scale. A thousand tiny clicks and scrapes and shuffles reverberated across the square, the sounds of muscles seizing, joints cracking, and eyes snapping open.
The city opened its eyes.
Caleb didn't need to look at the people around him. He felt the consciousness rush back into the space. He felt the cold, oppressive psychic pressure that the dream had been holding back.
The first sound was a communal, collective gasp a thousand lungs drawing air for the first time in a century. Then came the whispers, growing instantly into a panicked roar, a city screaming in unison, blinded by the darkness and terrified by the realization of a hundred lost years.
Caleb scrambled backward, falling off the fountain ledge. He knew that the thing the city had been hiding from the reason they all chose the dream was now free. The terror of the awakening was not the chaos of the people, but the return of the ancient, consuming horror.
He looked up at the wax hand now solidified on the cold stone, a permanent, mocking memorial. He had failed the vigil. He had been too late, or too exhausted.
But then, a deep, resonant voice cut through the chaos, silencing the screams immediately. It was a sound that seemed to come from the ground itself, ancient and filled with infinite, consuming hunger.
"Keeper. I am awake. And I am hungry."
Caleb realized his new, terrifying role. He was no longer just the one awake. He was the one who had extinguished the flame. He was the anchor that had stabilized the city for a century, and now he was the final piece of the offering. The dream had been a sanctuary; the Keeper was the sacrifice.
He looked across the square, where the eyes of a thousand awakened citizens his neighbors, his frozen congregation were now turning toward him, their eyes wide, not with fear, but with a vacant, cannibalistic hunger. The ancient terror hadn't been defeated; it had simply waited, using the century of dreams to hollow out the population, leaving a city of perfect, compliant puppets.
Caleb Thorne was the only one with a waking soul left in Noctis. And the city, and the dark thing that ruled it, was hungry.
He closed his eyes, hearing the sound of a thousand shuffling footsteps beginning their slow, inexorable march toward the fountain. He opened his mouth, not to scream, but to take his last, ragged breath of the cold, dark air, knowing that he had traded a century of safety for a single moment of terror.
The Last Candle was out. The true nightmare had just begun.