The Lantern Path

The first lantern appeared on a Tuesday, though nobody in Aldermoor agreed on what time it had happened. Old Pell swore it wasn't there when he took his goats up at dusk, and swore just as hard that it was there an hour later, burning steady on its iron post at the base of the hillside path. Others said they'd walked that way at dusk too and seen nothing unusual. By the time half the village had gone to look, the lantern was simply a fact, sitting where no lantern had ever sat before, on a path everyone had walked a thousand times and never once needed lighting.

It burned without smoke. That was the detail people kept returning to, standing in a loose cluster at a respectful distance, hands in pockets, breath fogging in the cool evening air.

"Could be from the old logging camp," said Mira Voss, who ran the mill and liked practical explanations. "Might've left equipment up there for years. Somebody's cleaning it out."

"There's no camp on that hill," her husband said. "Never was. You're thinking of the ridge past Callun's field."

"Then maybe it's a shrine marker," offered the miller's apprentice, a boy of perhaps sixteen who read too many old books and enjoyed being right about strange things. "My grandmother said there used to be shrines through these woods. Lights to guide travelers to them."

"Your grandmother also said the well talked to her."

"It did, once. She was very specific about the tone."

By Thursday there were three lanterns, evenly spaced up the first curve of the hill, and by Saturday there were seven, the newest one glowing faintly at the treeline where the path bent into the forest proper. The village had stopped debating whether they were real and started debating what to do about them, which was, if anything, a worse argument.

"Leave it alone," said Pell, who had gone from first witness to loudest voice of caution. "Whatever puts up lights that don't smoke isn't doing it for our benefit. My father always said the hill wasn't ours past the second bend. Called it borrowed ground."

"Borrowed from who?"

"That's rather the point, isn't it."

Ren listened to most of this from the edge of conversations, the way he listened to most things, turning it over without contributing much. He worked the smithy with his uncle, which gave him plenty of excuse to be present at the well or the tavern without being expected to hold strong opinions. He liked facts. He liked things that could be tested. A lantern that didn't smoke was, in his estimation, simply a lantern he hadn't examined closely enough yet.

He mentioned this to his uncle on the evening the eighth lantern appeared, while they were closing up the forge for the night.

"You're not thinking of walking up there," his uncle said. It wasn't really a question.

"I'm thinking about it as a thing that exists and needs an explanation," Ren said. "Those aren't the same as walking up there."

"They usually turn into the same thing, with you."

"That's unfair. I've thought about lots of things I never did."

"Name one."

Ren considered. "Marriage."

His uncle snorted and hung up his apron. "The lanterns extend a little farther every night. You've noticed that."

"Everyone's noticed that."

"Everyone's also staying home."

"Everyone's also not me," Ren said, which wasn't an argument so much as an admission, and his uncle seemed to hear it that way, because he didn't say anything else, just shook his head and told Ren to at least take a coat.

Ren left the following evening, after supper, telling himself he was only going as far as the last lantern to look at it properly. He told his uncle the same thing. Neither of them entirely believed it, but it seemed like the kind of lie worth allowing.

The hillside path was familiar enough in daylight that walking it at dusk felt strange mostly because of what had been added to it, not because of the dark. Ren reached the first lantern while the sky still held some blue in it, low and full over the western ridge, and he stopped there for a long moment before he did anything else.

The lantern hung from an iron post that looked hand-forged, old work, the kind of joinery his uncle would have approved of. He touched the metal. It was warm, warmer than the evening air accounted for, but not hot. He held his palm near the flame itself, close enough to feel it should have singed him, and felt only a mild, pleasant warmth, the way a hearth feels from across a room.

"That's not right," he said aloud, mostly to hear himself say it. "Fire doesn't do that."

He crouched and looked underneath the lantern for wax drippings, for a fuel reservoir, for anything that explained how it burned. There was nothing. The flame sat inside the glass like it had simply always been there and never needed feeding.

"No smoke either," he added, still talking, because talking kept the strangeness at a manageable size. "No soot on the glass. No smell of oil. This is either very good craftsmanship or I'm about to have a much stranger evening than I planned."

He walked to the second lantern and paced the distance between them, counting steps out loud, partly from habit and partly because a number felt like something solid to hold onto. Forty-one steps. He walked to the third and counted again. Forty-one steps, near enough. Evenly spaced, then. Someone had planned this, measured it, built it with intention. That, at least, felt like a fact he could trust.

Behind him, faint but present, he could still hear the village. A dog barking somewhere near the mill. Someone's door closing. The ordinary sounds of Aldermoor settling into evening. He glanced back once to confirm the shapes of the rooftops were still there, dark against a slightly less dark sky, and found them exactly where they should be.

That was the last time the check meant anything.

He found the fae sitting beside the ninth lantern, cross-legged on the ground as though it had been waiting there for some pleasant but unspecified amount of time.

It looked, at first glance, almost human, which Ren found somehow more unsettling than if it hadn't. It had the general shape of a young man, lean and long-limbed, dressed in something that might have been very fine clothing or might have been leaves stitched with unreasonable skill, he genuinely couldn't decide which and suspected the ambiguity was deliberate. Its skin held a faint undertone of green that shifted when it moved, the way oil shifts on water. Its eyes were the wrong shape for a face otherwise so ordinary, too large, too dark, without quite enough white in them.

It was turning a stone over in its fingers, examining it with real interest, and it looked up at Ren's approach with an expression of mild, pleasant surprise, as though Ren were the unusual object here.

"Oh," it said. "You're new."

Ren stopped walking. He had, somewhere in the back of his mind, prepared for the possibility of something like this, and found that preparation did almost nothing to steady him. He decided to fall back on talking, since it had worked so far.

"I could say the same about you," he said. "Though I suspect you've been new for a lot longer than I have."

The creature's face did something complicated, an expression assembling itself out of pieces that didn't quite belong together, and settled into what Ren eventually decided was amusement.

"That's a strange thing to measure," it said. "New compared to what."

"Compared to me, I suppose. I've been new for about twenty-three years. You look like you might have a bit more experience."

"I have a great deal of experience," it agreed, setting the stone down with what looked like genuine reluctance. "Though experience isn't really the same as age, is it. You could live a long time and experience almost nothing. Some of your kind manage it."

"Some of my kind," Ren repeated. "You say that like you've made a study of us."

"Everyone makes a study of something." It rose in one motion, unfolding rather than standing, and Ren noted with a small, distant part of his mind that its knees had bent the wrong way for a moment before correcting themselves. "You're studying me right now. I can see it. You're deciding what I am."

"I'm working on it."

"What have you decided so far?"

"That you're not human," Ren said. "And that you probably already knew I'd figure that out, so I'm not sure why you're asking."

The creature smiled, wide and delighted, showing teeth that were very slightly too even. "I ask because your answers are interesting. Not because I need the information."

"Fair enough." Ren glanced past it, up the path, where the lanterns continued in their patient line into darker trees. "Do you have a name?"

"I have several. Would you like one, or all of them?"

"Just the one you'd actually answer to."

"That depends on who's calling."

Ren laughed, more out of nerves than humor, though the question had genuinely amused him too. "That's not really an answer."

"It's a perfectly good answer. You asked a badly formed question and I gave it the response it deserved." The creature tilted its head, studying him with those too-large eyes. "You could ask what I am instead. That one I can actually work with."

"All right. What are you?"

"Better." It fell into step beside him as he continued walking, matching his pace without seeming to decide to. "I'm the sort of thing that answers questions on this path. Among other things. It's not really a job title so much as a general description."

"That's still fairly vague."

"You're new," it said again, and this time there was something almost fond in it. "Vague is often the most honest thing I have to offer. You'll get more specific answers as we go, if you ask specific questions. I'm not being difficult on purpose. Well. Not only on purpose."

Ren found himself smiling despite everything, a small, involuntary thing. "You know, for something that isn't human, you argue like one."

"I've had practice," it said. "Humans argue constantly. It's one of the more entertaining things about you."

They walked together past the tenth lantern and the eleventh, and Ren noticed, distantly, that the trees on either side of the path had grown taller than the forest around Aldermoor had any right to be, old growth crowding close, the kind of trees that took centuries to reach that girth. He decided not to mention it yet. He had other questions first.

"Where does this path go?" he asked.

The creature made a small, considering sound. "That's the question everyone asks first. It's almost disappointing how reliable you all are."

"It's a reasonable question."

"It's a reasonable question asked in a way that assumes the answer will be useful to you," the creature said. "The path goes where it goes. I could tell you a destination and it wouldn't mean what you think it means. You want a place name. A direction. Something you could point to on a map, if your people made maps of places like this, which they don't, incidentally, because the maps keep changing and mapmakers find that discouraging."

"So there isn't an end."

"I didn't say that. I said your question assumes something the path doesn't agree with." It glanced at him sideways. "Would you like to try again?"

Ren considered this seriously, the way he considered a piece of metal that wasn't taking heat the way it should, turning the problem rather than forcing it. "Fine. What happens if I keep walking?"

"Better question." The creature seemed genuinely pleased. "You'll see more lanterns. You'll see less of the place you came from. Eventually you'll see things that aren't lanterns at all, and I'll have to decide how much of that I want to explain, and you'll have to decide how much of it you want to believe."

"That's not exactly comforting."

"I didn't say it would be comforting. I said it would be true, which is a different kind of gift."

They walked on. Ren found himself glancing back at intervals, an old habit reasserting itself, checking that the world he'd started in was still where he'd left it. The village lights were still visible the first two times he looked, small and warm below the darkening hill.

"Can I ask you something else?" he said.

"You've been asking me things this entire time. I don't see why you'd need permission now."

"Habit, I suppose. Politeness." He glanced at the creature. "Am I allowed to leave? If I decide I want to turn around right now, is that something I can just do?"

"Of course," it said, sounding faintly surprised by the question, or perhaps by the fact that it needed asking. "You're not a prisoner. I haven't done anything to you. You walked here on your own feet, entirely uninvited, and you could walk back the same way, entirely unstopped."

"Then why does it feel like a strange thing to ask?"

"Because you already suspect the walking back won't be as simple as the walking here," the creature said. "Which is perceptive of you. I'd be a little disappointed if you hadn't noticed."

Ren stopped walking. Behind him, the village lights had grown smaller than they should have, given how little ground he felt they'd covered, and the sound of the mill dog barking had gone entirely quiet, replaced by nothing, not even wind.

"How long have we been walking?" he asked.

The creature considered this with what looked like real effort, counting something invisible. "That's a harder question than you think. Time doesn't move quite the same way out here as it does back where you started. It's not that it moves faster or slower, exactly. It's more that it stops agreeing to be counted the same way twice."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the most honest answer I have. You want a number. I don't have a number that would mean the same thing to you as it does to me." It looked at him with something that might have been sympathy, or might have been simple curiosity about how he'd take it. "You could count the lanterns, if that helps. Humans like counting things."

Ren decided to test that. He turned and looked back at the lantern they'd just passed, fixed its position in his mind, paced ten steps forward, and turned to check the distance. The lantern was farther away than it should have been, easily twice the distance ten steps should have covered.

"That's not possible," he said.

"It's extremely possible. You're only surprised because you assumed distance here worked the same way it does at home." The creature crouched to look at something on the ground, a leaf or a stone, Ren couldn't quite tell in the dim light. "Try walking toward it instead of checking behind you. See what happens."

Ren did, counting his steps deliberately, twenty of them, watching the lantern the entire time. It seemed to recede exactly as fast as he approached it, holding a stubborn, impossible distance, until on the twenty-first step it was suddenly, simply, beside him, as though it had never moved at all.

"I don't like that," Ren said.

"Most people don't, the first time. You get used to it."

"I'm not sure I want to get used to it."

"That's a reasonable position too," the creature said. "Not everyone wants to. That's rather the point of the choice you'll have to make eventually."

They kept walking. Ren found his eyes drawn, more than once, to shapes at the edge of the lantern light, just past where the glow gave out into full dark. They weren't quite animals and weren't quite anything else he had a word for, tall shifting suggestions of shape that seemed to be watching without watching, present without approaching.

"What are those?" he asked, keeping his voice level with some effort.

The creature followed his gaze without alarm. "Neighbors, more or less. They live near the path the way your foxes live near your fields. Not the same species as me, if that's what you're asking, though the distinction matters less out here than you'd think."

"Are they dangerous?"

"Everything's dangerous if you handle it wrong. They're not hungry, if that's your concern. They're curious, the way you're curious, only their curiosity works differently. I'd suggest you don't stare too long at any one of them."

"Why not?"

"Because attention is a kind of touching, out here," the creature said, and for the first time its tone had lost some of its playfulness, gone flat and simple in a way that felt more honest than anything else it had said. "You look at something long enough, it starts looking back properly. Best not to invite that unless you mean to."

Ren looked away from the shapes at the treeline and found, with some effort, that he could make himself stop noticing them, the way one stops noticing a sound after enough time.

"You're very calm about all of this," he said. "The shapes. The distance. All of it."

"It's my hillside," the creature said, as though that explained everything, which, Ren supposed, from its perspective, it probably did.

"It's not, though. It's Aldermoor's hillside. People have walked this path for generations."

"People have walked across the surface of it," the creature corrected, gently. "That's not quite the same as it being theirs. You walk across the surface of the sea sometimes, in boats. You wouldn't say the sea belongs to you because of that."

"That's a strange comparison."

"Most true things are, from where you're standing." It glanced at him, something curious in the look. "Why did you come? Everyone else stayed in their houses and told each other stories about what the lights might mean. You came out and started counting distances and asking questions. That's not what most of your kind does."

Ren thought about how to answer that honestly, since honesty seemed to be the tone the conversation had settled into. "I wanted to know," he said finally. "That's the whole reason. Not bravery. I just don't like not knowing things, when knowing them seems possible."

"That's a very small reason to walk into somewhere like this."

"Most of my reasons are small," Ren said. "I've never had a large one for anything. I don't think that makes them worth less."

The creature seemed to turn this over with genuine interest, the way it had turned the stone over earlier. "No," it said eventually. "I don't think it does either. I like that answer better than the ones I usually get. Most of them say something about destiny, or curiosity as if it were a grand thing, a calling. You're just saying you wanted to know. That's simpler. I appreciate simple things more than your people tend to assume I would."

They passed another lantern, and another, and Ren realized with a small jolt that he'd lost count somewhere, that the running tally he'd been keeping without quite noticing had slipped and scattered.

"How many lanterns have we passed?" he asked, mostly to himself.

"I don't know," the creature said. "I never counted. Should I have?"

"I was counting. I think. I don't actually remember the number anymore."

"That happens," the creature said, unbothered.

"That's not comforting."

"I keep telling you I'm not always trying to be."

Ren stopped walking again, and this time it took him a moment to understand why unease had settled so firmly into his chest. He turned to look back the way they'd come, searching for the village lights, and found nothing but the dark shapes of trees and the small, steady glow of the lanterns receding behind him into a night with no bottom to it.

"I can't see the village anymore," he said.

"No," the creature agreed. "You stopped being able to a while ago. You didn't notice."

"How long ago?"

"I don't know that either. I wasn't watching for it. It wasn't the sort of thing I thought you'd need me to track."

Ren pressed his palm against his forehead, trying to steady something that felt like it was sliding. "What color is my front door?"

The creature looked at him with what might have been the first genuinely surprised expression it had shown all evening. "I have no idea. Why would I know that?"

"I'm asking myself," Ren said, and heard something close to panic creeping into his own voice. "I can't remember. I should be able to remember the color of my own front door and I can't."

"Ah," the creature said, understanding arriving in its face like a light being turned up. "That's the path doing that. Not me, though I imagine it's difficult to tell the difference from where you're standing."

"What do you mean, the path is doing it?"

"Things that aren't held onto tightly get loose out here," the creature said. "Memories work the same as anything else that has weight. If you're not holding a thing firmly in your mind, the path tends to take an interest in it. It's not malicious. It's simply what distance means, this far along. You're trading pieces of where you came from for pieces of how far you've gone. Most people don't notice until they try to remember something small."

"That's a horrible thing to just happen to someone without warning."

"Is it?" The creature seemed to genuinely consider this. "I gave you every chance to ask what continuing would cost. You asked about the lanterns and the shapes and the counting. You didn't ask about yourself until just now. I answer the questions I'm asked, Ren. I don't volunteer the ones people are afraid to ask."

Hearing his own name in its mouth sent an unpleasant jolt through him, and he realized he'd never told it his name at all.

"How do you know that?" he asked. "I never said it."

"You didn't need to," the creature said simply. "Names are less private than you think, out here. Yours arrived along with you, the way your shadow does. I'm not doing anything sinister by knowing it. I'd find it strange not to."

"Does that mean you have some kind of power over me now? Knowing it?"

"No," it said, and something in the flatness of the answer felt entirely truthful. "That's an old story your people tell about names, and it isn't one I've ever found useful. A name is just a sound you answer to. I could shout it into the trees all night and nothing would happen except the shapes at the treeline getting curious."

Ren pressed his hands against his eyes for a moment, trying to steady his breathing, trying to hold onto the shape of the thought he'd started with. "I need to remember why I came out here," he said. "Give me a second."

"You said you wanted to know where the path went," the creature offered, gently, watching him with something that might have been concern arranged into an unfamiliar shape. "You told me that a little while ago. Would you like to hold onto it, or is that one you're willing to let go?"

"I want to hold onto it," Ren said immediately, surprised by how much he meant it.

"Then hold onto it," the creature said. "That's really all it takes. I told you, nothing's being stolen from you against your will. You're the one deciding what's worth keeping a grip on. I only mentioned the door because you noticed its absence and seemed to want an explanation."

"You could have warned me before I lost it."

"I could have," it agreed. "But you didn't ask, and I find that warnings people haven't earned tend to mean less to them than the ones they discover on their own. You'll remember the color of your door again, probably, once you're closer to the door itself. Proximity helps. Most of what the path takes, it only borrows."

"Most," Ren repeated.

"Most," the creature said, without elaborating further, and something in its face told him pressing wouldn't produce a more comfortable answer.

They stood together for a moment in the strange quiet, the lanterns stretching away in both directions, ahead into deeper dark and behind into a distance that no longer led anywhere Ren could picture with confidence. He found, with some effort, that he could still summon the shape of Aldermoor in his mind, the smithy, his uncle's face, though the details had gone soft at the edges, like a drawing left out in rain.

"I think I need to turn back," he said.

The creature nodded slowly, as though it had been waiting for him to arrive at this on his own schedule rather than pushing him toward it. "That's allowed," it said. "I told you it would be."

"Is it going to be difficult?"

"A little. Not because I'll make it difficult. Because the path doesn't especially like giving back what it's already started to hold, and you've walked far enough that it's started to hold quite a lot of you. But it can be done. People have done it before."

"Do you want me to stay?" Ren asked, and immediately felt strange for asking, though the question had been sitting under his ribs since the moment he understood there was a choice being offered.

The creature considered this with what looked like real thought, not performance. "I like you," it said finally. "You ask better questions than most. You noticed the distance wasn't behaving before I had to point it out to you, which very few of your kind manage. Part of me is curious what you'd become, farther along, if you kept walking long enough to stop being quite so much yourself.

That's an honest answer. But I also think you belong to a door with a color you're trying very hard to remember, and a village that will worry if you don't come back, and I don't think I want to be the reason that door stays empty. Those two things sit in me at the same time. I don't find that as uncomfortable as you might expect."

"That's a strange way to say no."

"It's not a no," the creature said. "It's an honest yes and an honest no, both true, neither canceling the other out. You'll find, if you spend more time thinking about creatures like me, that we hold contradictions more comfortably than your kind does. It's not dishonesty. It's just a wider room to stand in."

Ren managed a short, unsteady laugh. "I don't think I understand that at all."

"You don't need to. You just need to turn around, which you're already doing, I notice." It gestured, and Ren realized his feet had already begun to shift back the way they'd come, some part of him deciding before the rest of him caught up.

They walked back together for a while, past lanterns that seemed, now, to be growing subtly dimmer, or perhaps it was only that Ren's eyes were adjusting to the idea of leaving. The creature kept pace beside him, quieter than before, offering small observations rather than questions, pointing out a shape at the treeline that had followed them for a stretch and then peeled away, mentioning that the stone it had been examining earlier was one it planned to keep, though it didn't say for what.

"Will the lanterns come back tomorrow?" Ren asked, at some point, when the ordinary sound of a dog barking reached him faintly from somewhere ahead, the first sound of Aldermoor he'd heard in what felt like a very long time.

"I don't know yet," the creature said. "That depends on things I haven't decided. It's not entirely up to me, if that helps. The path has its own opinions."

"That's not very comforting."

"I did warn you early on that comfort wasn't really something I dealt in," it said, and there was warmth in it, something like fondness, strange and real. "You should go on from here. The rest of it, you'll be able to walk without me. It gets simpler again, closer to your side."

"Will I see you again?"

The creature smiled, an expression that still didn't sit quite naturally on its face, as though it had learned the shape from watching humans rather than growing into it. "You might," it said. "You might not remember it as seeing me, when it happens. That's often how it goes, for your kind. But I think you'll notice something, even if you can't name it. I think you're the sort of person who notices things whether or not he's supposed to."

"That almost sounds like a compliment."

"It was meant as one."

Ren opened his mouth to ask something else, some last question he felt was important, though he couldn't quite locate its shape, and when he looked up from the effort of finding it, the creature was simply gone. Not vanished with any drama, not swallowed by shadow or light. Simply absent, as though it had never occupied that particular stretch of path at all, and Ren stood alone among the lanterns with the sound of Aldermoor growing steadily clearer ahead of him.

He walked the rest of the way without noticing how long it took.

The village looked exactly the same when he reached it, and also entirely wrong in ways he couldn't immediately place. The smithy's shutters were closed for the night, though he had no memory of what time he'd left or what time it might reasonably be now. A lamp burned in his uncle's window, the kind of lamp people leave lit when they're waiting on someone.

His uncle opened the door before Ren had finished crossing the yard, and the look on his face suggested this had less to do with hearing footsteps than with simply having been standing near the door for some time, watching the dark.

"You've been gone three days," his uncle said, and the words landed strangely, not shocking so much as simply failing to fit the shape of what Ren remembered, which felt like an evening, a single long evening, stretched thin but not broken.

"It didn't feel like three days," Ren said.

"It felt like something to you. What?"

Ren opened his mouth to answer and found the words slower to arrive than he expected, some of them slipping sideways when he reached for them. He remembered a conversation, vividly in places, the cadence of a voice more than the words themselves, a face that shifted when he tried to hold it steady in his mind, eyes too large and too dark for a face otherwise unremarkable. He remembered counting steps that didn't add up. He remembered a stone being turned over in long fingers. He did not remember, try as he might, what color the stone had been, or what the creature had ultimately decided to do with it.

"I met something," he said finally, which felt both true and inadequate. "I talked to it for a long time. I don't remember all of what we said. I remember that it let me leave."

His uncle studied him for a long moment, the way he might study a piece of metal for a flaw he suspected but couldn't yet see. "Your door's the blue one," he said eventually, unprompted, as though he'd guessed at the shape of the gap. "In case you were wondering."

Ren laughed, unsteady, and found that the sound of it loosened something tight in his chest. "I was, actually. Thank you."

The lanterns did not appear again the following evening, or the one after that, or through the rest of that autumn. The hillside path returned to being simply a path, walked by goats and children and the occasional argument between neighbors about grazing rights, exactly as it had been walked for generations before a single unexplained light interrupted it. The village discussed it for a while and then, as villages do, moved on to newer, more immediate concerns, a bad harvest one year, a good wedding the next.

Ren mostly moved on too. He went back to the smithy, back to arguing gently with his uncle about apprentices and prices, back to the small, ordinary business of being twenty-three and mildly stubborn and generally content. If he thought about the walk less often as the seasons turned, that seemed like the natural order of things, the way any strange experience eventually settles into something closer to a story than a memory.

But some evenings, at the particular hour when the light goes soft and blue over the western ridge, he finds himself glancing toward the treeline without quite meaning to, and once or twice he could have sworn he saw something small and warm and steady glowing just past where the path should have ended. By the time he looked properly, there was never anything there.

And sometimes, without warning, in the middle of an entirely unrelated task, he'll remember a fragment of conversation clearly enough to nearly repeat it aloud, a particular turn of phrase, a certain dry amusement in a voice he can no longer picture attached to any face at all. He'll stand there a moment, hammer or cup or harness strap forgotten in his hand, trying to place who might have said it, and failing, and eventually letting it go, the way one lets go of a name that sits just out of reach on the tongue.

He never mentions this to anyone. He isn't entirely sure how he'd explain it, or whether an explanation is the kind of thing this particular memory wants from him at all.

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