Sollareon awoke one morning, rested, glanced out the window to see a gloomy, overcast, and quite dark day awaited him. As he opened the front door to tend the garden, he was greeted by an object left on the front step of his little cottage. A lantern, lit, and it's light coalescing into a small beam pointing west. People would often leave him gifts as payment, or to try an appeal to him for some odd thing or another, but this was... different. This lantern gift held an aura of intention. This was not just something left to repay him for healing, or a misquided attempt to ask for a good harvest or light winter. He picked it up, and noted to matter how he rotated the lantern the beam still pointed in the same direction. Odd. A small sense if excitement ran through him. There was not much new and unusual in his life. This was much different. Sollareon gripped the lantern in one hand and set out in the direction the beam led. Many, many hours passed, he walked through and fully out of the old wood he lived in, through younger forests, over roads and hills, across bubbling streams and down a cliff face. Eventually the trees started turning old again, but not like the ones full of life in the forest he cared for. These trees were bent, curled, grasping and wickedly sharp. This forest of dead trees went on for a while and he eventually caught the sound of the ocean and the smell of salt on the wind. Cresting over a small hill, it came into view. A tumultuous bay, the sea heaving against the cliffs, almost seeming like it was trying to escape, to run from something hidden inside of it. In the distance on a part of the land jutting out into the ocean stood a lighthouse. Everything about it made sense. Lit up on a stormy night on a cliff to guide ships at sea. There was one difference here though. The light was not circling the top. It's light was trained directly at Sollareon, like a great eye combing over every part of him. The beam from the lantern gazed back at the lighthouse, unmoving, meeting the other beam. If this is where it was guiding him, what awaited him inside?

Art by Tvard