The world had grown dim long before the final sun slipped beneath the horizon.

Cities had gone quiet. Forests stood still, their leaves brittle as ash. The oceans, once wild and untamable, moved only when the wind remembered to breathe. Somewhere, in what had once been a thriving coastal village, a woman named Mara guarded a lantern, the last known source of natural light.

It wasn’t fire in the usual sense. The flame glowed softly blue, like moonlight caught in a jar. Her grandmother had called it the Soul Flame, a gift from the old world, said to burn only as long as hope did. For years, Mara kept it alive, shielding it from the hungry dark that pressed closer each night.

Each dawn, if one could still call it that, she climbed the remnants of the lighthouse cliff, holding the lantern high. Its glow reached the ruins below, a fragile thread tying her to the memory of what had been.  Sometimes she imagined the light could be seen miles away, that others still searched for it. But no one ever came.

Until the day she saw the boy.  He appeared from the mist, no more than twelve, thin and trembling. His eyes were wide, reflecting the lantern’s glow as though he’d never seen light before.

“Is it real?” he asked.

Mara nodded, her throat tight. “As real as it can be.”

He stepped closer, palms outstretched, warming them against the soft glow. “My mother said there was one light left. I didn’t believe her.”

Mara smiled faintly. “Belief is the hardest thing to keep.”

They shared silence, two silhouettes against a horizon that no longer promised tomorrow. The boy told her his village had turned to shadow months ago. People stopped speaking. Fires refused to burn. He had walked toward the faint glimmer he’d seen one night, praying it wasn’t a trick of memory.

When he finished, Mara realised what she had to do.

She lifted the lantern, the flame flickering in protest. “This isn’t meant to stay with me,” she said softly. “It’s meant to travel, to remind others they’re not alone.”

The boy shook his head. “But without it, you’ll be in the dark.”

“I already am,” she whispered.

Carefully, she placed the lantern in his hands. The light shimmered brighter, as if recognising new hope. “Go,” she said. “Find those who’ve forgotten what light looks like. Tell them it still exists.”

Tears welled in his eyes, catching the blue glow. “What if it goes out?”

“Then it wasn’t the last light,” Mara said, smiling through her tears. “It was just the one that showed the way.”

He turned and disappeared into the fog, the lantern bobbing like a heartbeat in the distance.

Mara watched until even that faint glow faded, and then, something strange happened.  For the first time in years, she saw the faint blush of dawn spreading across the horizon, soft, fragile, but real.

Maybe the light had never truly been in the lantern at all.

Maybe it had always been in those who dared to carry it forward.