The house at the end of the road never felt empty, even after she was gone.
It stood small and weather-worn, its windows always a little fogged from the sea breeze, its walls humming with the memory of quiet laughter and herbal tea. It was in that house the boy had grown up—not with parents, but with the warm, wrinkled hands of a woman who smelled of lavender and always seemed to know when he was sad, even before he did.
Her name was Lila. His grandmother. The only family he could remember.
She never told him much about what happened to his parents. Only that "grief is like a tide, my dear—it comes when it must, but it always goes, too." She said it with a sad smile and a faraway look, and he learned not to press. He only knew that she had taken him in, raised him with patience, stories, and lullabies hummed under the stars.
Then one morning, she was gone.
No note. No trace. Just a cold cup of tea on the table and the scent of her lavender shawl drifting in the wind. He searched the woods. Asked every neighbor. Walked the shoreline again and again. But she had vanished—like fog lifted by the sun.
All she left behind was the lantern.
It sat on the old oak table by the window. Black iron, etched with curling patterns too delicate to be just decoration. It didn't glow. Didn't flicker. Not until night fell.
That night, when he curled into her chair, clutching the lantern in trembling hands, it came alive.
A pale, blue flame stirred within the glass—gentle, wavering, and quiet. Then a whisper came. Faint, like someone calling through water.
"Help…"
He nearly dropped it.
The voice was not hers. It was unfamiliar—lost. And so began the first night of many.
The boy didn't know then that the lantern was not just a remnant of her absence, but a guide. A bridge between worlds. With each soul he found, each life he glimpsed through tears and memory, he began to understand what she had once hinted at in passing: "The world is full of unfinished stories. Sometimes, it's up to those still breathing to finish them."
Now, he walks the quiet roads. Through towns that whisper of sorrow. Through fields where memories linger like mist.
The lantern swings gently at his side.
And with every soul he helps find peace, he hopes—
That one day, it will lead him back to her.