The Nightfall Game:The Lightkeeper's Tale

 The Nightfall Game:The Lightkeeper's Tale

“I can’t stop seeing your face,” she began, the Lightkeeper. “So long ago when the winds were still wild and the world still free. So long ago, when whispers were the sound of music and music was but a notion yet to evolve. Long enough to forget, most would say. Just long enough to remember, and remember, and never forget that all things begin at the beginning.

“We were never an exception.”

She opened her dark eyes and stared across the room. Her eyes fell upon no one, but they never did. Of all of them, all who played this Nightfall Game, she was the most reclusive, the only one of them who did not speak outside the tale she told. The Lightkeeper—although no one knew what that titled bestowed—a petite woman who always sat in the darkest corner, always in the same robe of the darkest black, always with a single glass of wine so dark it, too, neared black.

Her stories never told a story.

“The lighthouse,” she continued, her whispers barely audible in the tavern’s deep silence. “Where I waited at world’s end for you. Do you remember,” she asked, “the brushes, and how they rested between your fingers? Do you remember my hands, my fingers, and how they molded with yours and became one, and how we became one? The paint, and how you called it your life’s blood? My tears, and how you called them your life’s greatest failure?”

She swirled the wine, sipped. Swirled. Sipped.

“Do you remember my words, my desires? Paint me something beautiful, I asked.

“And you said, what was it that you said?”

“‘Beauty cannot be painted, because beauty cannot be seen by instruments as blind as our eyes. We cannot see beauty. We can only feel it.’”

“Then what will you paint me?” I asked.

“And you smiled and touched my hand. A graze of the fingers, but enough.”

“‘Something you can feel.’”

“And you took my hand into yours and pressed it against my chest, my heart, and insisted that I must feel, that seeing is not enough and will never be enough. You must feel, and believe, and know, to truly see. Or else you are blind.

“And you painted me something beautiful in those days so long ago. Not beautiful in itself. It’s what you draw out of something, and someone, that’s truly beautiful and miraculous.

“And then, like all good things, you passed into the west on a ship that never returned. I waited, and in your absence I began the work you never finished. I painted you a hundred scenes. I painted you a world, hoping you’d find beauty in it, hoping you would return to capture what was rightfully yours.”